SEO in 2026 doesn’t look anything like it did even a year ago, or even a month ago as you’re reading this in June of 2026. If you’re still thinking in terms of domains and backlinks and keyword-driven page views on Google, it’s time to update your worldview.
In this episode, Meg breaks down entity-focused search and discoverability: the shift from optimizing the domain versus optimizing the entity and the person. She explains what an entity actually is (think of it as a star in a constellation, or a suspect on a murder board with red strings connecting everything back to you), and why so many of us have fragmented, disconnected, or missing entity signals without realizing it. This is the same material that opens her Signal mentorship, compressed into one conversation.
We talk about why your full name needs to be on your website, what schema markup does and why it’s suddenly mattering again, and the difference between work you control (your own pages and copy) and the third-party validation you can’t fully control but absolutely need. This is the first step of the slow, compounding, multi-month play—and why the work pays off even if the AI citations take their sweet time to show up.
Why “it’s not just Google anymore” changes everything about how you get found
What an entity actually is—person, book, program, company—and how they connect like a constellation
The three most common problems: missing entities, disconnected entities, and entity fragmentation
Why Meg’s own podcast and business weren’t connected in the AI knowledge map (and how she fixed it)
The copywriting habit that’s quietly hurting you: all client-facing language, no expertise or “who I am”
Schema markup explained in plain English—and the “Same As” code that ties your whole body of work together
How to narrate a pivot so AI (and humans) know you’re the same person who changed
Why you can build a perfect entity and still not get recognized without external validation
The referral guide idea: a “call me when” doc for both the humans and the machines
How long this really takes—and why Perplexity shows changes before ChatGPT ever will
“We get to signal that we would like things to be entities, but we do not get to decide which are the entities that are recognized. So, Jessica Lackey already exists in the knowledge map. We know that because if you go to ChatGPT or Claude or Google and say, ‘Who is Jessica Lackey?’ there’s an answer there.
But unless you are super clear about this is what I want you to do, AI can pull from anywhere. So if you wanna be more in control of how you’re represented and the language that it’s using about you, then you need to be clearer about how you want to be defined.” -Meg
