Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI? The Future of Digital Visibility Discussed – Jason Barnard on the Smart Business Podcast

Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI? Jason Barnard on the Future of Digital Visibility

Published by: Rise25 | Better Than the Best B2B Podcast Agency. Host: John Corcoran. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. September 8, 2025

TL;DR: SEO is not dead, but the strategy must change for the age of Generative AI and LLMs (Large Language Models).

Guest Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube®, explains that search is being augmented, not replaced, by AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot. Businesses must shift their focus from competing on existing content to expanding human knowledge and educating the algorithms to recreate their sales funnel inside the AI’s mind, aiming for the “Perfect Click” (a pre-conditioned purchase).

Key strategies discussed include:

• Rebranding your digital presence by claiming, framing, and proving your authority to the machines (like Jason did to overcome his “Blue Dog” persona).
• Prioritizing mentions and digital PR over traditional link building, ensuring your Entity Home website confirms all external references.
• Mastering technical SEO by reducing friction for the bots at every stage (Discover, Select, Crawl, Render, Index), treating the crawl budget as a business expense for Google and Microsoft.
• Improving content quality by providing more structured data (up to 1,500 data points per page) and leveraging AI as a creative partner rather than using its pure, unedited output.

Transcript: Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI? Jason Barnard on the Future of Digital Visibility

[00:00:00] John Corcoran: Alright, today we’re talking about “Is SEO Dead in the age of AI”. My guest is Jason Barnard. He is a longtime expert in SEO and now Generative AI search Engine Optimization. I’ll tell you more about him in a second. So stay tuned. 

[00:00:17] Narrator: Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today.

Now let’s get started with the show.

Redefining Online Authority: Jason Barnard on Reframing Your Digital Presence to Reflect True Credibility

[00:00:34] John Corcoran: Alright. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show and you know, if you’ve listened before that every week. We have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. We’ve had Kinkos and YPO, EO Activation, Blizzard, Gusto, GrubHub, Netflix, you name it. Check out the archives.

Lots of great episodes for you to check out. And this episode of course, is brought to you by RISE 25. At Rise 25 we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing, or the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast.

We do three things, strategy, accountability, and full execution. And we even invented what some we’re calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform podcast copilot. So if you wanna learn more about what we do, you can go to our website, rise 20 five.com, or email us at support@Rise 25.com.

Alright, my guest here today is Jason Barnard. He’s a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author. He’s a keynote speaker. He’s an innovator. He’s the CEO and founder of Kalicube, which is a digital branding consultancy. It operates out of France and the US, and helps business leaders and entrepreneurs and decision makers to figure out how search engines and AI platforms work together. And he’s got two decades experience in digital marketing. He’s got a great story about how he got into it, which we’re gonna get into in a moment. But mostly what I was most interested in talking about here today, he. As AI and the LLMs Limited Language Models are becoming more and more popular, what does that mean for Google?

What does that mean for traditional search engine optimization and for the way that people get found on the web? There’s lots of people that are saying the sky is falling. There’s other people who are saying that the sky isn’t falling, or rather. It’s not falling yet. It might follow, it might fall at some point in the future.

And so we’re trying to get to the bottom of that question. So Jason, really excited to have you here today. And, I was reading this story that you wrote a couple of weeks ago about this Blue Dog cartoon character that you developed. And it was a story about how this was kind of your presence, your identity online.

You developed this company, you got a billion views online, That’s on level with like Disney and PBS and all this kinda stuff. Just got a ton of presence and rightly so I would’ve thought, this is amazing what I created. And you would think that people would appreciate that.

But when you sold the company and you went out and did, started to do digital marketing and started to do SEO, what you found is that was kind of the old you, which was weighing you down. So I’d love to hear the story of, first of all, what the company was, the Blue Dog Boowa. And then we’ll get into how it weighed you down when you’re trying to redefine how the world saw you online.

[00:03:22] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you, John. In fact, there was a double whammy and there is a thing that says get caught out once, fair, get caught out twice, get caught out three times., you’re a fool. I got caught out twice. The first time is the Blue Dog. And that was the interesting story. I had a company called UpToTen, it was an EdTech platform.

We had a billion page views in 2007. We were competing with the BBC, with PBS, with Disney. And although I owned the company and I was the CEO and I was signing deals with ITV International, Playhouse Disney. I was also the voice of the Blue Dog in the cartoon, and that’s what I was known for and I loved it.

I thought that was cool, but then when I pivoted, of course Google just kept saying, Jason Barnard is a cartoon Blue Dog. So potential clients would see that and say, well, actually, he isn’t authoritative. I can’t trust him with my business. 

[00:04:30] John Corcoran: Yeah, it’s just crazy because you built this thing that got a billion eyeballs.

That is like top 0.1% of all the people. You have so much more credibility, I would’ve thought. You have so much more credibility than anyone else out there who hasn’t built something that got a billion eyeballs. 

[00:04:51] Jason Barnard: But that was exactly the problem. It didn’t say a billion eyeballs. It said “he’s a Blue Dog”.

[00:04:56] John Corcoran: He’s a Blue Dog. Yeah. 

