What is Entity SEO?

Entity SEO treats your business as a thing rather than a phrase. A string is raw characters that either match a query or do not. An entity is an identifiable object with attributes and relationships: a company with a founding date, a location, people, products and links to other entities. The distinction entered mainstream search on 16 May 2012, when Google launched the Knowledge Graph under the slogan "things, not strings", initially covering around 500 million objects and 3.5 billion facts about them.

The sharpest way to understand the discipline is this: its job is identification, not ranking. Entity work does not push you up a list. It makes you resolvable, so a system can tell which organisation you are and attach the right facts to you.

That matters more in AI search because misidentification is a failure mode that did not really exist before. A ranked list of ten links puts the disambiguation burden on the reader, who can glance at a URL and tell two similarly named firms apart. A generated answer resolves the entity itself and presents one result. When it resolves wrongly, the output is not absence but error: your competitor's facts attached to your name, or your work credited to someone else. You can be confidently misrepresented in a way a blue link never allowed.

The mechanics are unglamorous and mostly familiar. Use the same name, description and category everywhere. Declare identity in structured data with Organization or LocalBusiness markup, and use sameAs to point at the profiles that corroborate you. Keep name, address and phone details consistent across directories. Accumulate third-party mentions from sources that already exist as entities themselves. None of this is novel; it is the off-page half of SEO with clearer purpose.

A caution about the evidence, because this is where entity SEO advice usually overreaches. A widely-quoted 2025 correlation analysis reports that unlinked brand mentions track AI Overview citations far more strongly than backlinks do, with the gap often cited as roughly threefold. Two problems. The attribution is inconsistent across the write-ups that repeat it, so check the primary before relying on the figure. More importantly, the correlation is almost certainly confounded by brand size: large, well-known organisations accumulate both mentions and citations because they are large and well-known. That a relationship exists does not establish that manufacturing mentions produces citations.

Do the entity work anyway. The mechanism is sound, the cost is low, and being correctly identified is worth having on its own terms. Just do not expect a published coefficient to transfer to your situation.