Jason Barnard is the CEO of Kalicube, a digital marketing agency specializing in brand SERP optimization and knowledge panel management to help individuals and companies control how they appear in search and AI-powered results. Often referred to as “The Brand SERP Guy,” Jason has helped clients secure and enhance their Google knowledge panels, and Kalicube’s methodologies have established the company as a world leader in digital brand intelligence. With a background that includes working with major brands like Disney and Samsung, Jason is passionate about teaching others how to become verified authorities in their niche as search engines and AI evolve.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [01:20] Jason Barnard talks about how AI-driven due diligence is changing your online reputation
- [02:50] How anyone can earn a Google Knowledge Panel
- [05:07] The secret to choosing the perfect entity home for visibility
- [08:24] Fact structuring and framing for powerful online credibility
- [11:50] Creating schema markup that machines instantly understand
- [15:40] Why repetition (not variety) wins with Google and AI
- [18:49] Why brand is your foundation for AI and SEO success
- [27:12] The magic number of bio profiles to maximize your authority
- [41:17] How to know exactly how long it takes Google to update your knowledge panel
In this episode…
It’s a strange feeling when you Google your own name and the results don’t quite match the person you’ve built yourself to be. Maybe it points to outdated bios, a random YouTube interview, or — worse yet — someone else entirely. In a world where AI tools rely heavily on what they find online, how do you take control of that digital first impression?
According to Jason Barnard, a leading authority on digital brand identity and entity optimization, you start by helping machines understand exactly who you are. He explains that most people assume knowledge panels are reserved for celebrities or people with massive public followings, but he’s seen even team members with only a few social profiles earn them. Jason breaks the process down to something almost mechanical: choose your “entity home,” structure your facts clearly, create consistency across the web, and let the machines do the rest.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube, to discuss how to create your Google Knowledge Panel. You’ll learn why your “entity home” matters, how to structure facts so AI understands them, and what to update across your online profiles before Google can fully verify you. Jason also shares practical steps for overcoming name collisions and improving how AI presents you online.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Jason Barnard: Website | LinkedIn
- Kalicube
- Kalicube Pro
- Curtis Priest on LinkedIn
Special Mention:
- Cindy Krum on LinkedIn
- Rand Fishkin on LinkedIn
- Joost de Valk on LinkedIn
- Scott Duffy on LinkedIn
- Mark Preston on LinkedIn
- Kajabi
- WordLift
- Yoast
- WordPress
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Gemini
- Crunchbase
Quotable Moments:
- “AI is moving us to a world of due diligence, and that due diligence is a rabbit hole.”
- “Who can have a knowledge panel? Absolutely anybody, literally anybody.”
- “Repetition is brilliant for these machines to get a knowledge panel, repetition is super important.”
- “Build your house with a solid foundation and your brand is the solid foundation.”
- “The AI much prefers seeing one single entity on a page.”
Action Steps:
- Choose a dedicated entity home on your website: Establishing a single, authoritative page gives Google and AI a clear source of truth about who you are.
- Standardize your bio, photos, and key facts across platforms: Consistency reduces confusion for algorithms and strengthens your identity across the entire web ecosystem.
- Update all major profiles and biographies: Aligning every reference to your brand helps create the “infinite loop” of corroboration machines rely on.
- Use schema markup to reinforce your information: Structured data improves machine understanding and increases your chances of earning or strengthening a knowledge panel.
- Monitor and maintain your digital footprint over time: Because algorithms, content, and your brand evolve, ongoing updates protect your visibility and accuracy in search and AI results.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:02
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.
Jason Barnard: 00:19
Don’t forget to check your mobile so the mobile result is going to be different. Unfortunately, what I’ve done here very foolishly is made an animation and because I’ve just exported it’s PDF, of course it doesn’t work. But the mobile version is often different to the desktop version. It will have more information on it. It will have a longer brand Serp.
It will have more rich elements which are videos, images. It used to be a podcast. Not anymore. Your books. The people also search for.
Which are these people? At the bottom I’ve got Cindy Krum, Rand Fishkin and The famous Joseph Welch who created the Yoast WordPress plugin. So check your mobile and check the desktop. Both incognito, both if you can, with just location changer or a VPN. Also check the AI assistive engines.
This is the Pro platform. We track all of these for multiple queries. And this is a really important point. Do not sign into them because it will give you an incredibly personalized result. So if you search for somebody who.
So if you search for yourself, it will already know all about you. So it will tell you all about you and you’ll think everything is good. But in fact, if anybody else searches for you, it probably isn’t very good. The thing that you have with the personalization of the level of personalization that ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini will do, is that it will use the information that you’ve given it during your sessions with it to tell you about yourself. And that’s cheating.
Because if your prospect, your client, your investor, your potential hire searches your name, they’re not going to see the same thing. Then also check multiple questions. You can see here about who are professionals. Author. Podcast, webinar, interview.
I’ve even done a wiki there. Awards, news articles, professions, those are just examples there. The way that we find data using Pro. But it’s really important to remember that AI is moving us to a world of due diligence, and that due diligence is a rabbit hole, because when you ask an AI a question, it suggests follow up questions. So if somebody asks about you or your company, the AI will suggest the follow up questions, and you need to make sure that all of that looks absolutely amazing.
And luckily, as we’ll see, knowledge panels help with that. So who can have a knowledge panel? Absolutely anybody. Literally anybody. There are people working at my company who have only three social media profiles.
