Part of GEOly's "GEO / AEO Expert Watch" series — meet Jason Barnard, a quick map of their public work and where to follow them, with links to the original sources.
Who is Jason Barnard
Early AEO thinker focused on how search and AI systems understand entities, brands, and knowledge graphs.
These experts put the entity at the center: AI is not matching keywords, it is understanding "who you are, what you relate to, and whether you can be trusted." Knowledge graphs, structured data and entity disambiguation are their shared language. Their recurring focus areas include: AEO, entities, knowledge panels, AI brand understanding.
What GEO / AEO practitioners can learn from Jason Barnard
- Become a clear entity first: keep brand, product and people consistent across Wikidata, your site and third-party sources so AI can merge scattered mentions into one "you."
- Feed the graph with structured data: Schema.org, sameAs and explicit relationships help engines place you in the right knowledge neighborhood.
- Fact density beats rhetoric: verifiable facts, numbers and relationships are recited by AI far more readily than flourish.
GEOly angle: Foundational guide: entity optimization as the bridge from SEO to AEO.
What it means for brands going global
A hidden loss for global-facing brands is being split by AI into several fuzzy entities. Aligning names, categories and facts across your site, overseas socials, third-party directories and encyclopedic entries — so AI is sure "this is one trustworthy brand" — is where AEO begins.
Want to see how your own brand shows up across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers — and how you stack up against competitors? That is exactly what GEOly's brand GEO audit measures: citations, share of mentions and answer share, tracked over time.
Watch & listen
Prefer video or audio? Follow Jason Barnard's talks and conversations here.
