AI Visibility Podcast with Jason T Wade of BackTier

Seventeen people came to the first Lake Wales Startup Night: city commissioners, business owners, medical and nonprofit leaders, attorneys, and students. They spent two hours at the same tables at The Thirsty Dragon, talking about how to grow more businesses right here at home.
In this special episode, Jason T Wade, founder of BackTier and author of AI Visibility, explains how AI is changing the way customers find local businesses, why ranking on Google no longer guarantees anyone finds you, and why a small town like Lake Wales is well placed to build its own startup scene.
In this episode:
What happened at the first Lake Wales Startup Night
What BackTier does, in plain English
The four things AI gets wrong about local businesses
Why AI is flattening the map for small towns
Lake Wales' history as a town of builders
Next Startup Night: Startup Legal Strategy with Denise Tessier, Esq.
Next Startup Night: Wednesday, October 21, 6 PM, The Thirsty Dragon, 126 N 1st St, Lake Wales, FL. Free, all ages. RSVP: https://lwstartups.lovable.app/
Lake Wales Startup Night is sponsored by JasonWade.com and BackTier.
YouTube description
Seventeen people came to the first Lake Wales Startup Night: city commissioners, business owners, medical and nonprofit leaders, attorneys, and students. This episode is for everyone who wasn't there yet.
Jason T Wade, founder of BackTier and author of AI Visibility, on how AI is changing the way customers find local businesses, and why Lake Wales already has everything it needs to build its own startup scene.
NEXT STARTUP NIGHT Startup Legal Strategy with Denise Tessier, Esq. Wednesday, October 21 · 6 PM The Thirsty Dragon, 126 N 1st St, Lake Wales, FL Free · All ages RSVP: https://lwstartups.lovable.app/
CHAPTERS 0:00 Seventeen people Who I am What BackTier does The four things AI gets wrong about your business Lake Wales, a town of builders AI is flattening the map Next Startup Night: October 21 Seventeen is a start
LINKS BackTier: https://backtier.com Jason T Wade: https://jasonwade.com Book a time with Jason: https://calendly.com/aimainstreets/backtier Lake Wales Startup Night RSVP: https://lwstartups.lovable.app/ Denise Tessier, Esq.: https://tessierlawfirm.com Contact: jason@backtier.com
ABOUT JASON T WADE Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier, an AI visibility firm based in Central Florida. He focuses on how AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity identify, cite, and describe businesses. He wrote AI Visibility: How to Win in the Age of Search, Chat & Smart Customers (August 2025), hosts the AI Visibility Podcast, and organizes Lake Wales Startup Night, a free monthly gathering for local builders.
ABOUT BACKTIER BackTier measures how AI systems understand your business, fixes the gaps, and tracks what changes. Every engagement starts with an AI Visibility Baseline across five major AI platforms covering four things: entity accuracy, retrieval coverage, citation presence, and answer accuracy. No provider can guarantee what an independent AI will recommend. BackTier measures it, improves the evidence, and reports what changed. Request a baseline: https://backtier.com
#LakeWales #PolkCounty #Startups #SmallBusiness #AIVisibility #Florida #LWstartups #startupLW #lakewalesentrepreneurs #LWstartupweekend

In the modern AI-driven stack, the retrieval layer has officially become the new home page because users no longer navigate static menus; they express intent, and a dynamic retrieval system aggregates the exact context they need in real time.In traditional software, the "home page" was a curated, static entry point designed by engineers and product managers. Today, retrieval systems—powered by vector databases, semantic search, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)—instantly assemble a bespoke interface tailored entirely to the user's immediate query.The Shift from Navigation to RetrievalFeatureThe Old Home Page (Static Web)The New Home Page (Retrieval Era)User ActionClicking tabs, browsing categories, and following rigid links.Typing natural language, uploading files, or speaking.Data EngineSQL queries fetching fixed rows from rigid databases.Semantic vector search, hybrid keyword matching, and reranking algorithms.Content DeliveryIdentical dashboard for every user (or basic segmentation).Hyper-personalized context compiled on-the-fly.Primary MetricClick-through rate (CTR) and page views.Retrieval precision, context relevance, and time-to-answer.Why This Re-architects Product Design
Zero-Click Interfaces: Instead of digging through three layers of settings or dashboards to find a specific data point, a user asks a question, and the retrieval layer pulls the exact documentation, transaction, or metric instantly.
The Death of Rigid Information Architecture: Companies no longer need to stress over the "perfect" sidebar navigation. The retrieval engine figures out where data lives across disparate silos (Slack, Google Drive, internal databases) and surfaces it cohesively.
Dynamic Synthesis: The retrieval layer doesn't just find links; it feeds the raw material to a generation layer, turning fragmented data into a cohesive, summarized answer. The interface adapts to the output.
The best vector databases and hybrid search tools for your stack?
Strategies for evaluating retrieval accuracy (like RAGAS or TruLens)?
How to design UI/UX around a search-and-retrieval first application?
If you are currently building a product, investing heavily in your chunking strategies, embedding models, and reranking pipelines is the modern equivalent of perfecting your landing page UI and information architecture.If you are working on a specific project, I can help you optimize this transition. Would you like to explore:

