Entity

An entity is a specific thing a machine can recognise and attach facts to: a business, a person, a place, a product. The distinction that matters is between a thing and a string of characters. Your business name printed on a page is a string. Your business understood as one identity — this practice, in this town, offering these services, run by these people — is an entity.

The difference decides whether a system can answer questions about you. To recommend you, an assistant needs to hold you as a single thing it knows facts about, rather than as words that happen to appear in various places. That understanding is built from consistency: the same name, the same address, the same account of what you do, appearing in enough places that they corroborate one another.

You will meet the phrase entity salience in sales material, usually offered as proof that this requires an expert. Underneath the vocabulary it means how clearly and prominently a page establishes what it is about. It is a real idea wearing an unnecessarily expensive coat.

The ordinary failures are entirely ordinary. Three slightly different versions of your business name across your site, your listings and your invoices. An address written one way here and another way there. A description of what you do that changes depending on who wrote the page. Each inconsistency asks a machine to decide whether these are one business or several, and the safest answer is often to leave you out of the reply.

The human translation is the difference between being mentioned and being known. Anyone can be mentioned. Being known requires that the various things said about you agree with each other.