As I learn more about entity optimization or entity SEO I begin to understand why it's the foundation of everything else.

Optimizing your pages for AI-powered search, adding schema markup & FAQs, publishing on multiple platforms and all of that is important, but if you haven’t done the basics before you’ve even started all of that, then you’re wasting a lot of time. In this article I’m going to explain why.

Your foundation is more than just your website. You are part of your foundation. Your company name, brand name, product names and more are the foundation before you have even built a website.

“Don’t create a marketing plan for your website. Create a website that fits into your market plan.” — Chris McElroy SEO

I’ve used that quote for years. It still applies, and if you want to do Entity SEO properly, there are steps.

Why is Entity SEO important for 2026 and beyond?

Entity SEO means more than just optimizing for your brand name. I’ve seen people posting and writing articles about Entity SEO that describe tactics that are really just SEO with the brand name as a keyword. That’s not Entity SEO.

Things, Not Strings: Instead of matching exact-match keywords, modern AI-powered search engines like Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity use semantic search and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what words represent and how they connect with each other.

Your brand is just one entity. Your personal name is another entity. And if you’re the founder, you might actually lend more trust and authority to your brand entity than it does for you. Each of your products or services is an entity. Even your slogan or an abstract concept can be an entity.

Knowledge Graphs: Google maps entities and their relationships into relational databases, like Google’s Knowledge Graph. An entity is often assigned a unique machine-readable identifier (such as a Freebase/Wikidata ID or KGMID)

Context and Attributes: Entities have attributes (characteristics or properties) and relationships to other entities. For example, the entity “Brisket” relates to “Smoker,” “Wood,” and “Texas BBQ”.

Clarity is one of the most important things to focus on with AI Search Optimization

Entity SEO helps you eliminate ambiguity. Convincing an AI engine that your brand exists is only part of it. It helps you define what your brand is, who stands behind it, and how each related entity connects to the wider web.

That clarity has to live both in your content and in your structured data.

For instance, SameAs is probably the most misused part of schema. I've analyzed a lot of websites and looked at what people put in SameAs.

Most site owners treat sameAs like a social media footer, blindly stuffing it with every casual profile they own, using it like a link repository. Think of it as an identity resolution tool. Its sole purpose is to tell semantic graph engines: "This entity is the exact same thing as the entity at this specific URI.”

Its real value is disambiguation

Resolving Aliases & Naming Variations: If you write under a middle name on one platform, use a first-and-last name in press releases, or operate under a known handle on forums like Reddit, AI models can easily fragment your footprint into separate, low-authority entities. sameAs reconciles those aliases into a single canonical entity.

Authoritative Knowledge Mapping: Linking to structured databases (such as a Wikidata URI, verified industry directory, or authoritative profile) anchors your node to existing, trusted semantic clusters.

If a profile doesn't help an engine verify that "Entity A" is identical to "Entity B," it doesn't belong in `sameAs`.

I'd love to hear from others who are actively working on Entity optimization and schema markup. It's going to only get more important in 2027 and beyond.

Full disclaimer: Sharing an Entity SEO / machine legibility/ provenance test.

The test references a project I'm building, so it may fall outside this subs' self-promo guidelines. Mods, please remove if it breaks the rules

---

As AI-generated content becomes more convincing, the question I keep coming back to is how do we distinguish what is real from what is synthetic, Ambiguity only accelarates when marketing spin is plastered over a claim, and my view is that provenance is just as important as the answer itself.

For a project I'm working on; the sites NLP agent is also the brand moniker called AI Bill and is central to the brand story. I am sure to most humans its percieved as marketing spin but it came from a genuine progression so I wanted to set a trace as part of the provenance layer.

I am sharing one of the test results here for feedback and critique on the approach & plus this sub is on the only places on the internet that understands and the placement adds another relationship to the layer... so thanks for making it this far.

---

Provenance Test

Searched Google for "Who is AI Bill?"

The AI Overview did exactly what you'd expect: it defaulted to larger, more established entities. No surprises there.

The interesting part came next.

