GlossaryAI search
What is entity SEO?
Also called: entity-based SEO, entity optimization, semantic SEO
Definition
Entity SEO is the work of helping search engines and AI systems recognize your company or product as one distinct thing, an entity, and connect the right facts, profiles and pages to it.
Entity SEO, explained
Search engines stopped treating queries as bare strings years ago. When Google introduced its Knowledge Graph in 2012, the announcement's title was "things, not strings": Google wanted to understand real-world entities like people, places and companies, and the relationships between them. AI assistants work in a similar spirit. They answer better when they know that "Acme", "Acme.io" and "@acmeapp" are the same company.
For a startup, the problem is usually ambiguity. Your name may be a common word, or shared with another company. Your founders might be listed differently on different sites. Your product might be described as three different categories. Each inconsistency makes it harder to join the dots.
The practical steps are simple, if tedious. Use one exact name and one short description everywhere. Publish a clear About page with who you are, what you make, where you're based and who founded it. Add Organization structured data with your logo and a sameAs list pointing to your official profiles. Keep those profiles consistent, from LinkedIn and X to GitHub, Crunchbase and major directories. Where you genuinely qualify, a Wikidata item can help too.
Entity work also shapes content strategy. Pages that clearly relate your product to known entities, the category you compete in, the platforms you integrate with, the problems you solve, give search systems more to connect. That's more useful than repeating a keyword.
None of this is instant. Search engines and models update their understanding as they recrawl. But entity clarity compounds: every later mention, link and citation lands in the right place instead of being split across lookalikes.
Why it matters for founders
If search engines and AI can't tell you apart from a similarly named company, your mentions and links help someone else. Clear entity signals make every other marketing effort count.
Example
A startup called "Orbit" shares its name with several companies. It adds Organization markup with sameAs links, standardizes "Orbit, the community CRM" everywhere, and assistants stop confusing it with a satellite firm.
Common mistakes
- Using different names or spellings across profiles and listings.
- Leaving the About page vague about what the company actually does.
- Adding
sameAslinks to profiles that aren't official or no longer exist.
Sources
- Google: Introducing the Knowledge Graph, things not strings (2012)
- Google Search Central: Organization structured data
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Related terms
- Knowledge GraphThe Knowledge Graph is Google's database of real-world entities, such as people, companies, places and products, and the facts and relationships connecting them. It powers knowledge panels and helps Google understand queries.
- sameAs (schema.org)sameAs is a schema.org property that lists URLs of other pages which unambiguously identify the same entity, such as your official social profiles, Wikidata item or Crunchbase page, inside your structured data.
- Brand mentionA brand mention is any place your company or product name appears on the web, in articles, forums, reviews, directories or AI answers, whether or not it links to your site.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)Structured data is machine-readable information about a page, usually written as JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary. It helps search engines understand what a page is about and can make it eligible for rich results.
- WikidataWikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual knowledge base of structured facts, run by the Wikimedia movement. Each entity is an item with a Q number, described by statements that other sites and systems can reuse.