09:10Edward Sturm · Podcast
How to Build Backlinks for a Brand New Website (From Zero Authority)
A daily SEO podcast reads through a Reddit thread on link building for a brand-new site and adds real-world context to the best answers.
January 29thThe argument in one line.
A Google Knowledge Panel is not a ranking reward but a confidence score, and it goes to whoever gives the machine the clearest, most consistent, most cross-linked set of facts about who they are.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're a founder, consultant, or personal brand who wants Google, ChatGPT, and Gemini to describe you accurately when someone looks you up before a sale or a hire.
- You're building out a new company's web presence and want to sequence LinkedIn, Crunchbase, The Org, and social profiles correctly from day one.
- You've lost a deal or a hire because of stale or wrong information about you online and want to understand why the machine got it wrong.
- You do SEO or brand work for clients and want a concrete, teachable process for entity-level optimization rather than keyword-level SEO.
SKIP IF…
- You're chasing keyword rankings for products or content pages; this is about how your name or brand gets understood, not about ranking articles.
- You already have a well-established Knowledge Panel and are looking for advanced schema or technical SEO tactics beyond the basics covered here.
The full version, fast.
Google gives out Knowledge Panels to entities it's confident it understands, not just famous ones. Barnard's process is three steps in order: be clear on your Entity Home (your About page, not your homepage), keep those facts identical across every profile you control, then link from your Entity Home out to that corroboration to create an "infinite loop of self-corroboration." Common mistakes: inconsistent facts (three founding dates on one page), hoarding link equity instead of linking out, and writing descriptions that require the reader to reason instead of stating the conclusion outright ("he's been doing SEO since 1998, therefore he's an SEO expert"). A new company can get a panel in four to five months; an established, messier one can take nine. The payoff extends past Google: the same clarity now shapes what ChatGPT and Gemini say about you when someone does due diligence.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00guestJason Barnard
00:00hostEdward Sturm
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 02:08
01 · Knowledge Panel Basics & Entity Home Clarity
Barnard opens with the number-one factor: clarity on the facts (name, birth details, subtitle, description, photos). Introduces Entity Home as the single page (usually the About page) where Google reconciles who you are.
02:08 – 06:15
02 · What an Entity Is, Sponsor Break & the Search-Volume Myth
Defines entity as anything nameable (person, company, film, road). Sponsor read for Sturm's Compact Keywords SEO course. Then: search volume for your name has no bearing on whether you get a panel, only on whether anyone sees it.
06:15 – 09:48
03 · Common Setup Mistakes & the Corroboration Links
The biggest mistake: inconsistent facts on your own Entity Home (a client had three founding dates on one page). Second mistake: not spreading that consistency across your whole digital footprint, then failing to link out to it.
09:48 – 14:15
04 · Which Platforms to Register & Where Knowledge Panels Are Headed
Names the starter platform list (Crunchbase, LinkedIn, The Org, Facebook, a local review site) and the expected 3-months-to-a-year timeline. Flags that Knowledge Panels will become AI-generated and more dynamic as Google migrates to an enterprise Knowledge Graph.
14:15 – 19:04
05 · About Page, Home Page & Media Kit
Distinguishes the three page types by audience: About page for machines and due-diligence humans, homepage as a signposting page for everyone, media kit for people who want to hire or write about you.
19:04 – 23:28
06 · Pillar Pages, Site Architecture & SameAs Schema
Introduces pillar pages (one page per facet: talks, podcasts, books) linking back to the Entity Home. Covers his "everything in a category" architecture rule and confirms SameAs schema should always be used, pointing to your other verified profiles.
23:28 – 28:59
07 · Transparency, Trust & Brand-Naming Strategy
Separates transparency (contact info, VAT number, GDPR email) from clarity, then argues against exact-match brand names like "Austin Plumbers" because they trap Google's dominant-interpretation logic and cap the brand's ability to scale.
28:59 – 32:27
08 · Disambiguation, Click-Through Rate & Notability
The core machine problem is disambiguating everyone who shares your name and merging your own multiple facets. Confirms click-through rate has zero effect; the real tiebreakers are famousness, relevancy to the searcher, and confidence in the data.
32:27 – 37:22
09 · Modular Platform Descriptions & Doing the Reasoning for AI
Explains writing one modular executive-summary description with swappable sections per platform's character limits. Then the episode's biggest reveal: indexing and grounding run on cheap, low-reasoning LLMs, so you must state your own conclusions ("therefore, he's an SEO expert") instead of trusting inference.
37:22 – 43:52
10 · Writing a Clear Executive Summary, Ambiguity & Capitalization
Walks a local-electrician example through a semantic-triple opening (who, what, whom you serve, why trust you) and naming related entities. Flags two hidden traps: verbs that double as nouns, and capitalization errors that make Google misread proper nouns.
43:52 – 48:25
11 · Why Third-Party Proof Matters
Self-declared information can earn a panel but won't be stable or authoritative; third-party mentions (podcast show notes, press) add outside vouching. Tells the story of losing a $100,000 deal because Google surfaced an outdated career detail instead of the current one.
48:25 – 53:11
12 · Why Knowledge Panels Win: Business Card to AI Resume
Frames the Knowledge Panel as your online business card that stops funnel leakage, then extends the argument into the AI-search era: your "AI resume" is now what ChatGPT and Gemini say about you when someone goes down a due-diligence rabbit hole.
53:11 – 56:57
13 · When Panels Don't Show (Salesforce, Moz)
Sturm notices Salesforce and Moz don't show Knowledge Panels despite ranking well. Barnard explains not showing isn't the same as not having one; Google may withhold it if the panel is thin or it isn't fully confident in the interpretation.
56:57 – 1:00:52
14 · Kalicube Steps and Wrap
Closing checklist: listen back, run your copy through the Copywriting Sandbox, track your KGM ID in the Knowledge Graph Explorer, generate SameAs schema, and prioritize the trusted-sources list. Schema markup is supporting evidence, not mandatory.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A Knowledge Panel is not about fame; Google gives one to any entity it's confident it understands, however small.
- Your Entity Home is your About page, not your homepage; the homepage is a signpost, the About page is the destination for people and machines doing due diligence.
- The three-step order matters: clarity on your Entity Home first, consistency across every profile second, links out to corroboration third.
- Consistency is judged like local SEO's NAP rule (name, address, phone) but applied to every fact about an entity, everywhere it appears.
- Linking out to your own other profiles isn't wasted link equity; it's the pathway that lets Google's algorithm confirm the same entity in multiple places.
- A four-to-five-month-old company got a Knowledge Panel faster than an established one because the older company's digital footprint was bigger and messier to sort out.
- Search volume for your name has zero bearing on whether Google grants a Knowledge Panel; it only affects whether people ever see it.
- The indexing and grounding models that decide whether you get understood are cheap, low-reasoning LLMs, so you must write the conclusion for them instead of trusting them to infer it.
- A verb that can also double as a noun, like "engineers," confuses entity recognition; unambiguous nouns perform better.
- Capitalization is a hidden entity signal: a proper noun at the start of a sentence can get misread as a common word unless you force disambiguation in the copy.
- Self-declared information (your own site, your own LinkedIn) can get you a Knowledge Panel on its own, but only third-party mentions make it stable and authoritative.