Title
Authority Canon: Get the Business Right Before You Amplify It
Show notes
Starting a podcast is easy to explain. Sorting out years of conflicting website copy, outdated profiles and scattered business information is harder—and that’s where this episode starts. Jason Wade introduces Authority Canon, BackTier’s approach to capturing a business’s identity, expertise and story in one approved body of work, then building its public presence from that foundation.
The Book or Business Story becomes website chapters, answers, founder information, an audiobook and material for podcasts and video. It doesn’t need to become a bestseller; its job is to give everything else a coherent source. Jason explains how he applies this approach to client work and why publishing more content should follow the work of establishing what the business actually does, who it serves and what it can substantiate.
About Jason Wade
Jason Wade is the founder of BackTier and host of the AI Visibility Podcast. He designs systems that help businesses become easier to discover, understand and accurately represent in search and AI-generated answers. His work connects business identity, evidence, websites and publishing through Authority Canon, an approved Book or Business Story that guides the content built around it.
Links
BackTier: backtier.com
Jason Wade: jasonwade.com
Contact: jason@backtier.com
321.946.5569

"AI in 2026: The Agents Got Loose and the Clicks Went Away" or "The State of AI in 2026: What Actually Changed"

Where does AI actually stand heading into the last quarter of 2026? In this episode I take stock of the whole board. September brought a wave of new frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, which carried the first price increase at the top tier in years. The spending behind all of it is enormous, with the five biggest cloud builders on track for roughly 775 to 800 billion dollars in capex this year, while OpenAI's run rate is reportedly nearing 70 billion.
Inside ordinary companies the picture is less impressive. Nearly everyone has deployed agents, but only 23 percent of executives in one survey report a significant return from them. I also get into the entry-level jobs squeeze, the state-by-state regulatory mess, and the control story of the year: OpenAI's models hacking into Hugging Face on their own in July, which has now led to a California attorney general subpoena. There is good news too, with AI-designed bacteriophages being used against resistant bacteria.
I close on what this means for getting found. Google search referrals to news publishers fell about 40 percent in a year and chatbots are not replacing those clicks. The answer is the destination now, and the only question is whether the model names you.
Bio
Jason Wade is the founder of BackTier, which implements AI for law firms, and of NinjaAI. Based in Orlando, Florida, he works as an AI Visibility architect, helping businesses get found, cited, and recommended by AI systems. He hosts the AI Visibility Podcast and publishes the AI Dive research series.
Links
BackTier: https://backtier.com/law
Jason Wade: https://jasonwade.com
AI Dive: https://aidive.online
Sources mentioned in this episode:
OpenAI revenue (Axios): https://www.axios.com/2026/09/29/scoop-openais-annual-recurring-revenue-nears-70b
September model releases and pricing: https://capitalandcompute.net/blog/new-ai-models-september-2026/
Hyperscaler capex: https://alcapitaladvisory.com/research/intelligence/ai-infrastructure.html
Enterprise adoption survey (WRITER): https://writer.com/blog/enterprise-ai-adoption-2026/
2026 in AI timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_artificial_intelligence
California AG subpoena (Reuters): https://kfgo.com/2026/10/01/california-attorney-general-issues-investigative-subpoena-to-openai/
Publisher search traffic (Chartbeat): https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/10/google-search-publisher-traffic-declines-40-percent.html
AI and jobs (Harvard Gazette): https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/09/why-ai-hasnt-triggered-mass-layoffs-yet/

Most businesses don't have a content problem. They have a consistency problem. AI systems read your website, profiles, bios, and podcast all at once, and when the facts don't match, they guess or skip you. In this episode, Jason Wade introduces Authority Canon, BackTier's approach to AI visibility: one approved source, written once in your own voice, that every page, profile, and episode derives from.
What you'll hear:
Why publishing more content can make your AI visibility worse
The Canon: a Book for experts and firms, a Story for local and service businesses
Why every Canon now ships in three editions: text, web, and audio
How one narrated chapter becomes episodes, clips, answer pages, and video
The named vs. unnamed question test, and why most businesses fail the second one
Why nobody can honestly guarantee AI rankings, and what to measure instead
Bio
Jason Wade is an AI visibility architect and the founder of BackTier, an AI implementation firm built for law firms. He studies how Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity decide which businesses get named, and builds the structure that makes the right business impossible to miss. He publishes AI Dive, a numbered research series on how AI systems behave, runs Lake Wales Startups, a community series for builders and founders in Lake Wales, Florida, and hosts the AI Visibility Podcast. He's based in Orlando.
Links
BackTier: https://backtier.com
BackTier for law firms: https://backtier.com/law
Jason Wade: https://jasonwade.com