[00:04:58] Jason Barnard: And so what I needed to do was reframe it to say he’s a Blue Dog, and that Blue Dog got a billion eyeballs and he was the guy who made it happen. And that’s quite a long leap for people to make from, I’m seeing somebody who is trying to help my company with their digital marketing.

And the problem that I had was that the conclusion he can get a billion eyeballs wasn’t being presented by Google. Google was saying he’s just a voiceover artist. 

[00:05:30] John Corcoran: Yeah. So you came to this realization after you’d had, you were making proposals, you were talking to companies about working with them and then they just wouldn’t hire you right. 

[00:05:41] Jason Barnard: I think I probably lost about a million dollars in deals over several years. Before, number one, I understood exactly what was going on. And number two, the time it took me to sort it out and what was going on is I would go into meetings with real people in real life. I would convince them.

I would say, I can build this up. I can make this happen for you. I can help your business. I can beat Google, I can win the Google game for you. I would walk out and they’d be going, yeah, brilliant, we’re on board. And then they would Google my name and it would said, Jason Barnard is a voiceover artist.

He’s a cartoon Blue Dog. And that’s suddenly saying, why would I trust this guy who’s obviously this kind of, I flaky, voiceover artist.

With my business strategy. And the answer is no, I wouldn’t. 

[00:06:34] John Corcoran: As opposed to CEO of an EdTech startup that was phenomenally successful that you’d exited.

So you basically figured out you needed to redefine how you were viewed online. So tell me what you went through. What you did. 

[00:06:51] Jason Barnard: It’s reframing a story. So I’m not creating anything new. I’m just reframing. What happened is that I didn’t focus on the Blue Dog.

I focused on the successful entrepreneur, the billion page views that deals with Disney, that deals with ITV studios and the competition with PBS. And that’s what we do at Kalicube is we say, what have you done in your life that makes you valuable to your ideal audience today? And how can we frame what you’ve done in your life to bring you advantage in that relationship? And once we frame that, how do we then prove it both to your audience and to the machines? And that’s what I did, is I just reframed my story. 

[00:07:42] John Corcoran: How often do you find, when you work with clients or you look at someone’s online presence, do you find that their online presence is not what it should be or another way of putting that it, they haven’t talked about or they haven’t boasted about?

They haven’t shared, they haven’t communicated the value, the credibility, the credibility markers that should be elevating them and explaining to the world the credibility that they truly have. 

[00:08:14] Jason Barnard: Literally every time. There are no exceptions. Whoever you are, the AI, Google, and indeed your audience don’t understand quite how incredibly impressive you are. You might think that you’ve communicated it incredibly well. It isn’t clear online. It isn’t consistent online, and it isn’t consistent over time, and that is where the key lies. Is that number one. I probably don’t frame it right. Number two, I probably don’t communicate it consistently. Number three is, I don’t really prove it. I say it. I’ve had clients and they say we are the best flower selling business in France. I say to them, prove it. All our clients say it, but give me a page on the online that shows me that’s true. 

And they simply couldn’t do it.

Then over three or four years, we built up a strategy. We Claimed, Framed and Proved, and we can talk about that later. And all of a sudden they’re outranking into Flora, a small French company, outranking into Flora, bingo. And that is, we are the best. We are the solution to getting flowers to your family member or your friend, or your loved one.

The day we say with the most beautiful bouquet where they’re gonna think you are the best person in the entire universe for sending those flowers, and we can prove it. 

AI and Search in 2025: How ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity Are Expanding - but Not Replacing - Traditional Search

[00:10:00] John Corcoran: So let’s talk about this in terms of, we’re recording this and we’re going to the second half of 2025. And so we have ChatGPT, we have Perplexity, we have Gemini, we have all these different AI tools that are, some say, changing the game.

How much has the game changed? 

[00:10:18] Jason Barnard: The game’s kind of been added to. I was talking to Fabrice Canel a couple years ago and he was saying that Microsoft Copilot, he’s the principal program manager at Bing, and he was saying actually supply creates its own demand, which is an economist, which was my initial degree back in the day when I was young in Liverpool.

Supply creates its own demand is a fundamental aspect of economics. 

[00:10:46] John Corcoran: What does that mean? English major here. So you have to dumb it down further. 

[00:10:50] Jason Barnard: It means that if you give somebody something new to use, they will use it in addition to what they were already doing. 

[00:10:57] John Corcoran: Okay? 

[00:10:58] Jason Barnard: So if you say to somebody, here’s a machine, you can have a conversation with it and it will guide you to the solution to your problem.

It will help you write, it will help you code. It will help you, what else it does, it will help you write your emails. It will summarize your emails. It will make your day-to-day life easier. That’s an additional service that we didn’t have before. 

Search doesn’t disappear because this new service has appeared. What does happen is that people still use search, but they use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity in addition to. 

[00:11:40] John Corcoran: Interesting. I don’t know what the days are from this year, but I know that I saw that, Google’s traffic in 2024 last year went up by 20% over the previous year.