- A lost $100,000 deal traced back to Google surfacing an outdated old career ("voice over artist for a cartoon") instead of the current one, illustrating how an unmanaged entity leaks revenue at the bottom of the funnel.
- Click-through rate has zero effect on entity recognition; what decides between two similarly-named people is famousness, relevancy to the searcher, and Google's confidence in the data.
- Naming a company after what it literally does (Austin Plumbers) makes it hard for the brand to scale outside its niche or region, unlike a unique brand name.
- Schema markup is supporting evidence, not a requirement; one client refused it entirely and still earned a Knowledge Panel.
A Knowledge Panel is Google agreeing with you, not ranking you.
WHAT TO LEARN
Get clear on one Entity Home page, keep every fact about yourself identical everywhere, then link the two together, and Google, ChatGPT, and Gemini all start describing you the way you actually want to be described.
01Knowledge Panel Basics & Entity Home Clarity
- Your Entity Home is your About page, not your homepage; the homepage is a signpost to everywhere else, the About page is the factual destination machines and due-diligence humans actually read.
- Audit your own About page for internal contradictions (dates, titles, descriptions) before doing anything else; that's the number-one factor Google is scoring.
02What an Entity Is, Sponsor Break & the Search-Volume Myth
- Search volume for your name doesn't affect whether you get a Knowledge Panel, only whether anyone sees it, so don't assume you're too small or unknown to bother.
- An entity is simply anything you can name; the same clarity logic applies whether you're a person, a company, or a product.
03Common Setup Mistakes & the Corroboration Links
- A single inconsistent fact, like three different founding dates on one page, is enough to stall recognition; treat consistency the way local SEO treats NAP data.
- Linking out from your Entity Home to your other profiles isn't lost link equity; it's the exact signal that lets Google confirm the same entity across multiple pages.
04Which Platforms to Register & Where Knowledge Panels Are Headed
- Start with Crunchbase, LinkedIn, The Org, one major social platform, and a local review site; that baseline alone puts you in range of a panel within a few months to a year.
- Expect Knowledge Panels themselves to become more AI-generated and less predictable over time; getting into the underlying Knowledge Graph is the durable goal, not the panel's current template.
05About Page, Home Page & Media Kit
- Match each page to its actual audience: the About page is written for machines and researchers, the homepage for casual visitors, the media kit for people deciding whether to hire or feature you.
06Pillar Pages, Site Architecture & SameAs Schema
- Split large bodies of information (talks, books, podcasts) into pillar pages that link back to the Entity Home, so the Entity Home itself stays simple enough for a machine to parse.
- Always implement SameAs schema pointing at your verified profiles, but never point it at a profile you don't control and can't corroborate.
07Transparency, Trust & Brand-Naming Strategy
- Separate transparency (contact details, registration numbers, GDPR info) from clarity (a plain factual identity statement); both matter but they're different jobs.
- Naming a company after exactly what it does traps it in Google's dominant-interpretation logic and makes it harder to scale into new markets later.
08Disambiguation, Click-Through Rate & Notability
- Click-through rate has no bearing on entity recognition; don't chase it as an entity-SEO lever.
- When two similarly-named people or brands compete for recognition, the tiebreakers are famousness, relevancy to the specific searcher, and Google's confidence in the underlying data.
09Modular Platform Descriptions & Doing the Reasoning for AI
- Write one modular executive-summary description with swappable sections, then trim to fit each platform's character limits instead of writing from scratch each time.
- The systems that index and ground your information run on cheap, low-reasoning models, so state your own conclusions in the copy ("therefore, he's an SEO expert") instead of trusting the reader to infer them.
10Writing a Clear Executive Summary, Ambiguity & Capitalization
- Open every entity description with a semantic triple: who you are, what you do, who you serve, why they should trust you.
- Watch for two hidden ambiguity traps in your own copy: words that double as both verb and noun, and proper nouns at the start of a sentence that lowercase logic can misread.
11Why Third-Party Proof Matters
- Self-declared information can get you a Knowledge Panel on its own, but third-party mentions, podcast appearances, and press coverage are what make it stable and hard to dislodge.
- An unmanaged entity has a real cost: a stale detail surfacing at the wrong moment can silently kill a deal at the bottom of the funnel, the exact place you already did the hardest work to get someone to.
12Why Knowledge Panels Win: Business Card to AI Resume
- Treat your "AI resume", what ChatGPT and Gemini say when someone researches you, as the new version of the old Google business card; the same clarity-and-corroboration work now targets both surfaces at once.
- A Knowledge Panel's real job is stopping leakage at the bottom of the funnel, people quietly walking away after a bad search result, not vanity.
13When Panels Don't Show (Salesforce, Moz)
- Not seeing a Knowledge Panel when you search a brand doesn't mean it doesn't exist; Google can withhold display even when the entity is understood, so check the Knowledge Graph directly rather than assuming from search results alone.
14Kalicube Steps and Wrap
- Schema markup helps but isn't mandatory; prioritize clear, consistent, cross-linked prose on your Entity Home before worrying about technical markup.
- Use a copywriting checker to confirm your entity description is actually being recognized the way you intend before you publish it everywhere.
Terms worth knowing.
- Entity Home
- The single page where a person or company officially lives online and where Google resolves who they actually are; for most people and companies, this is the About page, not the homepage.
- Knowledge Panel
- The information box Google shows next to search results for a recognized entity, built from templates and pulled from the Knowledge Graph once Google is confident it understands who or what you are.
- Knowledge Graph
- Google's underlying database of entities and facts about them; being in the Knowledge Graph is necessary for a Knowledge Panel to exist but doesn't guarantee Google will display it.
- Brand SERP
- The search engine results page that appears when someone searches your own name or brand; functions as your online business card.
- Entity SEO
- Optimization focused on how search engines and AI systems understand and disambiguate a specific named entity (a person, brand, or company), as opposed to ranking for keywords.
- SameAs Schema
- A schema.org markup property that declares a page's other official profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, etc.) are the same entity, helping search engines connect the dots between them.
- Semantic Triple
- A subject-verb-object sentence structure (e.g., "PalmWires is an electrical company") used to state facts about an entity in the clearest, most machine-parseable form.
- Infinite Loop of Self-Corroboration
- A linking pattern where your Entity Home links out to a profile (like LinkedIn or Crunchbase) and that profile links back to your Entity Home, reinforcing to Google that both represent the same confirmed entity.
- Pillar Page
- A dedicated page for one facet of an entity (e.g., all the conferences someone has spoken at), linked from and back to the Entity Home so the Entity Home itself doesn't get overloaded with information.
- KGM ID
- The unique identifier Google assigns to an entity inside the Knowledge Graph once it's confident it has correctly understood and disambiguated that entity.
- AI Resume
- What ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI systems say about a person or brand when asked, treated as the AI-search-era equivalent of a Brand SERP.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- A term coined by Jason Barnard in 2017 for optimizing how AI-driven answer engines (like ChatGPT or Gemini) present information about an entity.
Things they pointed at.
10:20toolCrunchbase
10:20toolLinkedIn
10:20toolThe Org
58:15toolMuckrack
Lines you could clip.
00:23
“Being clear. You have to be clear about the facts.”
21:43
“It's what I call the infinite loop of self corroboration.”
36:09
“They're using the cheapest possible LLM, and the cheapest possible LLM is a pretty stupid LLM that simply digests and categorizes.”
