James Dooley: knowledge panel creation and why it takes time for you to trigger a knowledge panel. Today I'm joined with Jason Barnard from Calube. So the question is Jason Barnard, you've created tens of thousands of knowledge panels over the years. When someone promises a knowledge panel in six weeks guaranteed, what do they not understand? Jason Barnard: Well, six weeks guaranteed definitely possible. definitely doable. Absolutely no problem at all about that. Um what they're missing is how meaningful the knowledge panel is. So a knowledge panel created in six weeks is going to be superficial. It's not a deep understanding of who you are, what you do, and who you serve. It's not a demonstration in the machines of your authority. What it does do is give that superficial impression to human beings that the machines love you. So there's a huge difference here between the superficial presentation of to your users which is absolutely worth having and the idea that that superficial presentation to your audience or to the people necessarily means that the machine trusts you and sees you as authoritative. It doesn't. James Dooley: Yes. So it's almost just like having a brand new domain, but you've got no content and no back links to start with. So it's not ranking anywhere and seeing anywhere. Jason Barnard: Yeah. So it would appear when somebody searches your name and and that's kind of I think a lot of people think, oh, that's my job done. But the real value of a knowledge panel is the understanding that it represents in the mind of the machines and that's what's going to give you the competitive advantage across the board in Google and across AI. So for some basic level questions, what actually needs to happen for Google to give someone a knowledge panel? Jason Barnard: You can get knowledge panels in a lot of different ways. So uh the the the the classic one is publishing a book. If you publish a book and put it on Google books, you will get a knowledge panel. The knowledge panel is a 100% dependent on that Google book. You can see there immediately Google books is an isolated aspect of Google. It doesn't affect the rest of the algorithms. So that's your superficiality right there. You can also get a knowledge panel by publishing on uh Wikipedia for example that's going to trigger you a knowledge panel. It used to be 100% of the time and interestingly now it isn't even 100% of the time but generally speaking you will get one. That's a very powerful tool and if you can get a Wikipedia page, if you deserve a Wikipedia page, go for it. But Wikipedia is tiny. 6 million articles, six million people and companies and films and what have you. Cali Cube has got 70 million. Calcube is over 10 times bigger than Wikipedia already. And Google's knowledge graph is 54 billion. That's 10,000 times bigger. Wikipedia represents 0.01% 01% of Google's knowledge graph. So getting the knowledge panel that you need in order to build a wider strategy means getting into the actual heart of the beast. And outside of Wikipedia, that huge chunk is all about having a consistent brand presence across the internet. Um, I've kind of gone a bit off topic there just in the sense that I've gone away from triggering a knowledge panel, but I wanted to emphasize that the depth of knowledge Google needs about you to make that knowledge panel valuable is a very different thing from the superficiality of the knowledge panel existing. James Dooley: So on there then there's a lot of people now that's popping up left right and center on Fiverr on legit on um freelancers kind of websites and there's people on Facebook and direct messaging you I can trigger you a knowledge panel for £10,000 I can trigger you a knowledge panel and there all these different price ranges that come back. Are you saying that the goal shouldn't be to trigger a KGM ID and trigger a knowledge panel? It's got to be something bigger than that. Jason Barnard: It It doesn't have to be. It depends what your ambition is. If your ambition is just that people think you look great when they Google your name, you're off to the races with a knowledge panel of any sort. The danger is it might disappear any time. And our friend Craig Campbell had a problem with that. And he had a problem mainly because his name is so ambiguous. There are so many Craig Campbell and there's a famous country singer. Uh and also because he went for a lot of these shortcuts. And one of the problems that he ran into, and I'm sorry Craig Campbell, if you're watching this and you find this terribly uh insulting, but knowing Craig Campbell, he's perfectly happy. I actually did a podcast episode even about this, is that every time you get a knowledge panel and lose it, the next one is progressively more difficult to get. It's like if you taught a child something, the child thinks, "Oh, I've understood that at a superficial level." And then you say, "Well, actually, that's not true." And then you try and teach it again and it says, "Well, I you caught me out once. You're not going to c catch me out twice." James Dooley: Yeah. Jason Barnard: Um, and Wikipedia Wikid data are very problematic for that. If you get a Wikipedia page and it gets deleted by the editors, you're in a significantly worse situation than you were before because Wikipedia is such a powerful source. So, it's a two-edged sword. It will get you the knowledge panel, but if it's deleted by the admins, the admins are effectively saying that's not true. and Google is then going to struggle to believe whatever you tell it when you try and tell it that same thing again. Same thing with wiki data. Don't don't play with fire is my advice with that. Create them when you deserve them when you um when you have the credentials to get them. And wiki data the the bar for that is much lower. So that's a better target for you to aim at. um and creating a knowledge panel for £6,000, £700, whatever it might be, ask yourself the question, how much is it going to cost me to maintain it? James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, let let's move on to LLMs and AI. So, chat GBT and perplexity and stuff like that. How does generating a knowledge panel help you to get recommended by chat GBT or perplexity? Jason Barnard: The knowledge panel in and of itself is Google. So directly it doesn't affect anything but the work you do to get a knowledge panel as I would say the right way also educates the machines because they all use the same data source the web they're all looking at your digital footprint. So if we come back to why why would I not go with the 700 pound guaranteed knowledge panel in six weeks the answer is because it won't have