Entity SEO
TL;DR: What is Entity SEO?
Entity SEO is optimizing around the people, organizations, products, and concepts machines recognize as distinct things, rather than around keyword strings. It aligns your content and signals with how search engines and LLMs actually model the world: as entities and relationships.
Entity SEO explained
The shift has a birthday. When Google launched its Knowledge Graph in 2012, it framed the change as understanding "things, not strings": queries and pages stopped being bags of keywords and became references to entities with attributes and relationships. Everything since, from Knowledge Panels to how LLMs reason, builds on entity understanding.
Practically, entity SEO means making your entities unambiguous and well-corroborated. Structured data declares what things are (this is an Organization, this Person wrote this Article). Consistent naming and descriptions across your site and third-party sources let machines resolve mentions to the same entity with confidence. Topical depth connects your brand entity to the concepts you want association with, so that when a system thinks about your category, your entity is in the neighborhood.
LLMs raised the stakes. A language model answering a recommendation prompt is traversing learned associations between entities: categories, brands, attributes, competitors. Brands with clean, consistent, widely-corroborated entity signals form stronger associations in that learned space; ambiguous or inconsistent brands form weak or fragmented ones. Keyword optimization gets you matched to queries. Entity optimization gets you remembered by models, and the second is increasingly where buying decisions start. The two are complements, and the entity layer is the one most competitors still skip.
In practice
Entity work is where I start most AI visibility engagements, because it compounds into everything else. My test with clients is blunt: if I strip your name off your website copy, does the description still identify you, and does the rest of the web describe you the same way? Usually the answer is no on both counts. Fixing that, one clear identity, consistently corroborated, moves more than any single content tactic, because every engine and every model consumes those signals.
Common misconception
People often treat entity SEO as just adding schema markup. Actually, schema is the declaration layer; the entity is built by consistency and corroboration across the whole web, and markup on top of a contradictory footprint fixes little.
Want the bigger picture? Start with the Founder’s Guide to SEO.