Entity

An entity, in search terms, is a singular, distinguishable thing: a specific company, person, product, place, or concept. Google describes an entity as something singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable. Modern search is increasingly entity-based rather than keyword-based: engines try to understand the things a page is about and how they relate, not just the strings of text it contains.

Entity recognition is what lets an engine know that "Apple" the company is different from "apple" the fruit, that your business is a specific organization with a specific address and leadership, and that a claim on your page is about a known thing it can corroborate. This is the foundation of the knowledge graph and of how AI engines decide whom to trust and cite, an answer engine is far more comfortable citing a recognized entity than an unrecognized string.

Building entity recognition is concrete work: consistent naming everywhere, structured data that declares the entity and its type, sameAs links connecting your on-site entity to authoritative external profiles (Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, official social accounts), and presence in the sources that define entities, above all Wikipedia and Wikidata. A brand that is a recognized entity is recommended; one that exists only as text on its own domain is invisible to the entity layer. Our local and brand audits include entity-graph health for exactly this reason.