The cornerstone analyses behind the Identity-First methodology, distinct from generic entity-first SEO.
Marketing starts with the message. Identity-First starts with the identity, and everything you publish is a projection of it.
Identity-First is a first principle: the layer you begin from, and reason everything else out of. You start with a structured model of who you are, your personality, values, and motivation, and everything you publish, your website, blog, podcast, and email, becomes a projection of that one identity. Where conventional marketing starts with the message or the keyword, Identity-First starts with the source, so consistency becomes a property of the architecture instead of a discipline you hold together by hand.
Software people say "mobile-first" or "API-first." Those are not values, they are decisions about order. You start at that layer, and everything else is built as a projection of it. Identity-First makes the same claim about marketing. Identity is not a deliverable you produce at the end and then police. It is the first and generating layer. You model who you are once, and your website, your blog, your podcast, and your email all follow from that single source. Most marketing works the other way around. It starts with the message of the week, the campaign, the keyword that is trending, and tries to bolt a consistent identity on afterward. That is why staying consistent feels like effort: you are holding together by hand what was never built from one source. Begin with identity instead, and consistency stops being a discipline and becomes a property of the architecture. It cannot drift, because everything resolves to the same model. The clue is in the name. First is not a value, it is a position in a sequence.
Here is where most branding stops: a logo, a tone of voice, a positioning sentence. That is the surface, and a competitor can copy all of it by Friday. Identity-First goes underneath it, to how you actually think: your personality, your values, your motivation. A rival can lift your tagline. They cannot lift the voice that comes out of your particular structure of values, because they do not have it. This is the difference between a story about you and a model of you. An agency hands you a narrative, prose in a deck. Identity-First produces something structured and queryable, a model that both people and machines can read and resolve to a single, recognizable entity. The unit is not the message. The unit is you.
I have been building companies for over twenty years, and I want to be honest about what is new here and what is not. The principle is not new. A business that cannot describe itself coherently has always lost, long before anyone typed a prompt into a chatbot. What is new is the reader.
When someone asks an AI assistant for an expert, the model does not weigh your reputation the way a colleague would. It tries to resolve you to an entity: one coherent node it can recognize and cite. If your identity is scattered across channels that contradict each other, the machine cannot resolve you to one thing, and for that machine you effectively do not exist. We measured this. We asked five AI assistants, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok, who they recommend when someone looks for an expert. Across professions, 95 percent of those queries returned at least one concrete name. The model almost always names someone. The only question is whether it names you. And what decided that was not who was best, it was who stood most clearly as an entity on the web: 41 percent of the sources the models cited were the expert's own domain, the single largest source in every profession we measured. Review sites barely registered. (Identity First Media AI visibility benchmark, 1,125 answers across five assistants, Q2 2026.) AI visibility is not a separate game you learn. It is the most urgent and most measurable form of identity coherence available today. Fix the coherence and the visibility follows, because they are the same thing seen from two sides.
In practice it works like this. You model the identity once. Then a single recording becomes a blog, a podcast, social posts, an email sequence, and full courses, each one in your own voice and structured so AI systems read you as one entity. You are not running eight tools that disagree with each other. You are running one source with many projections. The time you save and the consistency you gain are not features we added on top. They are what happens automatically when the architecture starts with identity.
Identity-First is bigger than any one company, and it shows up as three things. The book is the principle itself. Identity First Marketing applies it to strategy and positioning, the thinking layer, including the course The Visible Expert. Identity First Media is the building layer: the intelligence that turns your identity into the presence you publish. To be precise about the claim: we did not invent the words. We built the most rigorous named method around the idea, and we apply it to ourselves. Ask any of the five assistants about Identity-First and they already recognize the method and trace it back to us. That is not a trick. It is the same thing we build for you.
The scan takes about five minutes: fourteen questions, and you get a precise reading of where the gap sits and the first move that closes it.