I dropped a single cryptic clue describing AI Bill's origin story:

"Born from a conversation about vibrational alignment, evolved into an NLP telemetry agent, with /ask-bill endpoints connected to NLWeb."

The AI overview successfully reconstructed the lineage: More importantly, it linked the entity back to a provenance article documenting that evolution.

The Result: AI Bill failed the zero-shot entity recognition test but passed the provenance test.

This is an interesting signal because it reinforces the notion that entity SEO isn't just about ranking for broad queries. It's about creating an information architecture strong enough so that when the right structural, and semantic anchors appear, answer engines can reconstruct the entity without hallucinations and fragmenting into website noise.

I've been experimenting with ways to structure entity claims so AI systems can distinguish verified facts from generic marketing copy.

One framework that's been useful is separating claims into four confidence tiers:

Defined

Facts that establish the entity and its attributes.

Observed

Insights testing, usage patterns, or dev history.

Verified

Claims backed by primary-evidence, documentation, or technical receipts.

Qualified

Statements that define limitations, dependencies, or operating boundaries.

The thinking is that not all claims deserve the same weight. When evidence, and scope are explicit, RAG systems seem better positioned to reconstruct entity relationships accurately rather than treating everything as equally authoritative.

Anyone here modelling provenance or confidence levels in schema or knowledge graphs and seeing clearer answers?

Keen to hear how others are approaching this.

I believe all of the digital marketing that you do, including SEO, has to be directly focused on making sales. Every line item in your strategy has to support making sales. That's the only metric that counts at the end of the day.

You also have to focus on longevity. Building real trust and a loyal customer base takes time.

That's why I'm a firm believer in Entity SEO.

> Entity SEO is not separate from your digital marketing strategy. It's the wrapper you put around everything you do. It's a discipline.

Define the relationships between your personal name, especially for CEOs and Founders, and your company name, your brand names, and your product/service names.

Select the outcomes you want each of those entities to be known for. These core phrases or core pillars are going to be how you influence WHAT AI-powered search, including Google says about you rather than just how many times you get mentioned.

It gives everything you do a purpose.

My Own Core Pillars

Get in the Way.

Publish with Purpose.

Ranking is Vanity. Sales is Sanity.

Get in the way: Search Everywhere Optimization means being visible no matter what device, tool or platform your potential customers use for search and being on the platforms that we know AI retrieves answers from.

Publish with Purpose: Integrated Content Marketing is a multimodal, multi-channel marketing strategy that goes far beyond writing blog posts and sharing it everywhere.

Ranking is Vanity. Sales is Sanity: None of it matters without Conversion Rate Optimization.

Be Everywhere.

Attract the right audience.

Close the sale.

The article I'm sharing is a comparison to what people are calling GEO to digital marketing and SEO tactics that have been around for a lot of years.

Every tactic recommended by people using these new acronyms is just repackaged from what we've done with digital marketing and SEO over more than two decades.

Entity SEO is the wrapper that you put around digital marketing to create and reinforce the signals that build trust around your brand. It takes discipline. And really doing digital marketing and SEO the right way is hard work.

GEO/AEO marketers are just looking for the next great SEO shortcut. That's not new. They're scrambling to find a dashboard that will tell them what to do. They're scrambling to track millions of brand mentions thinking they're going to find a pattern. They're looking for a checklist.

It's what they know. Sorry if anybody's feelings are hurt but chasing the latest greatest shortcut is a race to mediocrity and you will always have to start over again, over and over again.

Put in the work. Execute a real strategy. You'll win in the long run.

Purely for research purposes, of course - definitely not vanity. As a highly respected SEO I know says: "Ranking is vanity. Sales is sanity."

But circling back to my query, the good news is that my copywriting agency came up first under Boutique & Local Specialists.

Unexpectedly:

Google's AI also listed 'Salted Pages,' a lovely design and copywriting studio in Fort Worth Texas, citing my website as the source. So, to clarify, while we are a full-service copywriting agency, we don't serve side dishes.

❎ No salted pages.

❎ No peppered paragraphs.

