Entities & knowledge
Entity
A uniquely identifiable real-world thing an engine recognises, distinct from its name.
An entity is a uniquely identifiable real-world thing — a company, product, person, place or concept — that a search engine or AI recognises as distinct from the words used to name it. 'Clypp' the string of letters is a name; the company Clypp, with its properties and relationships, is the entity. Engines reason about entities, not just keywords.
Entities matter because AI answers are built on understanding, not matching. If the engine can confidently resolve who you are as an entity, it can connect you to the right category, the right facts and the right questions. If your identity is ambiguous — same name as other things, inconsistent descriptions — the engine hedges and names a competitor it can resolve.
Becoming a clear entity is foundational to AI visibility, and it is the work that underpins mentions, citations and knowledge-panel presence alike.
Related terms
Entity Optimization
Making a brand or topic unambiguously recognizable to engines as a distinct entity.
Entity Home
The single web page an engine treats as the authoritative source of an entity's identity.
Knowledge Graph
Google's structured database of real-world entities and the facts that connect them.
Named Entity Recognition
The NLP task of finding entities in text and tagging each with its type.
Entity Salience
A score for how central an entity is to a document as a whole.
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