Concepts
Entity
An entity is a specific thing an AI system can identify and reason about — a company, a product, a person, a place — as distinct from the words used to name it. Being understood as an entity, rather than as a string that happens to appear, is what lets an assistant describe you consistently.
Why it matters for a brand
Assistants confuse brands with similarly named companies, with their own product names, and with the category they sit in. That is an entity problem rather than a content problem, and it is not solved by writing more pages. It is solved by making the relationships between you, your products and your category explicit and consistent everywhere you are described.
How entities get established
Consistent naming across your own site, structured data stating what you are and what you are not, and corroborating descriptions on sources the engines already trust. Fewer than a fifth of B2B companies have a knowledge panel, which is a reasonable proxy for how few have done this work.
Confidently described as the wrong thing
An assistant asked about a company returns a fluent, well-written description of a similarly named business in an unrelated industry, or files it under the nearest category it recognises. No amount of extra content on the company's own site fixes that. What fixes it is stating, consistently and everywhere, what the company is and what it is not.
Related terms
- Citation — Sources get cited about entities the engine can identify.
- Generative engine optimisation — Entity work is the half of GEO that writing more pages will not fix.
Last reviewed . Definitions are reviewed quarterly, and whenever the underlying measurement changes.
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