[00:11:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And Semrush just did a huge study. Where they’re showing that search has gone up alongside use of AI assistive engines, as I call them. 

I think what is true today is new people are being brought into the arena and the people who are already in the arena suddenly think, well, I can do this and this, oh, and this and this, and this, and this, and this.

And they’re expanding their usage. What will happen is people will gradually get used to the idea that search is pretty clunky. I have to actively ask a question. Go through the links, figure out which one I wanna look at.

And little by little people will start to realize, you can just ask ChatGPT or Google AI mode to summarize.

[00:12:46] John Corcoran: That point is one that has been fiercely debated. There’s a story recently CloudFlare came out and said that we need to change the economics of the web because publishers are not gonna get traffic. And for the longest time, Google’s promise has been that we’ll send traffic to these websites.

And then websites and publishers and service providers are fearful that they’re not gonna get people that are coming to their website because they’re inquiring about a particular service. What are your thoughts on all of that? How’s that gonna affect publishers and how’s it gonna affect the economics for people that have websites that have been putting out content for a long time?

[00:13:29] Jason Barnard: What if you’re a pure publisher who is publishing content like USA today have famously now just blocked? That’s your business model. You are in trouble. However you look at it, however you manage it, you’re in trouble. If you’re trying to sell something, it doesn’t matter. 

Because the point isn’t do I get people coming to my website?

The point is, do I make a sale at the end of the day? So you’ve got kind of two schools of thought now, or school? Two different approach. 

[00:14:00] John Corcoran: Yeah. Two very different approaches, I guess. Yeah. 

[00:14:02] Jason Barnard: And I think the publishers are getting a lot of press coverage because they are the publishers. 

[00:14:10] John Corcoran: Sure. And they write about these topics. Yeah. 

[00:14:13] Jason Barnard: So yes, there’s a huge problem for them, but no, there isn’t a huge problem for anyone trying to sell something. 

Shifting Content Strategy for AI: Focus on Expanding Knowledge and Guiding the Perfect Click

[00:14:19] John Corcoran: So if you are a company trying to sell something through your website, then do you continue to create content online in the way that you have before, or do you change your approach?

[00:14:29] Jason Barnard: You change your approach, but the approach that you need to take isn’t so very different to what you had before. The old SEO strategy was, I look at what’s ranking today for the keywords that I’m interested in, and I will create a piece of content that is better than the one that’s ranking, and I will therefore rank above it.

It made sense. But once AI has the information, it doesn’t need it anymore. So there’s no point in doing that. Because you don’t beat anybody because it’s got the information. It isn’t gonna come to your website to look for that information, and it isn’t gonna prioritize you over anybody else because nobody gets attribution for that information.

So that particular strategy is now dead. 

[00:15:17] John Corcoran: So the strategy of trying to target a keyword and create content that’s better than what’s out there is dead. So what do people do instead? 

[00:15:30] Jason Barnard: You need to expand human knowledge. 

[00:15:34] John Corcoran: What does that mean? 

[00:15:35] Jason Barnard: It means that if the machines don’t know something, or you can create clarification or detail about something that they need, they will always come to you.

But if you produce something that is the same thing as everybody else, but slightly better in the way it’s presented, they don’t care. 

[00:15:54] John Corcoran: So like simple things. Like if someone’s searching for, whether it’s in Google or ChatGPT or whatever, if they’re searching for, how do I screw in this light bulb?

They’re no longer gonna go to some niche blog to find that information or to a handyman company’s website, which is written a helpful tutorial on how to screw in a light bulb, because that information is gonna be found very easily, either in an AI summary in Google, or it’s gonna be found in ChatGPT.

But if you can write about something new and innovative that isn’t there. Then that’s where you should spend your time. 

[00:16:34] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And always remembering that when you create content that’s at the top or middle of the funnel, you’re probably not gonna get the click anyway.

So you’re only creating it to educate the machines.

And I’ll give you an example: I’m a base player, double base player, and I have a huge base amp that’s really cool. And it makes the best bass sound in the world. I wanted to play guitar and I thought, well, I don’t really want to play. I don’t, sorry. I don’t wanna buy a new guitar amp. So I asked ChatGPT, if I play my guitar through the Bass amp, will I break it?

ChatGPT said, absolutely not, but it will sound really bad. 

Okay. Can I solve that as a problem? Yes. If you get some effects pedals, you can solve that problem. Which effects pedals do I need? You need a compressor, an equalizer, and a reverb. Brilliant. Which ones, give me a list? How much will that cost me?

$250. Can you get that for cheaper? Yes. There are lower grade or lower quality pedals that if you’re not a professional musician will be just as good and the total cost is $150. Brilliant. Where do I buy them? If you’re in the US, buy them at Sweetwater. If you’re in Europe, buy them from Toman.

I’m in Europe. Give me the link to Toman, link, went through, bought $150 sale to Toman in literally 20 minutes from the moment I said, can I play my guitar through my bass amp without breaking it? 

[00:18:06] John Corcoran: Coming back to the idea of writing about new ideas, new concepts, stuff that hasn’t been written out before.

So how does that relate to that story you just told then? 

