GEO glossary

Entity SEO

Entity SEO is the practice of helping search engines and AI systems recognise a brand, person, product or place as a distinct thing with known attributes, rather than as a string of keywords. It relies on consistent facts, structured data and links between trusted sources.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

Where does the idea come from?

Google introduced its Knowledge Graph on 16 May 2012 in a post titled Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings. At launch it held more than 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts about them and the relationships between them. Entity SEO is the work of making sure a business is one of those objects, with the right facts attached.

Why it matters for AI search

Language models answer questions about brands from what they learned in training and what they retrieve at the time. If a business's name, location, founding year and services are stated differently across its website, directories and press coverage, an assistant has to guess. It may merge the business with a similarly named company or leave it out.

Clear entities also help with disambiguation. Google says Organization structured data helps it understand an organisation's administrative details, and that some of its properties are used behind the scenes to tell organisations apart.

How to strengthen an entity

Most of the work is consistency, repeated across every place the business is described.

Publish an About page that states the core facts plainly
Add Organization or Person structured data with sameAs links to official profiles
Use the same name, address and details on every directory and profile
Earn coverage on authoritative sites that describe the business accurately
Link related entities, such as founders, services and locations, on the site

Example

Marketing Signals is an entity with fixed facts: a UK digital agency founded in 2007, fully remote, with its corporate headquarters in Halifax. When those facts match on its website, its structured data and its company profiles, an AI assistant asked about the agency has one consistent version to repeat.