AI Visibility Podcast with Jason T Wade of BackTier

The AI Trust Stack: From Visibility to Revenue

BackTier | AI Visibility

In this episode, Jason T Wade is joined by Devon Vocke, Awais Haq, Tom Gersic, and Babak Akhlaghi to explore what happens after a company begins pursuing visibility, trust, and operational effectiveness in the AI era.

Devon explains how traditional search is expanding into LLM discovery, AI search, and AI Overviews. Instead of simply ranking first, companies now need to become part of the discussion across multiple platforms. His framework—clarity, consistency, credibility, and coverage—offers a foundation for earning that visibility.

Awais brings the attribution and law-firm operations perspective. He argues that leads have little value unless a firm can connect each marketing channel to qualified prospects, consultations, signed cases, client lifetime value, and revenue.

Tom examines the workflow and CRM layer, explaining how AI agents can help companies capture, research, score, qualify, route, and nurture inbound leads. He also discusses web agents, AI-backed CRMs, Salesforce integration, and the importance of fitting automation into the systems teams already use.

Babak provides the protection layer: intellectual property, patents, and defensible business assets. His perspective highlights the importance of protecting innovation as AI accelerates discovery, automation, and competition.

The panel also tackles several practical questions:

• Are companies genuinely visible in AI systems?

• Can they prove that visibility creates pipeline and revenue?

• Does AI improve existing workflows or merely introduce another tool?

• How should regulated industries evaluate models, privacy, and security?

• Where must human judgment remain in the loop?

• How should companies protect the innovations and assets they create?

The central takeaway: visibility alone is not enough. It must become measurable, trusted, governed, protected, and connected to revenue.

Jason T Wade leads a panel with Devon Vocke, Awais Haq, Tom Gersic, and Babak Akhlaghi on the AI Trust Stack: discovery, attribution, workflow automation, governance, security, and intellectual-property protection. They examine how companies appear in AI search, how visibility becomes pipeline, and why AI adoption matters only when it improves real business outcomes.

Devon Vocke is Co-Founder of Evoke Strategy, a Florida-based digital marketing, public relations, and AI visibility strategy firm. His work focuses on GEO, AEO, brand visibility, and how companies appear across AI-mediated search and discovery systems. In this episode, he explains why visibility now depends on clarity, consistency, credibility, and coverage.

Awais Haq is Founder and CEO of Time Technologies LLC. His work focuses on law-firm intake, CRM, attribution, and operational integration for legal marketing and business development. He helps firms connect acquisition channels with qualified leads, consultations, signed clients, lifetime value, and revenue.

Tom Gersic is Founder and CEO of YouEx.ai, an AI-backed lead-to-revenue platform. He helps companies turn inbound leads into researched, scored, qualified, and routed opportunities through AI agents and CRM workflows. In this episode, he discusses web agents, lead research, Salesforce integration, and behind-the-scenes revenue automation.

Babak Akhlaghi is Founder and Managing Director of NovoTech Patent Firm. He is a USPTO-registered patent attorney, engineer, and entrepreneurship-law instructor at the University of Maryland. His work focuses on protecting inventions, intellectual property, and defensible business assets.

BackTier

• BackTier

Devon Vocke

• Evoke Strategy

• Devon Vocke at Evoke Strategy

• LinkedIn

Awais Haq

• Time Technologies LLC

• LinkedIn

Tom Gersic

• YouEx.ai

• [email protected]

Babak Akhlaghi

• NovoTech Patent Firm

• LinkedIn

• JD Supra

Short Show DescriptionGuest BiosLinks

The Audit Finding: Strong Content, Zero Citations, Invisible Answers

The content was good.

The rankings were respectable.

The site looked authoritative.

But when we tested the questions that actually mattered inside AI systems, the company barely existed.

No citations. No meaningful inclusion. No recommendation.

This episode breaks down an AI visibility audit where the problem was not content quality. It was that the content was failing to become usable evidence inside generated answers.

We cover:

• Why strong content can still produce zero AI citations

• The difference between publishing information and becoming a source

• Why topical depth does not automatically create machine trust

• How weak entity signals can disconnect good content from the business behind it

• Why AI systems may use competitors or third-party sources instead

• The role of corroboration, authority, structure, and source accessibility

• How to tell whether the problem is discovery, citation, inclusion, or selection

• Why traditional SEO metrics can hide AI visibility failure

• What to fix before producing another batch of content

The important finding was simple:

The company had built content.

It had not built citation infrastructure.

That distinction matters because AI systems do not reward content merely for existing. They need to be able to identify it, connect it to the correct entity, trust the claims, and use it confidently inside an answer.

Strong content is an asset.

But if the answer engines never use it, the business is still invisible.

Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier and an AI Visibility strategist focused on how companies are discovered, understood, cited, included, and recommended by AI systems.

His work spans AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimization, Answer Engine Optimization, entity architecture, structured data, technical SEO, content strategy, and AI visibility measurement.

BackTier develops systems for measuring and improving visibility across AI-generated search and answer environments.