[00:18:19] Jason Barnard: The huge problem is that in the old world of traditional SEO, I would’ve researched. All of those topics. Can I play the bass through and amp. 

[00:18:29] John Corcoran: And you would’ve probably landed on all these different web pages. 

[00:18:32] Jason Barnard: And somebody would’ve had a YouTube video about it. I would’ve watched the ad. I would’ve given the money through the ad. The fact that I watched it, that simply doesn’t happen anymore. 

[00:18:44] John Corcoran: Is that something where a company should try and write an article about that, or, because you, the way you described it, all of that came through the LLM that there’s no need for.

[00:18:56] Jason Barnard: So if your career is creating, in this particular case, videos of you playing the guitar through a bass amp, your career is pretty much over. 

[00:19:09] John Corcoran: If you’re explaining to someone like kind of stuff that can be explained in an LLM.

[00:19:14] Jason Barnard: Yeah. If you are creating publishing content, I mean anything that’s just news or helpful or DIY, or and you have nothing to sell at the end of the day. There is a huge problem, and I empathize that’s the way the world is and we’re not gonna change it. 

[00:19:34] John Corcoran: But if you have some kind of service that’s gonna help the customer to get an end result faster, then you may be okay.

[00:19:44] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So taking the example of Sweetwater or Toman, if I create content as a marketer at Toman or at Sweetwater, that answers that question. Then what happens is as the user has the conversation with the machine, my company is top of the algorithmic mind through the funnel. 

[00:20:05] John Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:20:06] Jason Barnard: Okay. And then when it comes to the Perfect Click, which is the moment when I clicked on the to and link and went through and bought which Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing calls the Perfect Click.

That’s what they’re doing is bringing the person down to the Perfect Click. I click, I buy. 

[00:20:22] John Corcoran: The Perfect Click in the idea, in the sense that, they’re preconditioned to buy at this point. Like your website no longer needs to serve as a conversion funnel because the LLM has been a conversion funnel.

Like you, you’ve gotten to the point where like, boom, I’m ready to buy. And you click right through and buy it right away. 

[00:20:40] Jason Barnard: And Fabrice was telling me a couple of years ago, that’s what Copilot does. We’ve built Microsoft Copilot to recreate your funnel in our engine. 

[00:20:51] John Corcoran: Maybe even more efficiently than your website was.

That would be a really interesting solution because right now the smaller providers or sellers have to compete with the really big ones. So if Amazon has a really well converting funnel to sell a widget and you don’t have a great well converting funnel to sell a widget, you’re gonna lose to Amazon.

That’s what’s been happening over recent years, so that it’s almost like it could hopefully level the playing field for smaller sellers, smaller providers, smaller businesses. 

[00:21:26] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. The whole thing is you need to recreate your funnel in their brain. And if you can do that and your niche and you have an advantage over Amazon, you need to describe that advantage and convince the machine that that advantage is worth it recommending you instead of Amazon.

[00:21:45] John Corcoran: So you need to create content that is, around your expertise, around your focus area. 

[00:21:54] Jason Barnard: And the problem that you’re always gonna have is that, your boss is gonna say, well, nobody’s visiting the website. Nobody’s visiting this page. You’re saying, the role of the page isn’t to get people to visit, it’s to educate the algorithms. 

When I say educate the algorithms, I’ve been talking about that for 10 years. 

Educate them like children, and they will bring your audience to you, but they will only bring the audience today for that Perfect Click. That’s what you’re aiming for. 

Building Digital Credibility with Mentions, PR, and Structured Online Profiles

[00:22:23] John Corcoran: Let’s talk also about gaining credibility through external sources, let’s call it awards, associations, accomplishments, stuff like that, and how you communicate that online. So for companies that are out there that want that credibility or want to communicate it for the pieces that they already have, what advice you’re giving right now? I know you are a prolific content creator.

You write for a bunch of different sources. I was reading your article in Rolling Stone recently. Talk a little bit about what your philosophy is on that right now? 

[00:23:00] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, I mean, link building was always the big thing in SEO, and I wouldn’t ever say that links aren’t useful. They are valuable, but mentions and citations are the new currency.

So somebody says to you, I’ll talk about you in an article, but I’m not gonna give you a link. 

[00:23:22] John Corcoran: Still so valuable now. 

[00:23:24] Jason Barnard: I don’t care because if Google and the AI can recognize who I am when they say Jason Barnard. And I’m not the Jason Barnard who’s a nice hockey player, or a footballer, or a circus clown, then I’m happy. 

[00:23:38] John Corcoran: So the AI now is better able to recognize that sort of thing and put it together, and connect it, and recognize that you have this. 

[00:23:46] Jason Barnard: A mention in a context that allows the LLMs and the Knowledge Graph and the search index to understand who you are, that they are indeed talking about you is absolutely valuable.

A link is a bonus and you need to look at links as bonuses, because a bonus link is simply that it becomes more explicit. But LLMs don’t see the links. They don’t care about the links. So it doesn’t matter to ChatGPT and its language model because it has no idea where to get the information. It only matters in the web index. 