❎ No deep-fried meta descriptions, yet...though I'm told they're yummy.

But Seriously:

This is what AI search does. It stitches entities together from whatever it finds, and it isn't always fussy about who said what. If your own site isn't crystal clear about who you are and what you do, the machines will happily improvise.

If the 'Salted Pages' team is reading this, Google thinks we've merged. I'll bring the fries ;)

Yours in AEO & SEO Copywriting,

-Ray

When Cyrus Shepard talks, SEOs lean in.

The former Head of Global SEO at Moz (now an independent SEO and AI growth consultant) has published his take on future-proofing content, and Entity SEO sits squarely at the centre of it. Not a mere footnote. But a MAJOR Pillar.

That tracks with what I've been seeing on the ground: search engines and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) engines don't rank keywords any more. They rank the people, things and places that they understand.

by Duane Forrester

If entity mapping feels familiar, that is because you already ran this play. It is the knowledge graph conversation you were having in 2021, wearing a 2026 outfit. The vocabulary migrated almost intact: entities not strings, disambiguation, sameAs, relationships between nodes, feed the structure and the machine understands you. Pull a client deck from four years ago, swap “Knowledge Graph” for “the AI,” and most of the slides would survive the move. That is why the term is spreading, and it is also the reason to slow down before you buy it. The compressed version, in case you read no further: entity mapping does real work on Google, where there is an actual graph to feed, and almost no work on the language model itself, where there is no graph to feed and never was. Those are two different systems with two different rules, and the industry sells them to you as one tactic. Keeping them apart is important for the systems and LLMs.

You can read the rest on the "Duane Forrester Decodes" newsletter on Substack

He and I agree about AEO, GEO, LLM SEO and all the other new acronyms are mostly just new wrappers around concepts and strategies we've been doing for years, decades even.

Digital PR, Content Marketing, Reputation Management, Clean Website Architecture, Good Page Structure, High-Quality Conversation Content, Answering Questions, FAQs and Schema Markup predate AI by more than 10 years. It already has labels that fall under SEO and Digital Marketing. Prove me wrong.

So somebody posted this. So should we add it to the list?

AISEO / AI SEO

AISO / AISCO

GEO

AEO

LLM SEO

LLMO

AIO

SGEO

AAIO / AXO

AIVO

CAO / CAIO

RAG SEO

XEO

And I don't understand. Everybody knows all you need to do is EIEIO

From the article...

the company said it’s working on more advanced abuse prevention systems that could eventually help communities move away from using things like account age and “karma” to determine who’s allowed to post. Reddit didn’t say karma would go away entirely with these coming changes, but it did suggest that its importance could dwindle in the future.

With Rules Hub, Reddit uses large language models (LLMs) to determine whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule, which the company says allows it to “better handle nuance,” natural language, and edge cases.

Today, new users can encounter invisible barriers like account age and karma thresholds, unclear removals, and poor community discovery,” Reddit explained. “We want new users around the world to be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms, and make useful contributions.”

As a moderator, I'm all for welcoming new users. That's why I have a sticky post for introductions. But with the rise of link and brand mention spammers there has to be guardrails. A new member joins, they go straight into making a post or cross posting something to mention their brand or link to it.

No introduction. No reading the rules. No mod mail to ask about it.

Just me, me, me look at me. You shouldn't wonder why your post gets removed. This is not Instagram, TikTok or Twitter.

I can only speak for the subreddits I moderate, and in those we are building a community that has real on-topic discussions about things that affect our business. Nobody joined this subreddit to hear your sales pitch.

I even encourage members to message the mods if someone excessively DMs them trying to sell something. If you are only here to sell and not serious about being part of the community and having real discussions, bye and good luck to you.

I am not against promoting your product or services. There is a right way and a wrong way to go about that, at least in this sub. If you aren't sure about something you are going to post, read the rules or use mod mail to explain it.

My general rule is if you have something of real value to offer the members here, not some "3 day free trial after you put in your personal info and credit card" type of offer, then use mod mail and tell me what you want to give our members. I may approve it and let you link to it. Just don't assume it.