50:19
“Jason Barnard is a voice over artist for a cartoon Blue Dog... and that was a $100,000 down the drain.”
52:43
“Google is your business card... now your AI resume is what ChatGPT, Google, and the others say about you.”
59:22
“Schema markup is supporting evidence. It isn't the be all and end all that a lot of people believe.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 06:15denseEntity Home clarity & the Knowledge Panel basics
06:15 – 14:15denseConsistency, corroboration links & platform checklist
14:15 – 23:28steadyPage architecture: homepage vs About page vs pillar pages
23:28 – 32:27steadyTransparency, brand naming & disambiguation
32:27 – 43:52denseWriting for AI: reasoning, semantic triples, ambiguity
43:52 – 53:11denseThird-party proof, business-card framing & the AI resume
53:11 – 1:00:52steadyReal-world panel gaps (Salesforce, Moz) & Kalicube toolkit walkthrough
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metaphoranalogystory
Jason Barnard, welcome back to the podcast. You are an expert in entity SEO, and I said to you, let's do a fifteen to thirty minute episode on how to get a knowledge panel.
Yeah. Right, Edward. That's easy peasy lemon squeezy.
I love it. I love it. Oh, it's okay.
So what is the number one most important factor for getting a knowledge panel on Google?
Being clear. You have to be clear about the facts. What Google is looking for to give you a knowledge panel is what are the facts about you?
What's your name? Where were you born? When were you born?
What your subtitle is? I'm an entrepreneur in my subtitle. You could be an SEO consultant.
You could be an investor. You get to choose. And what description it should give you, which photos it should use, that's the foundation of a knowledge panel.
Those are the things it's looking for number one top of the box. So if you're clear about that on your own Entity Home website, you're already well on the way.
And your Entity Home website is the website where your you as an entity live online. So it's like your house online.
So if you're a person, it's your personal website. If you're a company, it's your company website. If you're a person who doesn't have a personal website, it can be your company website.
Or it can be a LinkedIn profile, or it can be your Instagram profile. I would argue, as a person, you would want it to be your own site because you own it.
And your company is something you might leave, sell if you're the boss. Instagram doesn't belong to you.
LinkedIn doesn't belong to you. But they're all potentially entity homes. An entity home is what Google call the the place of reconciliation, where they reconcile all the information from around the web.
So the clarity on your entity home page, the about page on your website, the about page about you on your corporate website or LinkedIn or Instagram needs to be very, very clear who you are, what you do, who you serve, and disambiguate you from all of the other people with your name.
Can you can you describe what an entity is for for, like, people who are newer in SEO? Like, they're yeah. That's probably, like, one of the foundational things that a lot of newer people don't even understand.
Yeah. So I dived straight in with Entity Home without saying great. That was great.
Entity is just a thing that you can name. So you could say a brand. I talk about brand SERPs.
It could be entity SERP. Search engine results page for an entity is the search engine results page for the name of somebody, something, or a company.
So an entity is a thing that you can name, and examples would be a person, a company, a film, a music album, a musician, a music group, a road, a house, a building.
They're all things that we can name. And you can push it a little bit further. So we can stop there in terms of what's actually important to know for SEO.
But the next step is topics, things like economics, their entities too, because we can name them. It's a thing you can identify and name. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it.
It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, Compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed.
It's less work too. The average compact keywords landing page is only 415 words.
Compact keywords is a thirteen hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, compact keywords contributed to a $4,000 sale within the first six weeks.
Another customer said, give it to a junior employee, have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything, and you're going to gain a 6 figure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years.
It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO, and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com.
Back to the podcast. How much of getting a knowledge panel is due to having a brand that people search for? It's like search volume for the or or, yeah, search volume for the entity.
Well, I can give a good answer to that one. If nobody searches for it, nobody will ever see your knowledge panel.
So the knowledge panel becomes pointless.
But if how about if, like, not a lot of people searches search for it, do you still get a knowledge panel? So I was being cheeky that way. I was trying to be funny, and it just didn't work.
No. It was funny.
No. It doesn't matter. Google isn't trying to understand only the most famous people, entities, companies, films.
It's trying to understand everything. And because it's an algorithm and because it's AI, it isn't fussy.
If it understands, it understands. It gives you a knowledge panel. Simple as that.
So the the the point here is thinking about a child. A child who doesn't understand the world, and it's gone out there saying, I'm gonna try and understand everything.
And it goes and gets all the information it possibly can and tries to make sense of it. And so the first thing it's looking for is Entity Homes.
It's looking at a page and it says, well, is this page representing one specific thing, entity, person, company, brand, music album, that I'll be able to identify?
And if it thinks yes, then it will follow the links from that page and go and see if that same entity is also represented on the other pages. And if it is, and it's consistently the same information, it will say, I've understood this one.
I'm confident I've understood it. I'll give it a knowledge panel.
So you're saying that a newer company or, like, a not even popular company, like, new or not even popular can get its own knowledge panel.
Yep. So what are what are the mistakes that keep that prevent newer companies from getting their own knowledge panel?
So probably a lot of newer SEOs who are listening right now, and they're like, I wanna have a knowledge panel. How do I get a knowledge panel?
Well, the first thing that people get wrong is on their own entity home, they're not clear and they're not consistent. We had a client the other day, and he had three dates for the founding of his company on the same page.
And immediately, that's not clear.
That's something that's gonna make the machine confused. It's ambiguous. It's unclear.
The name needs to be consistent on the web page itself once again. So that consistency is the thing that almost everybody gets wrong. The second thing people get wrong is that that consistency needs to be spread across their entire digital footprint.
So every mention of that brand person, entity, company, music album, whatever it is, needs to be exactly the same everywhere. It's a bit like the the local search people talking about NAP.
Name, address, phone number has to be absolutely the same everywhere. So it's basically less local SEO done for entities. And if you can get that consistency on number one, that clarity and consistency on your entity home and then that clarity and consistency across every mention of it that you can control, and then you link from the entity home to all of that corroboration, you'll get it.
You'll get the knowledge panel. And the biggest mistakes are clarity on the entity home, consistency across the digital footprint, and failing to link out.
Because we will think, oh, I wanna keep my link juice. You can't keep your link juice in this particular circumstance. If you wanna be understood and get a knowledge panel, you need to spread that link juice joy, if we can say that.
To where? Where do you link out to? To all of the corroboration about you.
So you're linking to yourself, essentially. So, number one, you're helping yourself.
And number two, I'm not a believer in LinkGUICE being the thing that everybody appears to or a lot of people appear to believe it to be. And the benefits you get from being an understood entity, the benefits you get from being very clear and helping the machine, , understand the world, not just you, but everything about you.
Everything about you and your market and your and your audience will pay back significantly more than if you try and keep audio link juice because those links are the way that you can indicate to the machine where all the important information around you and about you is.
And I'll just give you a caveat there, is Google have focused on people for the last three or four years.
So for people, it's relatively easy, and for corporations, it's relatively hard.
So we recently had an experience with a a company that was well established. It took nine months. But for a new company, it took four or five months because we could build it from nothing.
Oh, wow. So the the the longer one was because the footprint was bigger and it was messier. So sorting out the mess and letting the machine digest it, it's a process, and it takes time.
So number one, companies are harder to do than people. Number two, it takes time and dedication.