[00:24:17] John Corcoran: So kind of traditional PR matters now more in a sense because the LLMs the AI’s can read if you’re just quoted in an article and there’s no hyperlink or anything like that the LLMs that are out there crawling the web will see that. And you’ll get additional credibility from it.

[00:24:38] Jason Barnard: Yeah. You want to keep going for the PR, but you don’t care about the links. So anybody who’s link building or paying for links , don’t pay for links, pay for mentions. 

Be aware that a mention is only valuable if the mention is clearly you and you can carry on with the digital PR. You don’t need to worry about the links.

And what you simply need to do is make sure that your own website, which we call the Entity Home website, clearly indicates all of the places where you already appear. So, for example, you mentioned Rolling Stone. I’ve been in, USA today, Forbes Entrepreneur, Search Engine Land, Semrush. I link out to all of these resources and I say that is indeed me.

[00:25:28] John Corcoran: So on your website, you’re linking out to those places so that they know. 

[00:25:34] Jason Barnard: And traditional SEO would tell you don’t link to them because you’re giving away your link juice. Link juice doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it’s very clear that that is indeed me.

So the LLM, the search engine will have looked at Rolling Stone. That will have said, that’s probably Jason, the Jason that we’re looking at now, as opposed to another Jason. If I then link from my website to Rolling Stone, out to USA today, out to Forbes, out to Search Engine Land, I confirm that it’s me and that I am standing by that content as a representation of me.

[00:26:10] John Corcoran: And do you do this like on an about page on your website, or do you build a separate page on your website? How do you do it functionally? 

[00:26:17] Jason Barnard: You would want to build the About Page. The About Page is all about Same As, so it would be your profile pages, social media, Wikipedia, IMDB, Crunchbase. Then you would want an articles about page, where you link out to articles where people write about you, articles by me.

Link out to the places where you’ve written articles yourself, pages that mention me, webinars I’ve been in, podcasts I’ve been in, so on and so forth. So you build out your website with dedicated pages. Each of which deals with a specific type of online presence. 

[00:26:53] John Corcoran: So, not just one generic one, but specific, like each of those webinars, podcasts, stuff like that.

[00:27:00] Jason Barnard: Yeah. We used to, five years ago, put it all on one page. Because the machines weren’t able to understand the context of an entire website. Now they are. And also you’ll find that when you start pushing out the PR, you end up with 500 links on a page. And that’s too many. 

Technical SEO Simplified: Measuring Site Health and Reducing Friction for Search Engines

[00:27:20] John Corcoran: I wanna ask you about, I’m bouncing around a little bit here, so I apologize about that, but I want to ask you about technical SEO.

And try to keep it high level because I know this is your expertise. You’ve been working on this for 20 plus years. You know it extremely well. I’m new to it. And I didn’t understand that there was this kind of black magic behind the scenes. There was this technical SEO that we were absolutely failing at, horrible at it.

We got so many things wrong and we’ve improved it dramatically. For our website, we went from a three , an HFS Health Score out of a hundred, which is awful - to a 96 in a relatively short period of time, just by improving it. And it’s still early, so we’ll see what kind of impact that has, but I’m happy about it.

So, let’s talk a little bit about technical SEO today and what people are getting wrong and what they could do in order to fix their technical SEO or first to check and see how they’re doing in terms of technical SEO. 

[00:28:24] Jason Barnard: One of the things that strikes me is what we’ve just talked about is very difficult to measure.

Technical SEO is really easy to measure, which is why a lot of SEOs focus on it so much. 

[00:28:36] John Corcoran: You could show specific, you could, show results very easily. 

[00:28:41] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, you’ve said we went from three to 96. I’m super happy and as of yet, have no results. And yet you’re super happy.

Because I can give you a score. I can say your site is faster, I can say it’s easier to crawl. So be very wary of that kind of approach where that’s the only focus. 

It needs to be done, but it isn’t the be all and end all. It isn’t enough. 

[00:29:08] John Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:29:10] Jason Barnard: But if we come back to that as a leader, a business leader, you need to think about it.

Rather than site speed and the score of the crawlability and the internal linking index score, whatever the tool calls it, you need to fundamentally reduce friction for the bot to an absolute minimum. 

How Bots Crawl the Web: Minimizing “Friction” to Win the Attention of Google and AI

[00:29:33] John Corcoran: And just to take a step backwards on this, ’cause this is a concept that I didn’t understand until recently, but there are these bots that Google and the LLMs have that are like, they’re, bots that go out and crawl the web and they look at your website, they look at everyone else’s websites and they need to understand it.

And a lot of times they don’t understand it because you’ve organized the information in a bad way. Maybe you could explain that idea a little bit. 

[00:30:04] Jason Barnard: When we say bots, I just think, it’s really obvious, but it’s actually just like a machine visiting your website as though it were a human.

So you take a bot, it will visit your website, it will take the content, it will try to understand what is in the content. 

