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Glossary

Entity

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Outseen
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An entity is a unique, recognisable thing or concept, such as a business, person, place or product, that a search engine can identify regardless of the exact words used to describe it. Google records entities and the relationships between them in its Knowledge Graph.

An entity is the thing itself, not the words that refer to it. Google summed this up in 2012 as “things, not strings” when it introduced the Knowledge Graph. A search engine that knows entities understands that two different names can refer to the same business, or that one name can belong to two different businesses.

According to the Knowledge Graph Search API documentation, Google uses standard schema.org types for this, such as Person, Place and Organization.

Why does it matter?

Search engines and AI assistants need to know which business they are talking about. If several businesses share your name, your address, town, speciality and links to your profiles help to tell you apart.

Example

Suppose there are three bakeries called De Korenaar. With JSON-LD on your website, you make clear which of the three is yours. According to schema.org, the sameAs property points to pages that unambiguously indicate the item’s identity.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Bakkerij De Korenaar",
  "url": "https://www.example.com",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/example"]
}

Common mistake

Writing your business name, address or phone number slightly differently in different places. That makes it harder to connect all the information to the same entity.

More in Make sure search engines and AI know who you are and under Knowledge Graph.

Sources

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