An entity is an identifiable subject, such as a company, person, or product. Entity work makes the subject’s name, website, and important facts clear across published sources. It helps address ambiguity, including businesses with similar names.Google's 2012 announcement, Introducing the Knowledge Graph, marks the shift from matching query strings to resolving real-world things.
How models resolve brands, products, and people
Generated answers can confuse companies, products, or domains. Conflicting sources and ambiguous names are possible contributors, but an output alone cannot reveal the cause. Test the specific facts an answer gets wrong.
The entity checklist
Maintain an agreed set of business facts. Use consistent names and URLs across the sources you control:
- Your own business and product pages.
- Relevant business profiles and knowledge panels where correction or verification is supported.
- Accurate company profiles and relevant industry directories.
- Existing Wikipedia or Wikidata information, where edits comply with the project’s policies.
- Supported Organization markup with accurate identifiers and relevant sameAs links.
Consistency does not require every page to repeat the same sentence. It requires the underlying facts to agree.
Wikipedia and Wikidata
The available report measures Wikipedia citations and Wikidata entities. Those counts are different from simple presence flags. The table does not establish the benefit of creating an entry. Follow the relevant encyclopedia’s eligibility and conflict-of-interest rules.Available report data. The available correlations are pairwise, with different data coverage by signal.
Wikipedia and Wikidata have their own inclusion and editing policies. Follow those policies and disclose relevant conflicts. Do not create an entry solely as an optimization tactic. Relevant independent coverage is discussed in Digital PR and Independent Coverage.Wikipedia's notability guideline, the standard editors apply when deciding whether a company merits an article.Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline. Brands that edit their own articles get reverted, tagged, and sometimes publicly covered for it.
Disambiguation: shared names and wrong domains
A wrong website address is a particularly actionable error. Record the exact brand name, returned domain, prompt, and model. Check whether the answer confused a similarly named company or used an outdated address.Research sources and limitations. Identifies the available report data and the analysis still needed to support earlier draft figures.
Ask the selected models what the business sells and which website is official. Repeat the questions with and without retrieval where supported. Correct conflicting information on pages and profiles you control. Then rerun the same tests. An updated profile does not guarantee an immediate change to a model’s learned associations.
Create a business-fact record
Use one maintained record for the facts that appear across your website and profiles. Include the public business name, legal name where relevant, canonical domain, product names, contact details, service areas, and verified profile URLs.
Each fact needs a source, a responsible person, and a last-checked date. For a fee, use the approved pricing record. For a service area, use the operating team’s current coverage. A generated answer is an observation to check, not the authority for the business fact.
When an assistant confuses two companies, record the exact answer and the competing identity. Check whether the official page clearly distinguishes the business through its location, domain, products, or legal name. Correct sources you control before requesting changes elsewhere.