Entity

A distinct, identifiable thing — a person, organization, product, place, or concept. Search and AI systems index the world as a graph of entities and their relationships.

Entity-based search replaced keyword-based search around 2013 with Google's Hummingbird update. AI answer engines are pure entity-based systems: when you ask “best CRM for B2B,” the engine maps that to entities (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.) and ranks them.

To register your brand as an entity in the AI corpus: ship Organization schema, claim a Wikidata item, build consistent citations across the web, and earn mentions in authoritative publications.

Related terms

Audit your brand against this concept

VibecodeAEO scans your site for all AEO factors weekly and tells you exactly what to fix.