Entity SEO
Entity SEO is the practice of optimising for how search engines and AI systems understand the things your content is about, such as your brand and its products, rather than the keywords on the page. An entity is any distinct thing a machine can identify and connect to other things, and clear entities are the foundation of accurate AI answers.
Modern search systems organise knowledge around entities and the relationships between them rather than around strings of text. Google's Knowledge Graph is the most visible example: when a machine encounters the word 'Apple', it has to decide whether that means the fruit or the company, and entity signals are how it decides. The same resolution problem exists inside AI assistants, which learn about your brand from everything they have read or retrieved that mentions it.
This is where entities become critical for AI answers. A language model describing your brand draws on a diffuse pool of mentions, and if those mentions are inconsistent, or your name collides with a similarly named company, the model can blend facts from different sources into one confident, wrong description. A well-defined entity, meaning the same name and the same core facts wherever you appear, gives the model less room to guess.
The practical work is mostly about removing ambiguity. Use consistent naming and a consistent short description of what you do across your site, your profiles and third-party listings. Add Organization schema with sameAs links connecting your domain to your official profiles. Maintain an About page that states the basic facts plainly, and seek presence in reference sources such as Wikidata or established industry databases where you genuinely qualify. No engine publishes exactly how it constructs entity understanding, so treat this as reducing the chance of confusion rather than guaranteeing a result.
Entity SEO predates AI answers; Google has been moving from strings to things since at least 2013. What has changed is the cost of a fuzzy entity. In classic search, ambiguity might cost you a ranking. In an AI answer, it can mean an assistant confidently describing you with another company's product line.