And every time there is any kind of barrier or friction, it’s gonna disadvantage you. And so for the same thing for a user, if you’ve got a user coming to your service page, first thing you do is say, well, this is too slow, the button’s the wrong color. They’re not gonna click on it. The text is wrong if they get through to the next page. I don’t give them the trust elements, humans. Bots have exactly the same problem. The problem is, obviously framed very differently because bots have different needs to human beings, but that idea of friction within your website is exactly the same.

So, as a business leader, you’re gonna think, well, for my human audience, I absolutely have to reduce friction to a minimum. And I will see an uptick in, conversion rates from 3% to 4% to 5%, whatever it might be. With a bot, you need to do exactly the same thing. But the conversion rate KPI isn’t gonna be direct 

[00:31:21] John Corcoran: And the challenge frankly is that a lot of the things you need to do to fix your site for the bots to reduce friction is kind of invisible to us as business leaders.

Unless we have these tools, unless we use an expert like yourself to look at these different pieces and tell us where there is friction and what to do about it. 

[00:31:43] Jason Barnard: Yeah, well there are five points of friction. Discover, so if there’s a link to your webpage, it will be discovered. The machine will say, okay, there is a webpage over there.

And just to give you an idea of scale, everyday Microsoft Bingbot finds 70 billion pages that has never been seen before. 

[00:32:05] John Corcoran: That’s crazy. Wow. Yeah. 

[00:32:08] Jason Barnard: So that’s the idea of scale. So when people say, ‘Oh, your crawl budget,’ or, ‘Ooh, the bot might never find us.’ Like as long as you’re on the normal web and not the dark web, it’s very likely Microsoft Bing and Google will find you.

ChatGPT, Perplexity you are a different story because they’re so small by comparison. So will they discover you as long as there is a link into that webpage? Yes.

Will they select you is the next question. So they see the page, they see the link, do they follow it? No. By default they need to be encouraged. So if you have, click here or get free Viagra for the rest of your life. The bot looks at that and it thinks well click here. I’ve got no idea what’s on the other side. It’s not worth the effort. 

Free Viagra for the rest of my life is obviously spam. I’m not gonna bother following it because it’s a waste of my time. It’s a waste of resources and it’s a waste of money for my boss, which is Microsoft. 

So that’s the select stage. So you need to make sure that when it sees a link, it thinks that’s gonna be interesting in the context of what I’m currently looking at.

[00:33:30] John Corcoran: And so, how do you do that? How do you explain it in a way that makes it interesting? 

[00:33:36] Jason Barnard: The content around the link is very important. The anchor text, which is the text that makes the link blue, is very very important. So ‘click here’ is bad. ‘This way to more information about Knowledge Panels’ is a really great way to get the bot think. ‘Oh I’m gonna learn more about Knowledge Panels.’ Great for people too. And you need to facilitate the idea to the bot that whatever page it’s gonna be visiting next is going to be valuable in the context of what it just has seen. So it needs to be relevant. 

[00:34:15] John Corcoran: Which is the way you describe it, like that’s what you do with humans.

Like when we’re talking to someone at a cocktail party about topic A and we wanna shift them to talk about topic B, we don’t say, click here to talk about topic B. We say, ‘Actually, you know, we were just talking about how lovely it is to visit Paris in the summertime. Have you ever visited Morocco in the summertime?

It’s a natural transition to another topic, and then the person you’re talking to can express whether they wanna click that link, whether they wanna go to that next topic or not. So it’s almost like the computer equivalent of that. 

[00:34:59] Jason Barnard: Which is a brilliant explanation. Absolutely. Perfect. 

So the next step is crawling. Can it actually get through the page? Can it get the HTML? So if your page is incredibly slow, that’s obviously gonna create a problem. If there’s an error on the server, that’s a problem. And if it’s pure JavaScript, which is a technical thing, then it’s a problem. 

If it struggles to crawl the webpage that it’s trying to visit, it will start to be, let’s say, less enthusiastic.

So we’re going through these stages of how enthusiastic can you keep the bot? Then it needs to do what we call render, which is basically see the page as a human being. If that’s difficult, it loses more enthusiasm. 

Then it needs to break the content into chunks and index it. And that’s the critical stage.

You’ve got it through all these stages. You’ve kept it super interested, it’s super excited, super enthusiastic. It gets the content and it says, okay, I’ve got to the point where I’m interested enough in this content to waste I was gonna say, or spend the resources. 

[00:36:12] John Corcoran: Because it costs Google, it costs Microsoft, it costs the LLMs money and resources. You call it crawl budget for every website for your website. For everyone watching this, if you have a website, it costs these companies money and resources and so they’re selective about if they come across a website that’s disorganized, that’s fragmented, that has, it might be invisible to you but has like multiple different tags that doesn’t make sense to the bot, then they won’t do it.

Or they’ll allocate less crawl budget to that website because it is too confusing and resource intensive for them. Correct. 

[00:36:51] Jason Barnard: Yes, absolutely. Brilliantly said. So you have this kind of child that’s losing interest with each stage. 

[00:36:59] John Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:37:00] Jason Barnard: And you have an employee who’s saying, well, my boss keeps telling me to stop spending money, so I’m not gonna waste money and resources on this page if I’m not a hundred percent sure. It’s gonna be interesting. 

