Jason Barnard is the CEO and Founder of Kalicube, a digital brand consultancy operating in France and the US. Kalicube helps business leaders, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers understand how search engines and AI platforms interpret and display online information. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, Jason is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and best-selling author.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [3:22] Why Jason Barnard’s past as a Blue Dog cartoon character hurt his SEO credibility
- [6:51] Steps Jason took to reframe his online reputation and regain trust
- [10:18] How AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are reshaping online search behavior
- [14:29] Why traditional keyword-targeted SEO is becoming obsolete
- [20:22] The concept of the “perfect click”
- [23:00] Why mentions and citations matter more than backlinks in today’s SEO
- [29:10] Understanding technical SEO: how to reduce friction for search engine bots
- [33:36] Why anchor text and context are critical in guiding bots through your site
- [43:13] How to use AI as a co-creator without sacrificing originality and authenticity
In this episode…
AI-generated summaries and chatbot answers are quickly changing how people search, sparking debate over whether SEO is becoming obsolete.
Some business leaders fear the rise of AI will wipe out traditional strategies, while others believe the fundamentals of digital visibility remain unchanged for now. What does this massive shift mean for businesses trying to get found online?
Jason Barnard, a digital brand management expert, believes you can — but only if you adapt. He shares why keyword-first SEO strategies are no longer effective and how to instead focus on expanding human knowledge through content. Jason explains how machines perceive online credibility, why citations and mentions are the new backlinks, and how companies can restructure their sites to better serve AI bots. From reducing friction for crawlers to reframing personal branding stories, Jason outlines a roadmap for digital success in the AI era.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube, about how generative AI is transforming SEO and online reputation. Jason dives into reframing brand narratives, optimizing for AI comprehension, and the importance of educating algorithms to build trust and visibility. He also shares strategies for utilizing AI as a writing partner and provides tips on minimizing technical friction on your site.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Jason Barnard: LinkedIn | Website
- Kalicube
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “Educate the algorithms like children; they’ll be your best advocates.”
- “You’re not adding to human knowledge by repeating what’s already out there.”
- “Mentions and citations are the new currency in digital PR.”
- “Your website doesn’t need to convert anymore; AI does the convincing for you.”
- “You don’t have a choice; AI is your mouthpiece now. The question is, what will it say?”
Action Steps:
- Reframe your brand narrative online: Ensure that your website and content effectively highlight the aspects of your experience that are most relevant to your audience today. This helps both AI and human users better understand and trust your value proposition.
- Stop chasing keywords — start expanding knowledge: Instead of optimizing for high-competition keywords, publish content that offers new, insightful information AI models don’t already know. This positions your brand as an authoritative source.
- Structure your website for machines, not just people: Reduce friction for search engine bots by improving crawlability, rendering speed, and internal linking. Bots that understand your site better will surface it more often.
- Use AI as a creative partner, not a writer: Start with AI-generated drafts to overcome creative blocks, but refine the content with your unique voice and insights. This ensures originality and authenticity.
- Build credibility through citations, not just links: Focus on getting mentions in reputable publications, podcasts, and industry platforms, even without backlinks. Then link to these from your website to reinforce your digital identity to AI.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. 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 with him in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:17
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.
John Corcoran: 00:33
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this 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, Activision 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 Rise25. At Rise25, 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 for 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 are calling the B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Co-Pilot.
So if you want to learn more about what we do, you can go to our website Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. All right. My guest here today is Jason Barnard.
He’s a serial entrepreneur best selling author. He’s a keynote speaker. He’s an innovator. He is 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 going to get into in a moment, but mostly what I was most interested in talking about here today is 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 sold, you developed this company got a billion views online. You know, that’s on level with like, Disney and PBS and all this kind of stuff.
Just got a ton of presence. And, you know, rightly so. I would have thought, this is amazing what I created. Did 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 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 Boudoir. And, and then we’ll get into how it kind of weighed you down when you’re trying to redefine how the world saw you online.
Jason Barnard: 03:22
Right. 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.
Yeah, okay. Get caught out three times. You’re a fool. I got caught out twice. The first time is is the Blue Dog.
And that was, as you say, the interesting story is 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’s 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.
John Corcoran: 04:30
Yeah, it’s just crazy because you built this thing that got a billion eyeballs. I mean, that is like top 0.1% of all the people out. You have so much more credibility. I would have thought, you know, you have so much more credibility than anyone else out there who hasn’t built something that got a billion eyeballs.
Jason Barnard: 04:51
But that was exactly the problem. It didn’t say a billion eyeballs. It said he’s a Blue Dog.
John Corcoran: 04:56
He’s a Blue Dog. Yeah.
Jason Barnard: 04:58
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, right? 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 is saying he’s just a voiceover artist.
John Corcoran: 05:30
Yeah. So you came to this realization after you’d been making proposals, you were talking to companies about working with them, and then they just wouldn’t hire you, right?
Jason Barnard: 05:41
Yeah. I mean, I think I probably lost about $1 million in deals. Wow. Over several years before. Number one, I, 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, 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 said, Jason Barnard is a voiceover artist.
He’s a cartoon Blue Dog. And they’re suddenly saying, well, why would I trust this guy who’s obviously this kind of, I don’t know, flaky voiceover artist with my business strategy? And the answer is no, I wouldn’t.
John Corcoran: 06:34
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 reviewed online. So what did tell me? Tell me what you went through, what you did.
Jason Barnard: 06:51
Well, and that’s the thing 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, the deals with Disney, the deals with ITV Studios and the competition with PBS.
And that’s what we do at Kalicube is we say, well, okay, 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’ve framed 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.
John Corcoran: 07:42
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 they haven’t talked about or they haven’t boasted about, they haven’t shared, they haven’t communicated the the value, the the credibility, the credibility markers that that should be elevating them and explaining to the world the credibility that they truly have.
Jason Barnard: 08:14
Literally every time. Yeah. There are no exceptions.
John Corcoran: 08:19
Yeah.
Jason Barnard: 08:22
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. And number three is I don’t really prove it. I say it. I mean, I’ve had clients and they say we’re the best flower selling business in France. I say to them, prove it.
All our clients say it. But give me a page online that shows me that that’s true. And they simply couldn’t do it. And then over 3 or 4 years, we built up a strategy. We claim framed improved.
And we can talk about that later. And all of a sudden they’re outranking Interflora. Small French company outranking Interflora. Bingo. Ago 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 going to think you’re the best person in the entire universe for sending those flowers, and we can prove it.
John Corcoran: 10:00
So let’s talk about this in terms of we’re recording this and, you know, we’re going into 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?
Jason Barnard: 10:18
The game has kind of been added to I was talking to Fabrice Canal a couple of 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.
John Corcoran: 10:45
What does that mean in English? Major here. So you have to dumb it down further.
Jason Barnard: 10:49
It means that if you give somebody something new to use, they will use it in addition to what they were already doing.
John Corcoran: 10:57
Okay.
Jason Barnard: 10:58