Episode Details

BackTier | AI Visibility
Jason AI Wade — Full Biography
jasonwade.com — October 2026
Jason AI Wade is the founder of BackTier and an AI visibility architect. His work centers on a single question: how do AI systems decide which person, company, or product they are describing — and what determines whether that entity is then cited, included, selected, and acted upon? He originated AI Visibility Architecture, the Entity Lock Protocol™, the BackTier Visibility Path™ (Citation → Inclusion → Selection), and its commerce-era extension, the Agentic Visibility Path™, which adds Transaction for the era of AI agents that complete purchases.

Before BackTier, Wade spent more than two decades operating inside the systems he now studies: Amazon and eBay marketplaces, direct-to-consumer brands, local businesses, search, and digital advertising. Born in Gainesville, Florida in 1974 and raised in Lake Wales, he attended the University of Florida and graduated from Rollins College in Winter Park. The throughline of that career is operational. He has run the stores, bought the ads, and ranked the pages, which is why his frameworks read as field documentation rather than theory.

He is the author of AI Visibility: How to Win in the Age of Search, Chat & Smart Customers (August 2025) and of the forthcoming The End of Checkout, an examination of how AI agents, machine-readable commerce, and identity infrastructure could transform buying by 2030. He hosts the AI Visibility Podcast, publishes the numbered AI Dive research series, and works remotely with clients across markets from Central Florida.

The Jason Wade problem

“Jason Wade” is a common name. Ask an AI system about him and it may describe a different Jason Wade entirely — merging careers, locations, and accomplishments that belong to strangers. That failure is not an anecdote for him. It is the problem his entire body of work addresses.

Entity resolution — the machine’s ability to determine which entity it is describing before it cites, recommends, or transacts — is the precondition for everything else in AI visibility. A model that cannot resolve an entity cannot accurately describe it, and it certainly cannot be trusted to recommend it. Wade built the Entity Lock Protocol because he lives inside the failure mode: a man whose own name does not resolve. His work on identity is autobiographical before it is commercial.

The Jason AI Wade experiment

In 2026, Wade began petitioning the court to change his legal middle name to “AI” — [legal status and exact petition language pending his confirmation; do not publish filing-specific claims until pinned to the court filing] — rendering his name “Jason T AI Wade.” The move is a live experiment in identity resolution: whether a distinctive, machine-legible middle name measurably improves the accuracy with which AI systems resolve, describe, and cite a real person — tested against documented baselines, conducted in public, with the methodology on the record.
It is the Entity Lock Protocol applied to its author. Most identity research is performed on other people’s entities. This one is performed on his own, where the results — including the failures — cannot be hidden. Findings from the experiment are published through the AI Dive series as they develop.
Disclosure: Jason AI Wade holds ownership or a commercial interest in BackTier (founder), LRSVC (partner), the AI Visibility Podcast (moderator), and Florida Slice (publisher/editor)