How many about this this four to five month old company that you got a knowledge panel for? That and exactly, like, what you did? Well, exactly what I just described.
Okay. But we had the advice actual, like, tactics and platforms and
yeah. Yeah. We were we were creating the the the the the profile pages so we could create them right at the start so they were correct from the very beginning, Crunchbase.
The LinkedIn profile was new and hadn't been super filled in, so we could fill that in.
The org.com is another powerful one.
All of these platforms and that's part of the problem is all of these platforms, like Off of the top of your head, I'm sorry for interrupting. What are the what are the platforms that are, like, that every biz new business needs to register themselves on? The org,.com,
Crunchbase, LinkedIn
Major social platforms?
Facebook is very good. Twitter is very good. Instagram, less good.
But, honestly, with just those and the Entity Home, Oh, and a review platform you would want as well.
So it would be good. Local review platform you have in your country, at least one of those. That would put put you in a situation where you would expect to get a knowledge panel in a few months, three months to a year.
But, obviously, that's not a guarantee. It's our experience. The but then I would also add another caveat to all of this, which is that knowledge panels are built from templates that are human defined.
And as we move more and more to AI, my perspective on this is that Google would be foolish to retain that system. So the way we think about knowledge panels today is not going to be the same as the way we will think about them in a year or two's time.
They're gonna be AI generated. They're gonna be much more dynamic, so they're gonna be less reliable in terms of what's in them, how they're presented, what information they pull.
The knowledge graph, however, is very stable. And being in the knowledge graph is not the same thing necessary as having a knowledge panel. So you can be in the knowledge graph.
The knowledge panel will exist in the stratosphere, but it won't necessarily show on a brand on a Brand SERP or on the on the search results.
And you can actually have a knowledge panel without being in the knowledge graph because there are multiple knowledge graphs. Google Maps is a knowledge graph.
Google Books is a knowledge graph. So you can actually get a knowledge panel without being in the knowledge graph. So you actually need to get in the knowledge graph, and that's the key.
And then the other another caveat, lots of caveats here, is that Google are migrating to the enterprise knowledge graph. So the current knowledge graph, the one that everybody uses, you there's a cool tool on cool tool on Kalicube Pro, kalicube.pro/ knowledge graph explorer, I think it's called, where you can actually put your name in and see if you've got a KGM ID, which is the unique identifier in the knowledge graph that says, I've understood you and I'm confident I've understood you.
And it'll let you click on it and see whatever knowledge graph exists, knowledge panel, sorry, exists. And then moving to an enterprise version of that, which is it's how gonna be much more powerful.
The the way it actually functions and the flexibility of it is gonna be something that we don't yet fully know, but the old one was built from an equivalent of Wikidata.
So it's like looking at Wikidata but a machine. And the new one is more big data in in a kind of big box, let's say, that you would be less able to predict exactly what's inside it.
So it's evolving. Getting a knowledge panel today is definitely something I would do. Knowing that knowledge panels, as they exist today, will die out and be replaced by something else that will still look like a knowledge panel.
It will still be an informative panel with information, photos. I mean, I've seen them in chat GPT already where you've got photos, a description, here's some videos.
That's where we're going.
How do you think about this is kind of a big question. How do you think about what the home page should look like, the bio or about page should look like, the heading navigation, the footer, um, even, like, even a press kit?
How how are you how are you approaching those things?
Really interesting question is you think about the audience. The about page, the audience is machines that are trying to understand you.
The entity home, the point of reconciliation, where you need to be clear and consistent through that page, are factual.
Who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you're credible. That's the biggie. And people who are really interested in researching you, so people doing due diligence on you.
Those are the two audiences for the about page. The audience for the homepage is somebody who's vaguely interested in you as a person or a company or they're interested in you. So the homepage is a signposting page to move people and indeed robots to the next step in the journey with you.
So the homepage is for everybody and is a signposting page. It's a hop to somewhere else. It's never the destination.
The about page is a destination in and of itself for bots to understand you and for humans to do do due diligence. Then the media kit is somebody who wants to hire you or wants more information to write write articles about you.
So it needs to be very human, very full of adjectives, and describe how wonderful you are, and why you're important, and all the rest of it.
And it will duplicate some information on the About page and probably the home page as well.
I would always suggest that you start out with the first chunk, that when you read the first chunk, the first paragraph or two, you think I know exactly who the audience of this particular piece of text is. And if that's clear, you're in a good position.
About the the footer and the navigation, does that play a role in in the understanding of the entity?
Yes. It does. It helps.
That that now we're getting into the more advanced stuff, which is what I'm calling the pillar page system, where each aspect of a person we'll stick to people here.
Each aspect of a person has a pillar page. So I have a pillar page where it says, here are all the conferences I've spoken at. I've got another pillar page here are the podcasts I've been on.
You'll be on that. Let's go. Another pillar page here, all the books I've written.
Another pillar page here, all my patents. Another pillar page here, all my academic papers. And the reason for that is if I try and put all of that on the entity home, that single about page, it's overwhelmed for the machine, and it doesn't know what's important.
So I keep the entity home to the fundamental information, what we call the fundamental facts about me, and then I link from the entity to home to each of the facet pages, and then from the facet pages back to the entity home. So the machine always says, oh, I wanna know about his academic papers. I'll go and look at that page.
So each facet has its own mini entity home. We call them pillar pages, and they need to be accessible from the top menu if possible.
And the footer also, but the footer is considered significantly less important than the main menu at the top.
The main menu at the top says, here's how to navigate the site, but also here are the main facets of this entity, this brand, this thing, this person.
And one thing that I tell my clients a lot, and I've been telling them for years and years and years and years, that I think people sometimes don't really think about, and then when I say it, they go, yeah, of course. The menu at the top is not the same thing as the structure of the website, that the URLs that you have don't map to the menu at the top.
The structure of the website is ontological. It's how you organize your information. And the menu at the top is what's important within all of this information.
And how are you going to navigate? And you don't navigate through categories.
Blum blum blum blum category, category, category. You navigate straight to the part that you want to be in. The categories exist to place it in a context of ontology and categorization.
So, I know that's something that probably people think, yeah, yeah, I knew that. Just take a step back and really think about what you're doing with your menu and to what extent your own ontology, your own categorization has influenced your choice in the menu.
And I think people will find something at least in that top menu is there and shouldn't be or isn't there and should be. How do you
how do you structure these pages? Excuse me. Do you have, like I swallowed something.
Do you have do you have them nested within a a hub page, or are they just right off the root domain?
Oh, I will I my my number one rule is everything in a category. The only page on a website for me that should be at the root is the is the home page.
Everything goes in a You don't like a you don't like a flat arc architecture? No. Yeah.
I'm with you. Actually, I I love information architecture. I think it's really fun.
I I have a lot of fun organizing websites because I'm, a very organized person. So it's very fun for me. Yeah.
Yeah. So Yeah. Well, I and they say, have a different kind of fun, and I think it's, well, it's actually kinda similar.
I love organizing it if it's in my platform, CaliCube Pro, which I'm building.
So I have the defined structure, perfect structure, a person, a corporation, a podcast, an event series, a SaaS platform.
And I've designed them all and put them into a database so I don't have to think about them anymore. And I loved that. But I hate doing my own website because it's such a mess.
So if anybody goes to my website and says Oh, no. His website's a mess. I know.
