Brand Entity SEO Explained for High Net Worth Individuals (James Dooley Interviews Jason Barnard)

James Dooley: Brand entity SEO in 2026 for high net worth individuals. Now, I’m going to like this episode because it’s a little bit different to just trying to elevate as much knowledge and as much exposure as what you can get. Some people want privacy. Some people want the exposure. They want the thing, but then there’s others that don’t. And anything they want to keep try and keep a low profile. So Jason, you’ve worked with a lot of premium brands and many people have been very successful and they’ve got the exposure and they’ve got the visibility.

Jason Barnard: Yeah.

James Dooley: But they need the right visibility. Why do you think people still come to you when they’ve where they’re already massively successful and got high net worth?

Jason Barnard: It’s a great question. We’ve had a few clients over the years who come to us saying, “I’ve got the money and I’m out there and I’m getting too famous.” And I don’t want that. What I want is that when the right people are looking for me, they find exactly the information I want them to find. And I don’t want people finding me. I don’t want just anybody finding me. So what I want is purely control. I want to control what the AI and Google are saying about me when the people I care about are finding me. So this will be sculpting. So when we come in, we will say, okay, where do we want to start the funnel? And that’s often going to be in the middle and not at the top. So they’re not looking for awareness. They’re looking for the consideration. But they’re looking for consideration only for exactly the right people. Then the people come to the bottom of the funnel and they want to stop the leakage at the bottom of the funnel when it’s the right person and increase the leakage when it’s the wrong person. So what we end up trying to do, or what we end up doing, is ensuring that Google and AI from the middle of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel are very clear in their minds who they should be presenting this person to. And at the bottom of the funnel that they should be incredibly clear and precise about what they’re saying and that the person they give the perfect click to that we talked about in another episode is not, “I want the perfect click for absolutely anybody.” I want the perfect click for the perfect client who I actually want to talk to.

James Dooley: Yeah. So obviously with regards to high net worth individuals, there’s an acronym for it, HNI, for high net worth individual, and you’re talking there about privacy, right? But and you can try to sort that out with brand entity SEO and the knowledge graph and the schema and the entity home of who you are and what you do. If anyone’s watching this and you don’t understand some of what I’ve just said, check out the other episodes in the playlist. But surely there’s going to be some sort of conflicts from how you’ve managed to get the entity home and the knowledge graph and the stuff in Google to what the LLMs are saying if they’re picking up that this high net worth individual has just spent 100,000 pound in a nightclub on a night out and he wants to try and sink that a little bit. How do you look at the conflict? It’s almost like online reputation management for AI specifically. How do you stop it and sort the privacy on the LLMs?

Jason Barnard: Right. Well, the first thing we do with a client like this is sit down with them with the facts that the AI already have. So, we do due diligence on them using AI and we present it to them and say, “What do you want to minimise? What do you want to deemphasise?” They give us a list of the things they don’t want the AI to know or they don’t want the AI to say rather. Sorry, that was a misspeak. And in addition, anything else that they have that the AI doesn’t currently know that they don’t want it to know. And then we set about deemphasising in the mind of the machine. So we can’t make the machine forget. It will always know what it knows. What we can do is convince the machine that that particular piece of information, the night out with lots of money spent, is unimportant, is irrelevant. I can’t speak about the people we work with, but I’ll give you an example. I was a voiceover artist for a cartoon, Blue Dog. I’m proud of it, but it’s not helpful to my career. But it dominated for years my entire personal brand. What I did, I didn’t deny that I was the Blue Dog. I simply explained, educated the algorithms so that they understood that it isn’t an important part of my life today and that somebody searching my name isn’t going to be interested in that. So it’s a question of changing the priorities in the mind of the machine.

James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah. Then with regards to high net worth individuals, like sometimes you’re saying if anything they want less exposure, where an entrepreneur or a business owner, where we’ve done episodes in this playlist on a lot of the time they’re wanting more exposure, more brand exposure, top of the funnel, this is who I am, this is what I do, come to me and then obviously they can funnel them down and try and sell them a service. But with the high net worth individuals, they always seem to come through not only for the privacy part, but also they seem to come through and they want to make certain the legacy that they’re leaving behind becomes very important. So can you speak about how entity and branding SEO and online reputation management for high net worth individuals is very important for legacy?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. The thing is as I just said, machines remember. So your legacy is going to be defined by the machines because the machines are going to be more and more omnipresent. They remember and we can fix into their brains the description of you that you want as your legacy. And I think when you’ve made a big impact on the world and somebody who has a lot of money has made an impact on the world of a reasonably significant nature, being sure in your own mind that your legacy will be positive and will represent the things that you feel were important about what you brought to society is phenomenally important. Related to that, there’s an interesting story that one of our clients told me. He said, “I’m on a plane in first class having a chat with the person next to me. I don’t need to boast. I don’t need to name drop. I don’t need to add all these pieces of information that make me look good because I know the person will get off the plane, ask ChatGPT, ask Google AI Mode, and ChatGPT and Google AI Mode are going to do the boast thing for me.”

