Entity SEO: being a thing, not a string
Search and AI systems reason about entities rather than keywords. What an entity is, why inconsistency suppresses you and how to build a coherent one.
Search systems stopped matching strings a long time ago. They try to work out what thing a page is about and what thing your business is, then decide whether that thing is relevant to a question.
For AI visibility this matters more than it ever did for ranking, because a model composing an answer has to assert something specific about you. If your identity is ambiguous, the safe move is to leave you out.
What an entity is
An entity is a distinct thing a system can reason about: a company, a person, a place, a product, a concept. It has attributes, a name, a category, a location, relationships to other entities.
“CubicGrowth” as a string is nine characters. “CubicGrowth” as an entity is a marketing agency, in the United States, working on AI search visibility, related to the concepts of SEO and generative engine optimization.
Ranking is about strings matching queries. Being recommended by an assistant is about entities matching intents. They are different problems.
The ambiguity problem
Our own brand is a useful example. “Cubic growth” is a standard English phrase in mathematics, polynomial growth of the third power. Search it and you get Wolfram, academic pages and algorithm complexity articles.
So the system is not choosing between us and another agency. It is deciding whether the phrase refers to a mathematical concept or a company. Until the company reading exists strongly enough to coexist, commercial queries resolve to mathematics.
Most brands have a version of this: a name that is also a common word, a name shared with a larger company in another sector, or simply a name nothing on the open web has ever disambiguated.
Building a coherent entity
Describe yourself identically everywhere
This is unglamorous and it is most of the work.
Your company name, category, service area and one-line description should be the same string on your site, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings and your social bios. Not similar, the same.
Variations like “Cubic Growth Marketing” in one place and “CubicGrowth Agency” in another force a system to decide whether those are one entity or two. It will sometimes decide wrongly.
Where genuine spelling variants exist, declare them explicitly with
alternateName in your Organization schema rather than letting them float.
Connect your profiles
sameAs in your Organization schema should list every profile you genuinely
control. This is the mechanism that tells a system “these scattered mentions are
all the same entity.”
Only list what you own. A sameAs pointing at a profile that is not yours is
either a broken signal or a false claim.
Establish relationships
Entities gain definition from what they connect to. knowsAbout for your areas
of expertise, areaServed for geography, provider on your Service markup
linking back to the Organization. Each relationship narrows what you are.
Be described by others
The strongest entity signals are not on your own domain. Being described accurately and consistently by credible independent sources does more than any amount of self-description.
This is slow, it is mostly public relations rather than SEO and it is the part most agencies quietly skip because it is hard to bill by the hour.
Checking what the systems currently believe
Two diagnostics worth running this week:
Ask the assistants directly. “What is [your company]?” and “What does [your company] do?” across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Record the answers. You will usually find at least one confident factual error.
Search your brand logged out. Use an incognito window on a different network. Your own browsing history will rank you first for you personally and tell you nothing about reality.
If the answers are wrong, the fix is rarely “more content”. It is correcting the sources those answers are drawn from, your own pages first, then the profiles and listings that corroborate them.
What this is not
Entity work is not a trick and it is not fast. You cannot configure a knowledge panel, you cannot buy entity status and nobody can guarantee a system will describe you the way you prefer.
What you can do is remove every ambiguity under your control so that when a system does decide to say something about you, it has a consistent basis for getting it right.