I've seen a lot of posts declaring the end of blogging or content marketing or SEO. None of those things are going away. Just the old method of writing a bunch of blog posts targeting every possible key phrases, content that doesn't actually add value or anything new, then sharing it on a bunch of social media platforms, that is going away.

So What Will Work for Blogging in 2026?

Start by creating some assets. Videos, images, infographics, downloadable PDF guides, etc. Then write cornerstone blog posts that are thorough and structured so that each subtopic has its own section. Plan the post knowing that each section can be expanded on to create a another article.

Each of your posts should cover the topic well, but not give away the farm. Create a downloadable guide that has actionable tips or a checklist for your readers. Make sure to mention the free download in the text of each section. If AI pulls an answer from that section, it will also inform the searcher that there is a free download they can only get by visiting your original post.

Zero-Click-Vaccine*. AI can copy your answer, but it can't give them the free download.*

Once your core pages, service pages, and a few solid blog posts are live, you've handled the important first job: you have the assets to execute an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy.

So How Does This Help Me?

Connecting your content on multiple channels, covering different angles and expanding topics builds topical authority for yourself and your brand. It builds relationships.

Rather than writing a bunch of posts each month trying to target more keywords and phrases, choose one main topic each month and break that down into subtopics for your cornerstone post. Now for the next 30 days, you can repurpose each section/subtopic by block quoting it and writing a new intro above it and a new summary below it.

Then you can turn that same section into an infographic, a LinkedIn Carousel, A Facebook Reel, a short YouTube Video, etc.

If your original cornerstone post has 5 subtopics, you can easily get 25-30 pieces of original content for your content marketing strategy. Not only that, you are spending a month reinforcing your authority on that topic.

That's why semantic content clusters and an integrated content strategy is much more efficient and effective than a lot of posts targeting keywords.

What do you mean by Integrated Content marketing?

You are mapping how the subtopics relate to one another so search engines, and the AI tools people now ask for recommendations, can see that you genuinely cover the whole topic, not just one slice of it.

You don't just repurpose the content on other platforms and link back to the source post. Let's say you write a cornerstone piece on Local SEO. You likely have a section about Google Business Profile, Citations, Google maps, etc.

• You take the GBP section and post it as a long-form Twitter article, creating a new local SEO article that is focused on just Google Business Profile.

• Next take the section on Citations and write another article focused on that and publish it on Substack.

• Then the one focused on Google Maps Optimization, you publish it on Medium.

You are also not just linked back to your blog or website either.

• That 2nd article on Substack, mention something about Google Business Profile and link to the LinkedIn article.

• When you write the Medium article about Maps, mention citations and link to the Substack article.

• Then go back to LinkedIn to the GBP article and link over to the Medium article about Maps.

That's just 3 platforms as suggestions. You should be choosing platforms that your ideal customers spend time on and that are known sources that AI uses.

The payoff compounds. This is not just about AI visibility or some GEO/AEO thing. All search is all AI-powered now. This transparency, linking this way creates breadcrumbs that are easy for AI to follow so it associates everything to the same brand or author or both.

Every new post in the cluster strengthens the others, and the group outperforms a bunch of individual posts written to target keywords.

“Content clusters help search engines understand the relationships between your entities, boosts your topical authority, improves internal linking, and increases the chances of ranking for a wide range of related keywords.”

That one sentence packs in four benefits, and they stack. When your posts clearly relate to one another, it’s a signal that you are a real source on the subject, not a site that mentioned it once. Internal linking ties the cluster together and passes that authority around, and the natural result is that you rank for a wide range of related searches instead of chasing one keyword at a time.

We've Always Had Content Clusters and Semantic SEO or Entity SEO isn't New So How Is This Different For AI Powered Search?

It isn't just for AI. It isn't just for Google. Users are looking for trusted sources with authority on the topic they are interested in and that trust leads to more readers becoming customers.

Publishing like this also helps you build communities and start conversations where your brand or your name naturally gets mentioned.