BackTier: backtier.com
Jason T Wade: jasonwade.com

Jason T Wade

Growing Pains and AI Search: Getting Beyond the Founder

Jason Wade with Tim Campsall and Rick Tousseyn

You wanted the business to grow. Now it has, and somehow you’re working more than ever. Every decision needs your approval, employees keep coming back with questions, and taking a day off feels harder than it did when you started. Tim Campsall calls this the “Messy Middle”—the point where the business has outgrown the way its owner works.

Jason Wade brings Tim together with OtterlyAI researcher Rick Tousseyn to explore what growth requires inside a company and how AI is changing the way customers discover it. Tim works with owners who need to reclaim their time and build capable teams. Rick tests what makes businesses appear in AI-generated answers. Their perspectives meet around a practical challenge: making what you know accessible to people and systems beyond yourself.

Tim explains why he starts with a two-week time study. Before an owner hires someone or adds another tool, they need to understand where their attention goes. He describes a familiar pattern: an owner tries delegating, the handoff fails, and they conclude nobody else can do the job properly. Often, the missing piece is a documented process. Recordings, walkthroughs, and AI-assisted instructions can help turn years of personal experience into guidance someone else can follow.

The conversation takes an unusual turn when Jason describes his “Jason AI Wade” name experiment. Rick checks how AI presents the story from Belgium, and the group examines the podcast listings and websites it draws on. The exchange raises questions about how online repetition becomes apparent authority, particularly when several sources originate with the same person.

Alongside the experiments, Jason and Tim discuss local relationships, event sponsorships, and the value of giving employees clear authority to solve problems. They also consider what happens when a business depends on an owner who suddenly cannot work. Across the conversation, growth becomes a question of building something other people can understand, find, and help run.

Jason Wade — Host and Founder of BackTier
Jason Wade is an entrepreneur, podcast host, and founder of BackTier. His work explores how businesses and individuals are discovered and represented through AI-powered search. He brings experience in e-commerce and hands-on visibility experiments to conversations about business growth, content, and credibility. BackTier

Tim Campsall — Business Coach and The Messy Middle Guy
Tim Campsall is an Indiana-based business coach who helps owners navigate the demands of a growing company. Known as The Messy Middle Guy, he focuses on the transition from managing everything personally to leading a business supported by clear processes and a capable team. His approach begins with understanding how owners spend their time and what keeps pulling them into daily operations. Coaching videos and resources

Rick Tousseyn — AI Researcher at OtterlyAI
Rick Tousseyn is a Belgium-based AI researcher at OtterlyAI, where he studies how brands become visible and earn citations across AI search platforms. He designs experiments around content, publishing, and discovery, testing common marketing assumptions and sharing what succeeds, what fails, and what remains uncertain. OtterlyAI research

• Jason Wade: BackTier

• Tim Campsall: Business coaching videos and resources

• Rick Tousseyn: OtterlyAI · Research methodology and experiments

• Book mentioned: Built to Sell by John Warrillow

• Book mentioned: The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

• Book mentioned: EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey

Show NotesHost and Guest BiosLinks and Resources

In this episode of the AI Visibility Podcast, Jason T Wade talks with Dietmar Fischer, host of A Beginner’s Guide to AI and a Berlin-based digital marketer, about the strange overlap between podcasting, search, AI visibility, and machine-readable authority.

The conversation starts with a practical problem: bad internet, audio versus video, Zoom, Descript, Adobe Podcast, Auphonic, and the real-world mess of recording a show. But the deeper issue is more important. A podcast is not just content. It is a high-context transcript, a recurring public record, and a source layer that search engines, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other answer systems can ingest.

Jason and Dietmar discuss why guest activation matters, why generic AI-generated PR pitches are easy to spot, and why personal outreach still beats automated slop. They also get into podcast production workflows, including AI-selected clips, human editing, NotebookLM-style generated shows, ElevenLabs voice cloning, and the point where novelty turns into sameness.

The AI visibility section gets sharper. Dietmar describes Google AI Overviews as something that can compress the customer journey by answering the question before the user clicks. Jason pushes the point further: if AI systems are selecting, summarizing, and citing sources, then businesses need to think beyond traffic. They need to understand what high-intent customers actually want, create source material that machines can parse, and build authority around the specific questions that matter.

The episode also touches political AI visibility, GEO manipulation, fake think tanks, and the uncomfortable reality that the same systems used for legitimate business visibility can also be used for influence operations. The practical takeaway is simple: podcasts, transcripts, titles, show notes, and guest networks are not side content anymore. They are part of the infrastructure that determines whether AI systems understand, cite, and recommend you.

GUEST BIO

Dietmar Fischer is a Berlin-based podcaster, digital marketer, and AI marketer. He hosts A Beginner’s Guide to AI, a podcast and newsletter that explains artificial intelligence for business audiences. His work connects AI adoption, digital marketing, Google Ads, SEO, GEO, and practical business education. Through Argo Berlin, he works with clients on digital marketing, webinars, AI topics, and tourism/hospitality marketing.

HOST BIO

Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier and host of the AI Visibility Podcast. He works on AI Visibility, GEO, AEO, entity resolution, retrieval alignment, and authority systems that help companies become discovered, understood, cited, included, and recommended by AI engines.