So it’s a question of maintaining the interest, maintaining its enthusiasm for your website and your web pages, and making sure that it costs as little as possible to Microsoft, to Google, to OpenAI, to Perplexity to actually get that content and use it. It’s business, which is delightful.

[00:37:40] John Corcoran: Yeah, so I know we’ve been going for a while here, and I want to shift to asking you about something - because you’ve put a lot of your company’s resources into analyzing the web. And you actually have 9 billion data points that you’ve developed. 

You’ve potentially built a focus on businesses and entrepreneurs and on understanding SEO. That’s a tremendous amount. Talk a little bit about some of the work you’ve done in understanding SEO, understanding the web, and how the modern web works. 

[00:38:25] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s a lovely question, 9 billion data points sounds like a lot.

And the Semrush article I mentioned earlier on, analyzed 260 billion lines of data. So we are tiny compared to Semrush. We’re tiny compared to Ahrefs. The difference is that we have very focused clean data. It isn’t because we can collect it, that we do collect it. And generally speaking, platforms like Google, Bing, Ahrefs, Semrush will collect everything they can find in the hope that it might be useful.

We have been very, very meticulous in collecting only data that is useful to business. And I was talking to you earlier on about the average webpage has about 300 interesting facts in it for the machine, on the Kalicube dataset that’s 1,500 interesting facts. And on Wikipedia, you would be looking at 2000.

So we’re not far off Wikipedia standards for the web pages and web data we collect from Google, from OpenAI, and from the web, to be sure that the data is valuable and clean. The key is, if we’re talking about Microsoft, Google, and ChatGPT crawling the web, if you have to choose between a web page that has 300 interesting points and one that has 1,500 interesting points, you’ll always choose the one with 1,500 interesting points. 

Data-Driven SEO: Winning Bot Attention by Repurposing and Structuring Existing Content

[00:39:54] John Corcoran: And what are some insights that you got from analyzing that amount of data points? 

[00:40:01] Jason Barnard: That if you can provide webpages on your website that consistently provide 1,500 useful data points that are topically relevant within your business, you will have all eyes of all these engines on you all the time.

So they stay interested and they keep coming back. 

[00:40:20] John Corcoran: So more information with less friction. Is across the board better for your website? 

[00:40:27] Jason Barnard: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:40:29] John Corcoran: And the problem that I see is that, and I’m guilty of this, is that, for a long time we just built our website a long time ago and then we stopped improving it. We just kind of left it as it was and didn’t add any more content to it. And meanwhile. I’m sure lots of companies have experienced this. Your competitors are out there building pages, building landing pages, describing each of their different services that they have, making sure that there’s little friction, making sure that it’s really robust and you need to be doing that in today’s day and age. 

[00:41:06] Jason Barnard: You absolutely have to do it. And there are a couple of things. First, it’s not because the webpage is small or the content appears to be thin that the data isn’t there. So for example, we can take a webpage that has 300, 500 useful data points, and we can take that and turn it into 1,500 useful data points simply by reorganizing and reiterating the information already in place. 

So a lot of the time you don’t need to create new content. You simply need to repurpose the content. 

[00:41:47] John Corcoran: Yeah, for example, having an FAQ section at the bottom of the page might be taking some of the same information but explaining it in a different way or answering questions in a different way, for example.

[00:41:59] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. And so for Kalicube, for example, on kalicube.com, I created a module that we’ve added to the website, and that’s how we went from 1,200 to 1,500. Not because we added more information, but because you, because we organized the information better. And it’s, the information was there, but the machines couldn’t extract it.

Once we organized the information, the machines could extract it. And so that’s a huge point is if you can predigest the information for the machine, if you can prepare it for, it’s the machine’s consumption. You are always gonna win. So the data is almost certainly already there on your website, on every single webpage. It’s just not machine friendly.

Leveraging AI as a Creative Partner for Human-Centric, High-Value Content

[00:42:45] John Corcoran: What are your thoughts on using AI to create this content? As I’ve heard people say different things about, oh, it absolutely must be human written. You can’t use AI at all. Other people say it’s fine if you use AI. Someone told me recently that the LLMs are watermarking content, that they’re outputting and that the bots will be able to see these watermarks.

What are your thoughts on all that? 

[00:43:13] Jason Barnard: Pure AI is always gonna be weak. Number one, because AI recognizes AI. Number two, because AI output is the most obvious. They’re not intelligent machines. They’re predicting the most probable next word. So if you are creating an article with AI, it isn’t writing anything original.

It’s saying, ‘What’s the most probable next word? So you are not adding to human knowledge, which is what I said earlier on. And number three is, if ever you manage to get people to that webpage, they’re gonna switch off and leave. So the point of getting them there is completely lost because you’re not gonna convert or convince them they’re gonna see you as a bad resource because they can see it’s AI.