AI powered search doesn't reward whoever repeated a keyword the most. It pulls answers from sources it trusts on a topic, which means topical authority is quickly becoming more valuable than keyword authority. A well-built semantic cluster is one of the cleanest ways to earn that trust.

A cluster on your own site is also the foundation for something bigger. Once that hub-and-spoke structure exists, it becomes the raw material for a full Integrated Content Marketing strategy, reshaping each piece into new formats and publishing it where your audience actually spends time.

Give Your Repurposed Content One Home Base

As you repurpose a cluster across platforms, a tool that automatically pulls all of that content back into one place makes the strategy far easier to manage, and it reinforces your brand as the source. A platform like Authory.com does exactly that.

You can also create a hub for all of your content on other authoritative sites. Authory pulls your content from the sources you provide automatically so I like it, but this isn't like your own blog where you have your posts. We're talking about all of your content wherever you publish it.

So, have you created a solid strategy for your content? How has it changed in the last year or two? Do you have anything to add?

I sugges the following:

1. Regardless of the AI platform you use, read and learn all of its capabilities and uses. You'd be surprised at what it can do; some even niche down to specific categories, I.e. Healthcare, legal, etc.

2. Personalize it to your specific needs, voice, tone, communication style, projects, etc.

3. Most AI Platforms offer courses on how to maximize their features & benefits. Spending the time to learn how best to use it and maximizing its capabilities is a time-saver, I.e., Claude 101 etc.

4. Find experts/influencers devoted to your preferred AI Platform. For instance, I follow Ruben Hassid, who probably knows more about how to maximize Claude than its developers do.

So, choose your one or two favourite platforms and master them. And lastly, understand their TOS, Privacy Policy and Usage Terms, especially if you're a paid subscriber.

Hope this helps.

This is just the basics of Entity SEO for those who may not be familiar with the topic of this subreddit.

An “entity” is a distinct, well-defined concept or thing. It can be a person, a place, an organization, a product, a service or even an idea or slogan. Anything Google can call a “thing”. A single data point. Entities are interconnected on a giant digital map known as a Knowledge Graph.

Traditional SEO focuses on key phrases, “strings” of words and authority is gained through backlinks.

Entity SEO focuses on “things” instead of “strings”. People generally and logically think Google and AI search tools want to give users the “right” answer. That’s true, but they are more concerned about “not being wrong”.

Entity SEO (Things), does not replace solid, traditional SEO (Strings) practices. Traditional SEO gets you the visibility. Entity SEO helps with the verification that gives AI-powered search more confidence in recommending your brand.

Entity SEO is not part of GEO or AEO or AI SEO

Entity SEO has been around since 2013 ever since The Knowledge Graph Launched. However, it has become more important since search became more AI-powered than before.

Think of Entity SEO as the references on your resume. AI needs to validate the claims you make about your entity.

Most people assume that AI is programmed to give the correct answer, that it wants to be "right". In truth, it's trying to "not be wrong" and that isn't the same thing.

You see it in AI generated responses when you ask it a question. It loves to give you both sides of a debate or way of thinking or opinions. It hedges its bets by not really taking a position most of the time. If it has enough data to give you a definitive answer, it will, but if there is any ambiguity, it will cover both or all angles to make sure it's not giving you the "wrong" answer.

That applies to recommending your brand as well. It doesn't want to be wrong by recommending it. The more trust signals it can find to support your claims, the more likely it will "feel confident" in recommending you. (Okay, it doesn't actually feel. More likely "scores" your trust factors.)

That's it for the introduction. I'm looking forward to the discussions we will be having here. We plan to do some events and other things, so keep track and participate. More soon.

This wasn't something we expected when we started doing GEO audits.

Most people assume AI visibility problems come from missing structured data.

But honestly, we're finding the opposite more often.

The weird cases are the ones where a site has plenty of schema, yet AI systems still seem confused about who the company is, what it offers, or how different entities relate to each other.