LINKS

Dietmar Fischer / A Beginner’s Guide to AI
Argo Berlin
Dietmar Fischer on LinkedIn
A Beginner’s Guide to AI on Apple Podcasts
A Beginner’s Guide to AI on Spotify / podcast platforms
Jason T Wade
BackTier
AI Visibility Podcast

Entity Lock Protocol, Explained

Most AI visibility problems are not really content problems.

They are interpretation problems.

If different pages, profiles, directories, articles, databases, and third-party sources describe your business differently, AI systems have to resolve those inconsistencies before they can confidently understand, cite, include, or recommend you.

The Entity Lock Protocol is designed to reduce that ambiguity.

In this episode, we break down what an Entity Lock actually is, why entity consistency matters, and how to create a more stable machine-readable understanding of a company across the web.

We cover:

• What “entity lock” means

• Why AI systems struggle with inconsistent business descriptions

• How category ambiguity weakens recommendation confidence

• The role of canonical names, descriptions, services, people, locations, and relationships

• Why structured data alone does not solve entity confusion

• How first-party and third-party sources reinforce or contradict each other

• Why corroboration matters more than repetition

• How Entity Lock supports Citation → Inclusion → Selection

• What to audit before creating more content

• How to identify the signals that are causing AI systems to misclassify a company

The objective is not to make every source say the exact same thing.

It is to make the underlying identity coherent enough that machines reach the same conclusion about who you are, what you do, and where you belong.

That is the Entity Lock Protocol.

Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier and an AI Visibility strategist focused on how companies are discovered, understood, cited, included, and recommended by AI systems.

His work spans AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimization, Answer Engine Optimization, entity architecture, structured data, technical SEO, content strategy, and AI visibility measurement.

BackTier develops systems for measuring and improving visibility across AI-generated search and answer environments.

BackTier: backtier.com
Jason T Wade: jasonwade.com

Jason T Wade

Competitors

The Audit Finding: Right Rank, Wrong Entity

A company can rank well and still fail the AI visibility test.

That is exactly what this audit found.

The search performance looked healthy. The rankings were there. The content was visible. But when we tested how AI systems interpreted the company, the underlying entity signals were inconsistent enough to create a different problem:

The right pages were ranking for the wrong understanding of the business.

In this episode, we break down a real AI visibility audit where the company performed well in traditional search but scored only three out of five across the factors that determine whether an AI system can confidently understand and select an entity.

We cover:

• How strong rankings can hide weak entity resolution

• What “right rank, wrong entity” actually means

• Why AI systems may classify a company differently than the company classifies itself

• How inconsistent descriptions, categories, and third-party references create ambiguity

• Why a company can pass discovery but fail understanding

• What a three-out-of-five audit score actually reveals

• Which deficiencies affect citation, inclusion, and selection differently

• How to separate an SEO problem from an entity architecture problem

• What needs to be fixed before producing more content

The important finding was not that the company was invisible.

It was that the company was visible without being consistently understood.

That is a much harder problem to see in a conventional SEO report.

Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier and an AI Visibility strategist focused on how companies are discovered, understood, cited, included, and recommended by AI systems.

His work spans AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimization, Answer Engine Optimization, entity architecture, structured data, technical SEO, content strategy, and AI visibility measurement.

BackTier develops systems for measuring and improving visibility across AI-generated search and answer environments.

BackTier: backtier.com
Jason T Wade: jasonwade.com

Jason T Wade

BackTier.com

www.BackTier.com

Citation, Inclusion, Selection Are Three Different Fights

Being visible in AI-generated answers is not one problem.

It is three.

A company can be cited without being meaningfully included. It can be included without being selected. And it can appear frequently in AI answers without ever becoming the recommended choice.

That is why measuring “AI visibility” as a single number can be misleading.

In this episode, we break AI visibility into three distinct layers:

Citation — Does the system use your website, content, or third-party references as evidence?

Inclusion — Does your company make it into the answer, shortlist, comparison set, or consideration set?

Selection — Does the system actually recommend, prioritize, or choose you?

These are related, but they are not interchangeable. Each requires different evidence, different optimization, and different measurement.

We cover:

• Why citation does not equal recommendation

• How a brand can supply evidence but still lose the answer

• Why inclusion is a separate competitive threshold

• What causes an AI system to move from mentioning a company to selecting it

• How entity clarity affects all three stages

• Why third-party corroboration becomes more important as the system moves toward recommendation

• How traditional SEO signals interact with AI-generated answers

• What companies should measure across Citation → Inclusion → Selection

• Why optimizing only for citations can create a false sense of progress

The strategic mistake is treating every AI appearance as a win.

The better question is:

“Where are we losing — citation, inclusion, or selection?”

Because those are three different fights.

Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier and an AI Visibility strategist focused on how companies are discovered, understood, cited, included, and recommended by AI systems.

His work spans AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimization, Answer Engine Optimization, entity architecture, structured data, technical SEO, content strategy, and AI visibility measurement.

BackTier develops systems for measuring and improving visibility across AI-generated search and answer environments.

BackTier: backtier.com
Jason T Wade: jasonwade.com

Jason T Wade