It's because it's a permanent experiment, and it's kinda got out of control. And it's allowed me to now say to my clients, here's exactly the structure we have to have. And I know exactly what it looks like, and it will look like exactly the same for you as it will for everybody else because this particular structure that we've built at CaliCube is universal.
And there isn't a single page you could offer me that I couldn't fit into this structure.
Okay. So the most important factor for getting a knowledge panel is consistency is is yeah.
Clarity and consistency across platforms. Yes. What what's the second most important factor?
Linking to them all. Making sure that those links are in place from your website out to each and every corroboration and that they stay there and that they remain there over time because the web degrades over time.
So it it isn't setting it, forget it. It's set it, realize you've added another profile, add the link to that, realize another profile has been deleted or moved, change that.
You know, LinkedIn, if you change your handle on LinkedIn, it will redirect for a year. After a year, stops redirecting, and it gives you a four zero four.
So that's for something that you would need to maintain. So that linking, it's the web that builds the relationships, sorry, the the pathways for the bot to follow.
And it's what I call the . If it goes from your entity home to a platform like LinkedIn or Crunchbase or theorg.com, and that platform links straight back to the entity home, it goes on an infinite loop of self corroboration, and that's the fastest way to get it to understand and be confident it's understood.
Are you using same Aschema?
Yes.
Think that was a simple answer. It was a simple answer. So new website should definitely use same as schema.
Yeah. And I think, uh, schema is a good Can you talk can you talk about it? Like, go deeper into how mistakes maybe that people would make?
Say something putting a same as schema should be relatively simple and straightforward, but maybe there there are common mistakes that you see.
Yeah. With same as, it would be pointing to a URL that doesn't agree with your entity home. So if you've got a profile that you can't control that says something you don't actually that doesn't corroborate what you're saying in the gym, don't link to it.
Is the Entity Home always the home page for the main website?
No. It's the about page. It's the about website.
Okay. Because otherwise, you end up with a conflict in your own mind is that because the home page is a signpost page, it's does it the home page is there to go, oh, wow.
Look at us. Aren't we wonderful? Welcome.
Now go here. There's a conflict between that and saying, here's a very factual, dry, boring definition of who we are, what we do, who we serve, and why we are credible. So the entity home really needs to be on the about page so you don't end up fighting yourself
for what message you're trying to get across. So to what level should the home page have an about for the company the company or the entity, or should it just be, like, mostly for navigation?
Well, I mean, what we have on ours is here's who we are.
Sorry. Here's what we offer you. We don't say here the the kickoff is here's who our audience is.
Here's what we offer you. Here's why you would wanna work with us. Here's a little here's some testimonials for trust elements.
And about Kalicube, about the company itself, there is very little clear information about exactly who and what Kalicube is. But there is a link that says, learn more about us, and you go to that page.
And then it's got all of the information that's factual. It's got the GDPR stuff on it as well, which is very important. That's something that people fail to, or often fail to implement, is transparency.
Being very transparent about who you are, both with your human audience and with the bots, is super, super important.
Is there a difference in in transparency worth, I guess, clarity?
Yeah. Transparency clarity is being clear.
I am Jason Barnard. That's clear. Transparency is I'm Jason Barnard, and oh, I'm trying to think of something I've been transparent about myself.
No. I'm a bad example. I we are CaliCube.
CaliCube is a a digital engineering company. Digital brand engineering company.
That's relatively clear. CaliCube is a company. That's very clear.
CaliCube's email address for GDPR issues is gdpr@calicube.com.
That's transparency. It's saying you can go here. Oh, VAT number is XYZed.
CaliCube's registration number with the state is XYZed. You can contact us.
You can find us. You can verify that we are a real company at all of these different places.
Do you do you have thoughts on whether or not brands should be targeting keywords with the homepage?
Or if the homepage shouldn't exist for targeting a keyword and you should have, like, separate pages for targeting keywords?
Well, I would personally never and have never aimed at keywords with my homepage because the homepage for me is the brand page. Yeah.
For me too. It it should be ranking number one for your brand. The people who land on the page are expecting to see the brand and what it is you offer and why they might wanna work with you.
If your brand happens to be the same thing as the thing you do, so if your company is called
Austin Austin Plumbers.
Yeah. Then you you're gonna you've put yourself in a difficult situation because you've got that conflict between the thing itself and who you are. So that exact match domain thing going on and calling yourself what you are worked back in the day, and it worked really well.
But today, you have the problem of what is the dominant interpretation? So we've now moved on to a different question, which is if you've called yourself barn doors, Google is gonna think the dominant interpretation is actually barn doors and not you.
And in order to become the dominant interpretation and rank number one for your own name, you have to do a huge job like Apple, for example, or Booking.
Or I I found a good one the the other day was windy.
Actually, they're not called what they are. Well, they are it's an application for the weather, and they managed to rank number one for the term windy, which is a huge achievement.
So when you're trying to rank for a generic term, it's now much, much, much more difficult. And my perspective on on naming the company is I named CaliCube a unique name, CaliCube, eleven years ago because I didn't want to compete on the terms that my of my business using the brand name itself.
Yeah. I'm a huge I'm a huge fan of that approach. I I like having actual brands.
I believe that actual brands scale. It's way harder to scale Austin plumbers than it is to scale an actual brand.
Yeah. I would agree. Yeah.
But then Austin plumbers probably doesn't wanna scale significantly outside Austin. They don't then have to call themselves New York plumbers.
That's true. That's true. I mean, you could I I could see a situation where Austin Plumbers could be just the name brand for plumbing in Austin.
But Or it could be it could be somebody called Austin,
and then it could be in San Francisco, at which point you're really getting confusing. That's true. That is also that is also true.
But also, like, if you're such a good marketer that you can scale Austin plumber to Austin plumbers to to be the dominant plumbing company in Austin, then you're going to be like, shoot.
I could've scaled into other cities, and now I can't do it because I have this this brand Austin Plumbers, and it's gonna be hard to scale that into San Francisco.
100%. I know. And then you have to think up another business model.
But, actually, that kinda made me think about ambiguity, which is the biggest problem. So you're asking about kind of the different problems you have is people think, oh, I'll get myself a knowledge panel, which is which is fine. But if your name is Bob Smith, there are an awful lot of Bob Smiths.
And the primary problem that the machines have is disambiguation between you Bob Smith and all of the other Bob Smiths.
And even Jason Barnard, 10,000 Jason Barnards in the world, let's say, How does it know that this Jason Barnard isn't the same Jason Barnard as the circus clown, isn't the same Jason Barnard as the podcast host in The UK, isn't the same Jason Barnard as the ice hockey player in America?
And that's a huge problem because also it has to figure out which facets of this Jason Barnard. So for example, I have a podcast.
So I keep saying podcast, podcast, Jason Barnard, Jason Barnard. How does it know that I'm this Jason Barnard and the other Jason Barnard with his podcast in The UK is a different person?
So and sorry, also, I made cartoons. How does it know that the person who made cartoons isn't somebody else?
So it has to do two things. One, disambiguate everybody, and two, merge the people who have multiple facets, which is all of us.
And that's a huge, huge, huge, huge problem. And you can imagine that if you start thinking about all the people with your name, all the things they've done, all the things you've done, and then you go around the web and you collect all the information, put it all in a me, put it all in your AI and say, make sense of that, mate, Probably won't.