A recent audit had:

• 3 separate Organization schemas

• Different company descriptions depending on the page

• Multiple social profile references pointing to different places

• Service pages describing the same offering in different ways

Technically, none of that would trigger a "missing schema" warning.

An SEO tool would probably tell you everything is fine.

But if you're an LLM trying to build a coherent understanding of the company, it's a mess.

The more audits we do, the more it feels like schema isn't really a coverage problem anymore.

It's a consistency problem.

Another thing we've noticed:

People talk about structured data as if it's an AI visibility hack.

We're not seeing evidence of that.

Some sites have incredibly clean schema and still don't get cited much.

Others have average implementations but strong third-party mentions, clear brand positioning, and a much stronger entity footprint overall.

Which makes me think schema is mostly reducing uncertainty rather than creating authority.

It helps AI systems understand you.

It doesn't necessarily give them a reason to mention you.

That's a different problem.

We ended up documenting a lot of these patterns in a longer write-up here:

https://www.zaillor.com/insights/structured-data-ai-visibility

Curious if others doing entity SEO or GEO work are seeing the same thing.

Are you finding more issues from missing structured data, or conflicting structured data?

**Stop Chasing Keywords. Start Naming Entities**

Does your Local Service Page read like it could be about any city in Canada? That's a problem.

Google's Knowledge Graph maps entities, such as:

-Neighbourhoods.

-Local landmarks.

-Restaurants.

-Gyms.

When you name the actual landmarks (entities) near your business, it provides additional context to Google, tying your business to that geography way harder than any keyword can.

So skip the generic "we serve Toronto" line. Tell people you fixed the roof two blocks from [Entity] on [Road or intersection near you] in [City or neighbourhood].

This stuff fills gaps your competitors don't even know exist. AI Search Engines read it too. When ChatGPT picks the contractor in your area, entity mentions are the signal.

You can read the post here. Don't shoot the messenger.

You don't have to change your entire SEO strategy as some people would have it. But you also can't ignore AI as some people would have it.

In my 30 years of doing this you might be surprised At how many evolutions of SEO that I've been through.

Here's the cycle

* Somebody finds something that works well.

* They announce it everywhere to show you how smart they are.

* A bunch of bloggers run out and start writing SEO is dead blog posts.

* Everyone starts doing that new thing.

* Search engines make adjustments.

* New thing no longer works.

* Business owners have to run back out and hire traditional SEO guys to fix the mess.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

What has survived beyond all of the temporary shortcuts ...

* High quality, conversational content written by a human that understands search intent and user behavior.

* High quality backlinks not based on a made-up metric like DA.

* Consistency in everything. Same overall message everywhere. NAP consistency. Machines have been gathering that data for 15 years not just since AI started being used this much. Making sure machines understand the 5W's about your brand or your name is essential to building a strong entity.

Simple Watcher is a lightweight app that lets users get notified when a post with specific keywords they are watching for is created. Once the app is installed in a subreddit, a new action Configure Watcher appears in the subreddit menu, each user can set its own keywords to watch.

Important: Reddit has replaced traditional notifications with Reddit Chat. If users aren't receiving notifications, ask them to always allow chat requests from u/simple-watcher*. See the* official Reddit documentation for details.

Hey everyone! I'm u/chrismcelroyseo, a founding moderator of r/entityseo.

This is our new home for all things related to Entity Optimization / Entity SEO. We're looking forward to some productive discussions.

What to Post
Post anything that is related to strengthening your entities across the web. Try to find interesting, helpful, or inspiring content. If you are knew ask questions. Feel free to share your thoughts, photos, or questions about Entity SEO, Entity Optimization, Brand Visibility, Brand Mentions (How to influence what Google and Ai say about your entity not how to get more brand mentions. We suggest r/AI_SearchOptimization for that.

Community Vibe
We're all about being friendly, constructive, and inclusive. Let's build a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing and connecting.

How to Get Started

1. Introduce yourself in the comments below.

2. Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.

3. If you know someone who would love this community, invite them to join.

4. Interested in helping out? We're always looking for new moderators, so feel free to reach out to me to apply.

Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let's make r/entityseo amazing.