Entity SEO Secrets 2026 – Branding Optimization Strategies (James Dooley Interviews Jason Barnard)

James Dooley: entity SEO secrets in 2026. There's no one better to be speaking to than Jason Barnard when it comes down to branding and entity SEO. So Jason, you've been optimising the algorithms for the last 27 years since 1998. I think that was before I was born. And after all that time, what do you know most SEOs haven't figured out yet?

Jason Barnard: brand. And I was thinking about it the other day. I've been working in SEO 1998, the year Google was incorporated. So I've grown up with Google and I've been through all the ups and the not very many downs that Google have had. And very early on in my career I bet on Google. There were loads of different engines like Excite or Magellan or HotBot. There were dozens of them and I ended up thinking, okay, I can't work on all of them because they all have different rules. I'll focus on Google. And was it a lucky bet or a smart guess? Don't know. But it worked. I ended up with a billion page views for a kid site for kids in one year, 2007. And one fifth of that came from Google. And why I'm saying that is because we got 800,000 from elsewhere because I built such a strong brand. It was a kids site with two characters, Boowa and Koala. And we got immense amounts of traffic from people recommending us, from listicles, from schools, and from Google. And it was a really lovely flywheel. And what happened, even though Google wasn't smart at the time, there was a circle and a cycle that was self elevating, if I may use an AI kind of word, which is a horrible word that I keep now using. Google would send us traffic. That traffic would convert. They would stick around. They would recommend us. That sent us more traffic. And it just went up and up and up. Looking back I'm thinking actually the whole thing was brand. Google kicked off our fame, but that billion page views came from brand and only a fifth of it at the end of the day was from Google, whereas at the beginning 90% came from Google. I think that's a really big lesson.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And something that I wanted to touch on is frameworks because I think frameworks becomes very important, especially for what you're doing and who you're doing it for. And you always tell me that you've got a framework that you use for every single client. You do a lot of branding. You do a lot of knowledge graph optimisation, entity optimisation and stuff like that. So can you walk us through this framework that you say that you use for every client?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And the framework is completely about brand. So it's called understandability, credibility, deliverability. I call it the Kalicube process. Understandability. Does the machine understand who your brand is, who it serves, and indeed what you offer. Credibility. Are you the most credible authoritative brand in your market. Deliverability. Does the machine have the understanding and the confidence in your credibility to deliver you to the subset of their users who are your audience? So the Kalicube process, understandability, credibility, deliverability. Understandability at the end of the day is the bottom of the funnel. Branded search. People are about to convert. Credibility, middle of the funnel. People who are comparing you to the competition. Can you beat the competition by being seen and accepted as the most credible, authoritative, best solution to the problem the person is trying to solve? Deliverability at the top of the funnel. Does the machine introduce you to the conversation at the top of the funnel when the person hasn't started asking about brands or comparative brands. They're just researching the topic. So it's universal. I invented it in 2019. It finally crystallised. It was after a conversation with Gary Illyes that I got the last piece to the puzzle which was deliverability. I'd already got understandability, credibility, and I do everything in threes. I was looking for that final piece and Gary Illyes didn't tell me it, he inspired it by telling me how the algorithms worked and that gave me the final piece. The Kalicube process turns out, because it's founded on brand, that it is universal and applies to any person, any company, any product, any service, any music group, any music album, any film, any entity. Understandability, credibility, deliverability always works.

James Dooley: So with regards to the Kalicube process framework then, how can you measure the brand is understood? This is the big bit where there's certain things that can be tracked and certain things that can be measured. How can the Kalicube process framework be measured?

Jason Barnard: For years I was looking at the knowledge graph from Google. If you're in the knowledge graph it's understood who you are. Full stop. Now obviously we've got the other machines, much more difficult to measure it. But at Kalicube we've got 25 billion data points sitting in a database that I've collected since 2015 from Google's knowledge graph. Now from Google's enterprise knowledge graph, from branded search results specifically, which allow us to look into Google's little brain because branded results allow us to understand whether Google has understood. And now I'm applying that exact same strategy to ChatGPT, to Perplexity, to Copilot. Does the answer that they give to your name, who is James Dooley, demonstrate fundamental solid understanding, yes or no. And I'm not guessing because I've got 10 years of data from Google to compare their brand SERPs and now their Gemini results to the AI, we call them now the AI, the brand SERP in the AI era. So I can actually create a very accurate and meaningful measurement of does the machine understand you by using the current results and mapping them to the brand SERP results that we still collect from Google.

James Dooley: Yeah. But when we're talking about entities and branding, what's the difference between a brand or an entity being found and then a brand being recommended?

Jason Barnard: Well, being found, somebody sees you. And I would argue, and there's a lot of talk today about citations in AI, and that's my big win. I've been cited by AI and that's being seen in the AI, which is brilliant. So the person has asked a question of ChatGPT. ChatGPT has used one of your links within the citations that it's provided. That's a win. But it isn't recommending you. The recommendation is when the person says, when push comes to shove, who do you recommend? The answer has to be you. When I compare supplier A to supplier B, it has to pick supplier A, you, every single time. So being seen in that particular instance, supplier B has been seen, discovered, but it's not being recommended.

James Dooley: Yeah, that makes sense. So if someone's watching this now, what's one key takeaway that they can do tomorrow? What would that be?

Jason Barnard: I always start at the bottom of the funnel with the brand, with does it understand you. Does AI understand you? Does ChatGPT understand you? Does it understand you with confidence? Does it understand you in detail? Jono Alderson talks a lot about all the detail you need to get into this machine's brain. So the first thing to do is look at your entity home web page, the about page on your website. Make sure it's clear. Make sure you've explained exactly who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you're credible. But also then expand that thought out and say, I'm going to focus on my entity home website. Every page of your website is an educational opportunity for you to push your brand story, your offers, your credibility into the brains of the machine. You need to optimise your website from top to bottom as an educational resource for the AI and looking at it from the perspective of saying I'm educating the AI with the aim that the AI will recommend me to the subset of its users who are my audience. So the AI is simply a conduit to the people I'm trying to reach.

James Dooley: And when you're talking about these funnels, there's lots of different funnels like AIDA and all the rest of it, but everything you seem to have coined your own branded funnel with understandability, credibility, deliverability, UCD. Then there's some that's CUD and stuff like that. Can you go through that funnel of UCD and CUD for credibility, understandability, and deliverability?

Jason Barnard: Yeah, you should mention the AIDA and other marketing frameworks. I've been analysing that for the last couple of years now because I don't know all of these frameworks. So what I've done is sat down with ChatGPT. I've got a ChatGPT AI assistant and a Google Gemini AI assistant and I use them both. And I've asked them how do they contradict or conflict with the Kalicube process, understandability, credibility, deliverability, seeing that as bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel, top of the funnel. And in every single case from ChatGPT and from Gemini it's it doesn't conflict. The Kalicube process adds value to each of these frameworks. So if you go to Kalicube.com there's a whole set of articles that tell you how you can continue using those frameworks and add the Kalicube process as a beneficial addition to that process, to that framework.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure. So anyone who's watching this with regards to entity and branding SEO, there's a whole playlist that I'm doing with Jason. There's 10 different episodes. Make sure you check out the link in the description where we dig deeper into certain other topics all related to branding and entity SEO in 2026. Jason, it's been a pleasure.

Jason Barnard: Thanks, James. Delightful.