any real effect on the AI. The AI is looking at the bigger picture. Google's algorithms are looking at the bigger picture. So that Google knowledge panel is just going to serve that one purpose. AI needs consistency and corroboration over time and over space. So that means across the web you need to be consistent. You need to be corroborated and over time that maintenance that I talked about earlier on needs to be there. So you've got to differentiate in my opinion between having a knowledge panel appear in AI appearing in the citations and being part of the answer when the AI is recommending. James Dooley: So the biggest difference or what you would you say is the biggest difference for people that are going out buying KGM IDs and laying it sit or knowledge panel laying it sit versus the caliq process and how you're doing it with regards to strengthening up the knowledge graph score and making it it optimized and being recommended by the AIS. What's the biggest difference that people can understand and go, "Oh, okay. I can see the benefits of spending that little bit more to make long-term I'm getting both recommended in the AIS and stuff like that." Like what what's the other key benefits? Jason Barnard: You can build a strategy on a well-built knowledge panel. And the other thing is to build a knowledge panel that is strong and stable and reliable, you have to optimize your entire digital footprint. And by optimizing your entire digital footprint, you're actually improving all of your digital channels because you have to go to YouTube and make that better. You have to go to LinkedIn and make that better. You have to go to Crunchbase. You have to go to IMDb. They have to go to every single website, including your own, and make it absolutely consistent. Make it absolutely the message you're trying to get across to your audience. So, you're building the knowledge panel by improving every single place where you're standing, where your audience is looking. So that that classic business thing, stand where your audience is looking, demonstrate to them to them that you have the right solution for them and that you're credible and then invite them down the funnel. Yeah. If you do that across your entire digital footprint, number one, you get more clients from the channels you already have and number two, you build an incredibly solid reliable knowledge panel and you've got a strategy in place that you can then build on. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And so we asked this on knowledge panel creation with the kind of question is how long does it take and I'm presuming that you would say that to from scratch you might need realistically I would say myself I would say 12 months of working to build up that corroboration and to strengthen it and that's I'm on about for a proper knowledge p I'm not on about the ones that you can go and buy a KGM ID for a few hundred quid and that's it done and it's not being seen even when you're searching in, right? But what happens with regards to if someone is looking and they want a faster knowledge panel and let's say that they do have a lot of existing credible sources, could that be done when they've got already digital PR, when they've already got lots of mentions online, they've already got multiple businesses that they're attached to and stuff like who they founded. Could that then be done faster? And then what kind of timeline would you be saying? One month, two month, three month, like what kind of timelines are you looking at for knowledge panels? Jason Barnard: Right. Well, it's a really good point. If you've got a lot of authority signals that make a lot of sense, an article in the BBC, let's say, um, you've got credentials from a university that has a page about you that confirms that you have those credentials, it's going to be significantly easier for you to get a knowledge panel and faster. If you own companies that already have knowledge panels, that's going to be faster. So, if you start thinking about this from a perspective of relationships, we've talked a lot about that throughout this series. The closer, the stronger, the longer the relationship, the more the algorithms are going to be able to hook on to you, the easier it's going to be to build that knowledge panel in the first place and build it out indeed. So, if you own a company that has a knowledge panel that has been around for a while, you're going to get a knowledge panel faster and it's going to grow into a big beautiful knowledge panel faster. If you have those true real authoritative uh signals out there, it's going to be faster from authoritative sources. It's going to be faster and it's going to grow faster, too. So as you said a year for a normal human being, the more famous you are, the more authority signals you can present, the more existing entities within the knowledge graph you can attach yourself to, the shorter the timeline. But to get a really good solid knowledge panel, there is an incompressible aspect to it, which is the information needs to get into the knowledge script. Sorry, you need to join all the dots, clean it all up, optimize it all. You need the bots need to crawl it, stick it in the index, and then the algorithms need to pick it up and then add it to the data set within the knowledge graph. And as you can imagine with that um optimize, crawl, index, uh select and integrate the timeline isn't six weeks to the cur the heart of the knowledge graph. The timeline is 3 months, six months to get something that's reasonable, even if you're very famous. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. So, mind you, if you're already famous, you'd already have a knowledge panel. That's a silly comment I just made. Jason Barnard: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. James Dooley: Anyone who's watching this with regards to knowledge graph and knowledge panel creation, this is part eight in 11 part series where I'm interviewing Jason Barnard with everything related to knowledge graph optimization. It could be for solopreneurs, it could be for entrepreneurs, high net worth individuals, for businesses. I'm digging deep on the entity home. There's lots of different series and different episodes within the playlist. So, make sure you check out the link in the description. But this is all about knowledge panel creation and how long it takes to trigger a KGM ID. And Jason Barnard's dug deeper into it's not just about getting that KGM ID, but building that confidence and clarity online to start becoming recommended both on Google and also the LLMs. Jason Barnard, it's been an absolute pleasure. Jason Barnard: Thanks, James Dooley.