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Entity SEO

Definition

Entity SEO is making sure search engines and AI systems recognize your business as one distinct thing, with consistent facts about what it is, does and connects to.

Updated

Also called entity optimization.

How it works

Search engines store facts about entities (people, companies, products, places, topics) and the relationships between them. Google's version is the Knowledge Graph, introduced in May 2012 under the line "things, not strings". When the signals about your company agree on name, description, location, founders and services, new mentions get attached to the right entity. When they conflict, your company can be merged with another business or left out.

Language models pick up a similar picture from the web. If the web describes you consistently, a model is more likely to describe you correctly and to connect you with the topics you sell.

How businesses use it

The work is mostly careful housekeeping:

  • One exact business name everywhere. For us that is "The Method Crew".
  • Organization schema markup with sameAs links to profiles you control, such as LinkedIn, Crunchbase or Clutch.
  • A real About page: founders by name, what you do, who you serve, where you are based.
  • Matching details on directories and review sites, including Google Business Profile if you have a physical location.
  • Service pages and guides that tie your name to the topics you want to be known for.

Mentions on other sites carry weight because you cannot write them yourself: interviews, partner directory listings, conference talks. Those have to be earned, and they take months.

Where it goes wrong

New companies often trip on their own name. "Method Crew", "The Method Crew" and "MethodCrew" on three profiles can read as three different businesses. Pick one form, list the others as alternate names in your markup, and fix the profiles.

Other common problems: a sameAs link to a profile you abandoned, a founder listed under two spellings, a company description that changes on every platform. Skip fake directory listings and paid mention schemes. Google's guidance says inauthentic mentions help less than people expect, and they create the inconsistent signals you are trying to remove.

Entity work has a ceiling. It helps systems understand who you are. It will not make you relevant to a query your pages do not answer.

Related terms

  • Schema markup

    Schema markup is structured data, usually JSON-LD, that labels the facts on a page, such as organization, service, price or author, using the shared schema.org vocabulary.

  • Generative engine optimization

    Generative engine optimization is the work of making your pages likely to be retrieved, quoted and cited in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

  • AI visibility

    AI visibility measures how often AI assistants mention or cite your business when answering the questions your buyers ask, compared with competitors over the same set of prompts.

  • Answer engine optimization

    Answer engine optimization structures pages so a search engine or AI assistant can lift a direct answer from them, as a featured snippet, voice answer or AI citation.

  • Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

    AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries shown at the top of some Google results with links to sources; AI Mode is a conversational search view built on the same systems.

All 30 definitions are in the AI and search glossary.

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