AEO glossary

Entity

An entity is a real-world thing, such as a person, place, organization or product, that search systems recognize as distinct, rather than as a string of words.

An entity is a thing, not a keyword. When Google launched its Knowledge Graph in 2012, it framed the shift as "things, not strings". Google's Knowledge Graph Search API describes the graph as having "millions of entries that describe real-world entities like people, places, and things", typed with schema.org types such as Organization, Person and Place.

For your brand, being a clear entity means engines can tell your company apart from others with a similar name and connect facts to it. Google says Organization structured data can help it "disambiguate your organization in search results".

Practical steps that follow from the sources:

  • Describe your organization (and key people and products) with schema.org structured data in JSON-LD.
  • Use sameAs to point to reference pages that unambiguously identify you, such as a Wikipedia page, Wikidata entry or official website.

If Google has a knowledge panel for your organization, an official representative can claim it and suggest changes.

Learn it properly

The course covers this in Structured data and entities. Lesson 1 is free.

Related terms

Sources

  1. Google Knowledge Graph Search API (opens in a new tab) · Google for Developers · Updated 26 Apr 2024
  2. Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings (opens in a new tab) · Google (The Keyword) · Published 16 May 2012
  3. Organization (Organization) structured data (opens in a new tab) · Google Search Central · Updated 8 Sep 2026
  4. How Google's Knowledge Graph works (opens in a new tab) · Knowledge Panel Help (Google) · Checked 28 Oct 2026
  5. sameAs (opens in a new tab) · Schema.org · Updated 16 Sep 2026

All 30 glossary terms