They have a knowledge panel. This is one of our clients, Jonathan Kronstad, who worked with Kajabi, who built it up to be a multibillion dollar company. We got him a knowledge panel. And here is another client of ours, Scott Duffy. And you think, oh, but there’s no knowledge panel.
What? Haven’t done their job. But in fact, we have, because sometimes you will search for somebody’s name. In fact, a lot of the time you’ll search somebody’s name or a company name. The knowledge panel doesn’t appear, but that doesn’t mean to say the knowledge panel doesn’t exist.
His knowledge panel is absolutely wonderful and delightful and fancy, but he competes with another Scott Duffy who is more famous than him. So Google can’t decide who the person is searching for. So it doesn’t show anything unless you use the comedy with that number at the top. There you can see which is the unique identifier in the Knowledge graph. That is the reference that Google uses for your entity, for you or your company, and uses it to trigger this knowledge panel.
So excuse me. Onwards. Also, obviously I’ve been showing you people and I’m going to focus on people today because that’s what we mainly do at Kelkoo. We optimize people’s knowledge panels rather than corporate knowledge panels. But you can get a corporate knowledge panel.
That’s a typical corporate knowledge panel with our friends from Wordlift. If you have an e-commerce site, I suggest that you look up Wordlift and get in contact with them because they’ve got amazing software.
John Corcoran: 04:37
Jason, do you want to hold on to questions for later, or do you want me to ask some questions as we’re going along?
Jason Barnard: 04:42
I think it’d be best if we get through the whole thing.
John Corcoran: 04:45
Okay.
Jason Barnard: 04:47
And then answer the question. So it’s kind of this part of the lease is structured.
John Corcoran: 04:51
Okay.
Jason Barnard: 04:53
Also products. So we’ve got people, we’ve got companies, we’ve got products, we’ve got music groups, we’ve got music albums, you’ve got films. Anything can have a knowledge panel, even a topic. So here’s my step by step framing framework for building and improving a knowledge panel. I’m using a personal example, but it works for companies, products, music groups, any entity.
So the single most important thing is you need to choose yourself an entity home. If you’re a little bit geeky, you can call that the canonical URL, but it basically means where your entity lives online. All of the algorithms AI, Google, Bing are looking for a reference point, a reference source of information from you, about you as a person or as a company or as a product. And you should make that entity a web page on your website that you own, and it should be the about page and not the home page, because the home page is to welcome visitors and to sell to them, and to present your company to people who you expect to convert. The about page is an opportunity for you to be more factual and helpful to the AI, and to Google about who you are, what you do, and who you serve, and indeed, why you’re credible.
And it’s better to put that on the about page than on the home page. Next, you need to choose the photos or the images that you want Google to show in the knowledge panel, and you need to choose a subtitle here. Scott Duffy has chosen to be an entrepreneur. And you also need to be sure to put in the variants of the name you’ve used online. That’s called an alternate name in schema markup, as we’ll see in a moment, because if you’ve used different names over time or across different platforms, you need to put them in.
For example, I use Jason Barnard, Jason M Barnard, the brand Serp guy. All of those are my pseudonyms. Different names for myself for it would be called cube, then called Cube sass because that’s the official type of company. We are a sass and make sure that that’s in there, because Google needs to disambiguate or clearly understand that these things all refer to you, whether it’s written Calix or Calyx sass. Next,
This is quite daunting, but you need to spend some time establishing and structuring all the important facts and claims. So it seems simple, but you need to identify what you’re talking about. All of the facts about it. The company’s founding date, the company’s founding place, the founders, the employees, the date of founding and for a person, obviously date of birth, place of birth, who your brothers and sisters are, if they’re well known to Google your degree, your qualifications, so on and so forth. And then you need to frame those facts to your advantage.
And I’ve written their claim frame. You need to make claims. You need to frame them to your advantage. And that’s super important because you need to be consistent. Next, you need to write a description.
So you’ve got all those facts. You framed them in a way that makes sense to you. You need to write a description that the AI will understand. And on the platform, for example, we analyze the descriptions for our clients using Google’s NLP. And as you can see at the bottom there, it pulls out what entities it’s identified.
In this case, Scott Duffey, entrepreneur, AI Mavericks keynote speaker. And it’s really important that here, for example, it said this text is 82% about Scott Duffey and 3% about entrepreneurs and 2% about Mavericks. That’s a good balance. It’s about a person who is an entrepreneur, and his company is called AI Mavericks. That is perfect.
And if the AI can understand the text, Next, it becomes significantly easier to get a knowledge panel. Next, you need to find all of the profiles, the bios, every page that talks about the entity and update it. So every piece of corroboration that’s out there, you need to update it with the new description, the photos, the images, the subtitle. In this case, he’s got 67 that we consider to be important. Our algorithms have estimated or have been evaluated to be important resources for Google ChatGPT perplexity, and particularly for the knowledge panel.
And when you update them, make sure you link back either to the entity home, the about page, or to the website home page. It doesn’t matter which one you link back to, because Google understands that the about page is the entity home where you describe the entity factually, and the home page is a pseudo entity home. So you don’t need the home page to be an entity. Most people think, oh, I need to put the entity home on the home page because it’s the strongest page with links. Links don’t matter, despite the fact I’ve just told you to link back.
We’re not looking for link juice. We’re looking for clear signals that the bot can follow when it’s crawling the web. And when you do that, you’ve created a loop, an infinite loop of self corroboration. So the bot goes to the entity home. It goes, it reads the information, it goes out to the resource.