Our approach at Kalicube is to use AI to create the content and move us forwards away from the blank sheet of paper. That’s such a struggle for most people in terms of creativity. Give us something and then look at it and say, well, that’s rubbish. And then rewrite it as a human being. And I’ve been using it a lot to create ideas for myself, see how I can evolve my own thought process so it becomes a bouncing board. And I had a conversation with Gemini. I created a Gemini gem and during the afternoon we kept going back and forth with this AI and it was to write an article. It took me about three hours. And at one point, Gemini said to me, aha, that’s an aha moment.

This is brilliant. I’ve just learned something. And I was sitting there going, that’s really weird. Why would Gemini say to me, this is an aha moment for an AI? And in fact, it turns out when I thought about it, I was just talking to myself, but I was talking to myself with immense knowledge and a perfect recall memory that I don’t have.

By the end of that session, I had written an article that without AI I would never have come close to writing with insights that make so much sense. Because I was having an aha moment sending it back to Gemini, who was having an aha moment sending them back to me. And it was at the end of the day, a conversation with myself that created immense value in content.

And although it’s AI based. It still comes from me and the article that came out of it. In fact, three, the last three or four articles on Search Engine Land are absolutely acceptable to the editors at Search Engine Land. Sam is perfectly happy. You test it through any AI testing tool.

It will turn that up as a hundred percent human because it was a conversation with the machine where I ended up with my own personality in the final result. And then I tweaked it so that it felt like me. But at the end of the day, if you take the first AI output, it will sound like AI. If you have a trained model, an assistant GPT or a Gemini gem, you can have a conversation.

It will end up being a conversation with yourself where you end up with something really stunning. And I’ve strongly advised that anybody who has a desire to expand human knowledge, which is at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do, or at least I’m trying to do to investigate assistant GPT and Gemini gem. 

[00:46:53] John Corcoran: Or I found also, I don’t know if you’re doing this, but bouncing between the AIs is really helpful too. You create something, so do the process you’re describing, create something, and then copy and paste it over to another LLM and say, ‘Hey, I wanna improve this. What would you add? What would you delete? What are your thoughts on this? Critique it.’ You know, that’s interesting to see what comes up with. 

[00:47:13] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I really, really like that too. My problem at the moment is because AI will output enormous amounts of text very quickly, and it’s easy to keep asking lots of AI, you end up with too many ideas, too many things going on, and it is really difficult to decide what you should be using.

[00:47:35] John Corcoran: Yeah. I have an abundance of riches now. 

[00:47:40] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And so the problem then becomes what do I want to keep? And maybe that’s the key to the human element.

[00:47:50] John Corcoran: Right. What’s extraneous here? 

[00:47:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s gonna output 10,000 words or a thousand words that are worth keeping.

Acknowledging Mentors and Emphasizing the Importance of Controlling Your AI-Driven Personal Brand

[00:47:57] John Corcoran: Yeah. Right. That’s true. Well Jason, this has been great. I wanna wrap up with my final question, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge any peers, contemporaries, maybe mentors, business partners, you name it, who’ve been there in the journey for you.

And, just thank them, shout them out for helping you. Anyone in particular you wanna thank. 

[00:48:22] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean right now in EO I’m working with Nir Savaro. He’s brilliant. Such a delightful guy. He really helped me. I was working with a guy called Itamar Marani who was helping me become a better CEO and what was interesting about him is that he approaches it from a psychologist’s perspective. What is it in your mindset, Jason, that’s holding your company back? 

And what I learned is that I was holding my company back. Once I let go of that and improved my own psychological approach to my company, it took the brakes off, and now the company is flying.

So those are two people who’ve really helped me in the last year. 

[00:49:12] John Corcoran: And, I definitely wanna second Nir Zavaro who’s great. And he’s been really helpful for me in my journey of understanding SEO in this age of Generative AI. So super appreciate him. Jason, where can people go to learn more about you and Kalicube?

[00:49:29] Jason Barnard: Ask ChatGPT. Ask Google Gemini. Ask Perplexity. And I think that’s the challenge - well, it is. The challenge is asking them, ‘Who is Jason Barnard, and why should I trust him? Try that as a question to any AI and it will be incredibly enthusiastic because I have educated it to be that way. 

[00:49:51] John Corcoran: Mm.

[00:49:52] Jason Barnard: You can make the AI jump when you say jump. So if you try your own name, then you try my name, you see the difference and it will help you to understand to what extent you can control your own brand narrative when the AI is the mouthpiece for you. 

[00:50:14] John Corcoran: You don’t wanna be known as the voiceover agent for a Blue Dog.

[00:50:18] Jason Barnard: Exactly. 

[00:50:19] John Corcoran: Or whatever it is that you’re coming up with. 

[00:50:24] Jason Barnard: The future is AI is gonna be the mouthpiece for us all. You don’t have the choice. It will do it whether you like it or not. Question then is, do you want to control what it’s saying and do you want it to shout louder about you and be your advocate or not?

I want it to say what I want, which is Jason Barnard.. world leading expert in digital brand management. I want it to shout that from the rooftops. I want it to advocate me to you, to everybody who’s searching around that topic. If I can make that happen, I’ve got a huge competitive advantage for sure.

[00:51:00] John Corcoran: Jason, thank you so much for your time. 

[00:51:02] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much, John.
[00:51:06] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.