To what extent is it also a click through rate problem? A what sort of problem? A click through rate problem.
Oh, not at all. Zero. No.
If you well, I because, like, what if, like, you have more of a generic name and and there's a more popular one of you and people are clicking on that entity, which shares a similar name to you or the same?
Well,
yeah. Well, the the right there's all always been a debate about to what extent that's, a, true and, b, important.
But with entities, it's actually much more to do with confidence. So there are multiple things going on. The first would be famousness.
If somebody's famous, like Robert Smith of The Cure, it's always gonna show his knowledge panel. He's always gonna be number one.
And as Robert Smith, you would really struggle to beat him. But if we put two people side by side who are more or less the same famousness and both have knowledge panels, it will look for the one that it thinks is most likely to be the person you're looking for.
So that's kind of famousness on a much lower level. So we're looking at notability between two people.
Or, and now in the modern world, where everything is personalized, if it's got Jason Barnard, the circus clown, and Jason Barnard, the digital brand engineer, but the person who's making the search is obviously very interested in circuses, they're gonna show the other guy and not me.
So it's relevancy. And then the third is confidence.
If it's more confident in the information it has about me, it will show me instead of somebody else at equal notability.
Alright. So I said this would be a short episode, and I I wanna I wanna wrap with going back to your new brand.
And and Jason Barnard said, oh my gosh. I can get I can get a knowledge panel in around three months? Like or like, what?
That's crazy. So the top things, again, it's consistent consistency, it's clarity.
And then the platforms. How do you think about the descriptions for each platforms?
Because there's rules for, like, how long each description can be. So you might have different descriptions on on different platforms.
Yep. So we we manage that by having an executive description, executive summary, which is about well, I think it's a 150 words because that fits on Crunchbase.
And Crunchbase for us was the one that we were building on. And all of the others that we've been using are that length or longer, Twitter being an exception, of course.
And then the the longer description that we just append to it when we can. So if on Crunch well, Crunchbase, for example, we put the executive summary, and then lower down, you can put a full description. We just put the full description, which is executive summary plus the rest.
On LinkedIn, you can put the entire thing, so you just put the entire thing. On the org, I think you can put the entire thing. So we've we've done a modular system as well where if you create it with multiple headings and each heading has a paragraph underneath that describes that aspect, that facet, so we're back to facets again, then you just remove the ones that aren't relevant.
So if you're saying something along the lines of we yeah.
Sorry. We love to serve people fluffy unicorns and rainbows, whatever it is. For Crunchbase, I could take that out because it isn't relevant to the Crunchbase audience.
So, if you can create your description with executive summary and multiple chunks with a heading and a paragraph, each of which is distinct, each of which treats a different aspect of your business or your person, then when you go to the platform, you just remove the ones that don't apply to that audience.
And that way, number one, your audience is getting the information that they actually want and need. So you're serving the human audience in the right platform with the right information.
And number two, the AI and Google and Bing see very consistent descriptions all over the web without all of them being completely identical.
To what extent shoot.
Shoot. I was gonna ask something else that you need to do for an entity that
people are making mistakes with. I'll I'll give you I'll give you the biggie. Yeah.
Please. Just it's only the biggie because I've been thinking about it since yesterday. The biggest thing in my life is always what I was thinking about yesterday.
A bit like a kid, I suppose. And it's all about reasoning, is that AI can reason.
So when you're talking to it and you're using your subscription, you'll see it thinking and a lot of people click on the thing and watch it think and it's super interesting. If you haven't done it, do it because it's cool. But what they forget, think, is that at the moment of indexing and the moment of grounding, which are the two principal moments that people focus on right now in the SEO industry, there isn't any reasoning going on.
They're using the cheapest possible LLM. And the cheapest possible LLM is a pretty stupid LLM that simply digests and categorizes and sticks in the in in the index.
So it's not doing any reasoning or think or very little reasoning and thinking. So if your entity description requires it to reason in order to put it in the index or to pull it out for grounding, you've already put yourself at a huge disadvantage.
So you need to do the reasoning for it. You need to say, Jason Barnard is a digital brand engineer and has been doing SEO since 1998. Therefore, he's an SEO expert.
And then it will index that. Whereas if you don't put the therefore, he's an SEO expert, that doesn't get in the index. So it's it's I think the biggest mistake people are making right now is not realizing that the LLMs that are indexing and grounding are not thinking beasts and that you have to do the reasoning for them.
And that's gonna give you a huge advantage straight off the bat across your entire SEO strategy, not just for entity optimization.
You're a local let's say you're an electrician in Miami. How do you write about how do you describe yourself?
Like, what what is your what is your language like to make it most clear?
Well, I mean, the things you need to put in are electrician
in Miami. Brand name. You're you're called you're called Palm Tree Wires.
That's the that's the the brand name. Palm Palm Tree Wires? Yeah.
Palm Tree Wires is is an electrician company in Miami.
Well, exactly. And so because your brand name doesn't say what you do, you have to say what you do. So Pumtree Wires is a elect electrical services company in Miami serving households because you could be industrial scale.
So you need to take who you need to describe who your audience is. Since 2004, give it some history.
Give it a reason to trust you. You've been allowed take this
and you put this across every platform, all the platforms that we mentioned earlier. Is that is that mhmm.
And the the kickoff that you did was a semantic triple.
PalmWires is an electrical company. That's a way better name. That's way better.
Subject verb object. Is is actually a good brand name. Isn't that what you said?
No. I said Palm Tree Wires, which is really dumb, but palm Oh, Palm Tree Wires. They're wires.
Yeah. Palm Wires is great.
We've just named the company. It's getting my memories going. That's great.
So start with a semantic triple. Say the name, what you do, who you serve, potentially where you serve, why they should trust you.
And that's your executive summary. So it's who you are, what you do, who you serve, and should they trust you.
Why should they trust you? I say that all the time who you are, what you do, who you serve, why should they trust you.
If you can get that into the executive summary, you're off to the races. The other thing is that the more you name related entities, the better you will perform.
So Miami is an entity. It's a place.
And it's related to you because you're in Miami and you serve clients in Miami. Households. It's a concept entity, like economics.
So you want to name things that the AI already understands so that it can say, okay, I associate this word with that idea or this.
And it can make sense of what you're what you're talking about. And once again, make that sentence incredibly clear so that when you read it, there is zero ambiguity. Oh, I found something really interesting the other day as well.
Is using a verb that can also be a noun is hugely confusing.
So the word engineers could be a person, multiple people, sorry, several engineers who work on that work working site, or Catacube engineers your brand authority.
And LLMs really struggle with that when they're analyzing, trying to figure out is it a verb, is it being used as a verb, or is it being used as a name? So if you can avoid that, it's not discover did that? How did you find that out?
Oh, there's a tool on katikube.pro where you can analyze text using Google's LLM natural language processing, actually, API.
And I was trying to figure out how to get it to recognize everything in the entire text that I was writing.
And I kept changing words around, just one word to see what would change. And the way it recognizes entities change and the type of entity it was identifying changed. So what it tries to do is figure out which entity it is.
Is it in the knowledge graph? So you can find whether things are in the knowledge graph using this tool as well, which is a lot of fun. What type of entity is it?
Is it a corporation? Is it a work of art? Is it a person?
Whatever.