James Dooley: Yeah, that’s true. It’s true. So on there, right, when you’re talking about this and we’re speaking about legacy and what we’re leaving behind and stuff like that and reputation that’s coming along, like you just said there, you’re knowing that the AI, the LLMs and Google are going to say how amazing you are because that’s how you have managed to sort that narrative out. But there’s a term that you’ve used and it’s called the authorised biographer, right? So with regards to AI what do you mean? What do you mean when you say the authorised biographer?

Jason Barnard: Well, AI is going to be your biographer whether you like it or not. It’s going to be your biographer today in real time. It’s going to be your biographer when you have a career pivot and it’s going to be a biographer when you die. You want to make it an authorised biographer. So, when we have these famous people have books written about them, sometimes it’s an authorised biography, sometimes it’s unauthorised. The unauthorised biographies tend to bring up all the stuff you don’t want. They dig up the dirt because it sells books. The authorised biographer, you get to define what’s going to be in that biography. You want to make the AI your authorised biographer. They say what you want them to say.

James Dooley: Yeah, I can understand that. And with regards to high net worth individuals, they’ve obviously got complex portfolio. They probably got investment. They might have been investing in a football team. They could have lots of so many different things going on. They could be a philanthropist now and stuff like that. They could be helping other people out, involved with multiple businesses. Some businesses might have gone bored. How does AI and how do you manage to deal with the complexities of a high net worth individual?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And you said the word complexities and it is complex because you’re trying to change the way the machine perceives the person. And you mentioned philanthropy. We have a client who says I want to be recognised as a philanthropist because that’s where I feel comfortable about my contribution to society rather than the money I made with company A’s, B and C. And what we need to do is emphasise that aspect. And it’s a really tricky problem because it’s difficult to talk about your own philanthropy. I can’t even say the word. Because the first thing they’re going to say is I can’t say on my own website, look at what I did for the pandas. Look at what I did for the children in Africa. Look at what I did to support young business people in New York’s underprivileged areas. So that’s the really difficult trick that we can pull off is getting these machines to boast about you without you having to boast about yourself, which comes back to the aeroplane conversation but more complex. So they have multiple facets and some of those facets are going to be much stronger than others and we need to develop a strategy to deemphasise the things that we don’t want pushed to the fore and emphasise the ones that do. We have the platform Caliq Pro, which we actually haven’t talked about during this series, 25 billion data points, but also algorithms and smart AI assistants that will write the content that will ensure that the other machines understand the perspective we’re communicating to them. And it’s important to bear in mind that it’s not one piece of content. It’s not the description that you write about yourself that will change its perspective. It’s the consistency of that perspective subtly inserted into every single piece of content you produce. And hopefully, if you can get that influence, the content that other people produce that you can influence.

James Dooley: Yeah. And I want to round off with one last question. Right. So this episode is about brand entity SEO for high net worth individuals. Normally if you’re doing it for an entrepreneur or a business owner, normally it’s to do with more volume. I want more exposure and stuff like that. How do you track or how does your client come back with feeling like they’ve won and that you’ve done what you wanted to do? The question is like for a high net worth individual looking for entity SEO, when do you know they’ve won?

Jason Barnard: When the AI is their authorised biographer and it’s not just ChatGPT, it’s all of them. So that’s absolutely key. You can’t have a different strategy for each of the AI because there are so many of them. And once again, they all work the same way with the algorithmic trinity. It’s your digital footprint that will define what they say about you. How well you organise your digital footprint will define whether they say what you want or not. And that is the key. When they’re all singing from the same song book, you’ve won the game. And a really quick example for me personally, I’ve been working on this for so long now that it’s a shoe-in every single time a new AI comes out. So, I’ll give you the example of DeepSeek. DeepSeek came out, downloaded to my phone, asked it who Jason Barnard was, it answered perfectly as my authorised biographer. That’s where we want to get our high net worth individual clients to. In fact, it’s where we’re going to get all our clients to.

James Dooley: That’s brilliant. So, we hope you like this episode. It’s one episode of 11 in the playlist. So the episode title is high net worth individuals, entity SEO and branding in 2026. Jason, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Jason Barnard: Thanks, J.