What is an entity in search?
An entity is a thing an engine models as a distinct object in the world, such as a specific company, product or person, as opposed to a string of text.
Entity resolution is the step where an engine decides that three different mentions refer to one company. It is the quiet precondition for being recommended: an assistant will not confidently name a business it cannot resolve.
Most of what is called entity work in practice is making that resolution easy, through consistent naming, structured data, and presence on the third-party sources that engines already treat as authoritative.
Related
- sameAssameAs is a schema.org property listing other URLs that represent the same entity, such as a company's LinkedIn, GitHub or Crunchbase profiles.
- Structured dataStructured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page and its subject are.
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
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