And tries to see how many mentions it can find in the text, which sounds silly, you realize that if I say Jason Barnard is the CEO and founder of Kelly Cube, Jason Barnard and CEO are the same person.
And it will identify CEO as being the same thing as Jason Barnard. So once you get into it, you end up with this digging down into rabbit holes and doing all this stuff. And the ambiguity of a verb now is huge.
The problem that companies have when they've called themselves what they do, like Car Sales Limited, is that you put a capital letter on cars and a capital letter on sales.
It's already two things that are deeply difficult to understand out of context.
But because the first letter of the sentence is always a capital letter, it will assume it should have been a small letter. So you you lose the capital letter proper noun, and it will take sales to be the proper noun, even when sale car is at the start of the sentence.
So then you have to say, at car sales with a capital a at the beginning, so it knows that car is also a noun. And that, I mean, it's it's a tiny detail. But it's those tiny details that make all the difference.
Because when car sales is my example, it was actually a client I was working on who I can't name. But they have that problem is the first word of their name is a thing is a sorry.
Is a is a is a verb, actually. And because when it was at the start of the sentence, the capital letter was taken to be it should have been a small letter, but it's at the start of the sentence, therefore, it's a capital letter, I had to put at car sales to get it to recognize the the car and the sales as one proper noun.
And capitalization is super important. That's another one.
Another weak spot in everybody is if you pay attention to capitalization, you're going to do really well because a proper noun, Jason Barnard's car sales in this case, is a proper noun.
It's a thing that we can name. That's an entity, and that's what Google's looking for. Car sales with small letters is just something that's happening.
Car cars are being sold. And there's a huge difference between the two.
My other question, to what extent does appearances in other media help get a knowledge panel?
So going on podcasts or or appearing like, answering help a reporter out questions or having articles written about you, things like that.
I like that question because I it just made me think of self declared. So anything self declared has limited ability to survive, let's say.
So you can self declare yourself all the way to a knowledge panel. You can.
Well, it's you can. Just by placing information on Crunchbase, on the org, on on your own website, LinkedIn, on Twitter.
I would call that self declaring your way to a knowledge panel. The problem with that is that it won't be very stable, and it won't be authoritative.
As soon as you get third party proof, other media writing about you, your knowledge panel and the machines understanding you in general will become significantly more stable.
You will have significantly more authority within your industry. So if you don't have any third party press, that doesn't stop you starting on your road to the knowledge panel.
But once you're on your road to the knowledge panel, you do need to need to think about how you're gonna get that third party press. I mean, the one thing is coming on your podcast. And then you write a show note saying, Jason Barnard was on my podcast, and he was ace.
And that's in the show notes. That's third party. I have no control over you.
You're giving me you're vouching for me. And you're vouching, number one, that I exist, and number two, Jason Barnard, the the the Brand SERP guy and digital brand engineer, and that places me as the exact person that we're trying to identify and gives me authority when I say that.
So every time I now say that, because you said it, every time I say it, it becomes a little bit more meaningful.
Yeah. Remember on the last episode, you you said you asked me to describe your brand in a certain way, and we did that in the description. And so so just let me know after how you want me to describe your brand, and I'll give it to chat GPT when I'm writing the description.
Thank you very much. And and that is kind of a a big part of it. I think people are, what's the word, nervous or a little bit uncomfortable, asking for other people to describe them in a particular way.
Asking you to say, I'm the best person in the entire universe, that's one thing. Asking you to say, he's a digital brand engineer, or he claims to be, or he's the Brand SERP guy, is is not such a big ask.
And what I'm trying to achieve there is consistency. And I I did an interesting experiment the other day when I was thinking about to what extent machines reason, and that was all to do with the reasoning thing that I talked about earlier on.
But it was to what extent it can analyse my digital footprint against somebody else's digital footprint when the other person has an incredibly large digital footprint, but it's very badly organized.
Versus my digital footprint, is large and less impressive. I've got less kind of big newspapers talking about me, But it's incredibly well organized.
And both strategies work. I was a bit disappointed in that because I thought, I just want my strategy to work.
But, you know, if you're STING, you don't need Jason Barnard and Kelly Cube to help you. Because there's so much information out there, it would be impossible for me to start to really control it in any meaningful manner.
So, you know, if you want in my opinion personally, and there must be middle ground somewhere, is either you keep it small and keep it under control, or you splurge and you go for the big, big, big play.
And both will work.
My argument for not going for the big play and the splurging is that it's impossible for you to control. It will have a life of its own.
But at least you don't have to look after it. Mean, Sting doesn't need to look after his digital footprint or the AI's opinion of him because he's he's such a huge megastar, and there's so much news about him. Yeah.
I probably should have asked this question earlier on, but just, like, can you describe even the benefits of having a knowledge panel? Like, why is that gonna I mean, it's it's it'll be obvious to a lot of people, but it's, you know, it's one thing, like, thinking about it on your own. It's another thing just like hearing why it's great.
It gets it gets people excited.
Well, the for me, the first one is Google brand SERP, the search engine results for your name is your online .
People are gonna look at that before they look at your website. When they're researching you, they're gonna look at it. And if you have a super impressive knowledge panel, people's initial reaction is they must be important.
They must be authoritative. It's it's very I'll I'll give you actually a story. I was at the Players Club in New York with a with a friend, and we're meeting these people.
And and someone that we were with was like, oh my god. Edward is an influencer. Like, stop it.
Stop it. They're like, Edward is this Edward is this person on Instagram and YouTube. And and so then there was someone in the party that we were meeting, and she opened up her phone and googled my name.
And there was that knowledge panel right there, and she was like and it was me with, like, a microphone, and she's like, oh, wow. And it's but but you you are right. It's like when you have a knowledge panel, it's credit you know, it used to be just appearing on Google would give you credibility, but now it's like you have a knowledge panel and you really appear a lot more credible.
Yep. A 100%. So it's the Google business card, and it it it gets people over the line when they're trying to decide if they're gonna engage with you or not.
I've always argued for that ever since I started this in 2012. I actually started this because somebody googled my name. That I went into a meeting,
knocked it out of the park. They said, yeah. We're definitely gonna work with you.
This is great. This is great. Yeah.
We'll set it all up. And I walked
from their office to the train station, got on the train, and they sent me an email saying, oh, we've decided not to work with you after all. And I asked them why.
And they said, because when we searched your name, it said Jason Barnard is a voice over artist for a cartoon Blue Dog. And it had my previous career as a a cartoon maker and a voice over artist. And they said, we don't wanna work with a cartoon maker, you know.
And that was a $100,000 down the drain. And I can't imagine how many other people had done it, and they just happened to tell me why they had chosen not to work with me.
So, it stops leakage. Leakage at the bottom of the funnel is your biggest enemy, I would argue.
You've done all the work to get them there, then you leak. You should never be leaking and the Knowledge Panel will help to stop that. Another thing is ego.
It makes you feel good about yourself. Why not? But the other is actually moving into the AI universe with ChatGPT, Google AI Mo, Gemini, is that the knowledge panel represents or demonstrates that the AI can understand you, does understand you, is confident in the understanding, which will generally mean that the answers it gives when somebody asks about you in chat GPT are going to be much, much more accurate, much more stable, and I would argue stability is incredibly important.
People don't really realize it. As you see one answer, you think that must be the answer for everybody. Maybe it isn't.
Maybe it's different for multiple different people in different circumstances. So, it will give you a better answer, a more stable answer, a more positive answer.
It will treat you as more authoritative. It will present you rather as more authoritative. And then the last thing that I wanted to add here is the AI resume rabbit hole.
AI resume is the equivalent of the brand SERP. And the thing about AI is it will encourage you to have a conversation.
So when that person somebody looks me up on Google, they just see the the knowledge bound. They go, he's great. That's it.
Decision made. Very visual. We're very visual beings.
If somebody asks AI mode or chat GPT, it's going to suggest to them follow-up questions. It's going to give them more information and say, would you like to know more about ABC?
And so then you go down what I would call a , and you need to make sure that due diligence rabbit hole represents you as you would want all the way down whatever anybody asks.
Because whereas Google is your business card worked up until a few years ago, now your AI resume is what ChatGPT, Google, and the others say about you, and people are gonna dig down.
People are gonna go down that due diligence rabbit hole. And taking control of that is significantly more difficult than just taking control of a brand cert, and the knowledge panel is a sign that you are in a position with your entity home to take control.
I did I did something interesting, and I searched a bunch of brand names just now. And so this is crazy. Salesforce doesn't have a knowledge panel.
HubSpot does have a knowledge panel. Moz does not have a knowledge panel.
Ahrefs has one. Canva has one. Uniqlo has one.
Descript, which we're recording this on and which I edit with, does not have one. But I was really surprised that Salesforce and Moz don't have knowledge panels.
Well, actually, sorry to correct you.
No. It's okay.
I've done the same search, and the knowledge panel does not appear for malls where I am. I agree. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a knowledge panel.
It just means that Google isn't showing it. Yeah.
So I I mean, if I if I So why why why yeah. But that's that's what I wanted. Why might why might you not see the knowledge panel for a company like Salesforce?
Well, normally speaking, I would have expected it to have appeared.
I would expect Do you see it? Do
you see it if you do a search? I haven't looked at Salesforce. I was actually looking for the knowledge panel for our friends at Mozz.
There we go. You have it from us? Yeah.
No. But you have to find the KGM ID. So I'm I'm just doing I'm just doing a typical a typical Google search as a So what what Google does when you do that search is it it tries to figure out what a great result would look like for you, the user.
And one of the options is videos. Another option is images. Another option is news.
Another option is Twitter feed. And one option is knowledge panel. And just like all of the others, it can decide not to put it.
So not seeing a knowledge panel when you search somebody's name does not mean to say they don't have the knowledge panel. And I've just pasted the link there so you can go and have a look at it for Moz. And there's a there's a tool on Kadikube Pro that allows you to search in Google's knowledge graph and see if the knowledge panel exists or not in its little brain whether or not it shows you.
There you go. That's the link. Yeah.
Yeah.
That's interesting because, like, with with Ahrefs, the knowledge panel was showing in the right hand side. Same with Canva and with Uniqlo.
And then there was that was not happening, And with HubSpot, but that was not happening with it was not happening with Salesforce and Moz, and then there was just all this empty real estate on the right hand side. There's Yeah.
Nothing there. Whereas, like, with HubSpot, for example, there's just a big knowledge panel. So I'm just like, I'm wondering why.
Well, well, if you look at the the knowledge panel I just sent you from Moz Yeah. I saw I saw that, but you have you have No. No.
So I was about to say, it's not very interesting. It doesn't have very many elements. So Mm-mm.
One thing there is is that the knowledge panel isn't big enough, and it doesn't think that the information is sufficiently important or sufficient adds sufficient value to waste everybody's time with the knowledge panel. Another, and I would take that as a guess here, is it's not confident enough that Moz means the company Moz.
So although they're ranking number one, it's saying, well, I'm not a 100% sure that that's actually what the person meant. I don't want to overwhelm them. And another might be that there's an update going on because there are knowledge graph updates and knowledge panel updates, which are apart from the BlueLinx updates.
And that now makes me think from what you said because you've got Salesforce as well in there. There might be something going on in the background, and we've got the data at CaliCube, and I'm gonna be going looking at that later on to see if today, the August 26, there's something going on in the knowledge graph update world.
Wonder. Alright. This is my last question for the fifteen to thirty minute episode that I pitched you on LinkedIn when I when I sent you a message and said, let's do a fifteen to thirty minute episode.
Dude, it's just it's fun to I like, I love SEO. That's why I do this show, and and this is a fun topic. Last question.
How can somebody use kalikube.pro to get a knowledge panel in three months?
Well, number one, first thing I'll do is listen to this episode and do the things I told you. Number two is use the text analyte copywriting sandbox to see if it will recognize the entity so you can build your taxes better.
So as as you write them, you put them in, and it will analyze them and tell you which entities and which things Google has managed to recognize, which you then just keep rewriting it until it recognizes the things and the words that you want with your name, your company name, right at the top when you're writing the entity description.
You can then track using the Knowledge Graph Explorer that I just sent you, searching the name to see at what point it actually appears there and what confidence score you have. There's a confidence score in the Knowledge Graph, which is interesting to look at.
You can generate free schema markup, very simple for people and for corporations. So there's a tool for that on kadikube.pro.
And you can look in the trusted sources list. We share the trusted sources, the sources that are trusted for the knowledge graph. So it's nothing to do with domain authority.
It's which sources does Google's knowledge graph use primarily or which ones did its trust for filling up the knowledge graph.
And you can look through those, and if you can get a profile on one of those, that's gonna help you. But start with the ones I've already named. Muckrack for people is great if you're writing articles.
Muckrack is very powerful. Theorg.com for people and for corporations.
Crunchbase for people and for corporations. Start with the obvious stuff. Go to that powerful authoritative domains list that we've got on Kalicube.
Use the copywriting sandbox to write the best possible text to make sure it's fully understood what's going on. Set up your empty home. Put the text on there.
Correct all of your profiles, correct every page you can, link from the Entity Home out to those. If you add schema to the Entity Home, that's helpful, but it is not necessary.
You don't have to freak out if you haven't got schema markup. Schema markup is supporting evidence. It isn't the be all and end all that a lot of people believe.
We had one client who just refused schema markup, but he got a knowledge panel anyway. So using the schema markup generator on Kalicube, it's very simplistic.
It's the simplest possible schema, but it's the most solid. So, I would suggest you do that. You can add all of your same as, pop it into your page.
Oh, and by the way, with schema markup in WordPress, you can paste it into an HTML block in the middle of the page, and it will not render to people, but the machine will read it.
So you don't even need a fancy plugin to do it.
Jason, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.
It was delightful. Thank you very much. It was great.
Alright.
This is episode 1,149 of the podcast, one thousand one hundred forty nine days in a row.
Yo. One thousand one hundred forty nine days in a row doing this show. Let's go.
If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow.
Bye now. Yeah.
You're one of the coolest people I know now. Oh, come on. The way you speak, how cool and calm you are, and one thousand one hundred and however many days it was, hats off to you, my friend.
Thank you, Jason.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Edward Sturm frames the whole episode as a fifteen-to-thirty-minute lightning round, then Jason Barnard immediately undercuts the premise: getting a Knowledge Panel isn't a technical hack, it's a discipline of being clear, staying consistent, and linking out to prove it.
How they asked for the click.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
