What is entity SEO?
Entity SEO is the work of helping search systems and language models recognize a specific brand, product, person, or place, and understand how it relates to a category. It relies on consistent names, descriptions, and corroboration across pages you control and pages you do not. It is clarity, not a schema trick.
Why it matters for AI visibility
AI answers talk about things, not only keyword strings. If your product name is spelled three ways, shares a name with an unrelated company, or is described differently on your site and on reviews, an assistant can merge you with someone else or skip you when the category is discussed. Entity SEO matters for AI visibility because a citation is more likely when the system can tell who you are and what you are for. The practical work is consistent naming, a clear description of the category, identifiable authors where a person is the entity, and third-party pages that describe you the same way. Organization and product structured data can support that clarity for Search. It does not force an LLM to mention you. Align the visible sentences first, then the markup.
Example
A tool is called “Northwind” on the homepage, “Northwind HQ” in a review profile, and “NW” in a docs title. An assistant answering “what is Northwind?” hedges or describes the wrong company. Aligning the public name and the one-sentence description gives both readers and engines a single entity to resolve.
Related terms
Schema markup for AI is one way to repeat those facts in a machine-readable form. Topical authority is coverage of the subject around the entity. E-E-A-T is the quality idea that experience and corroboration make the entity more trustworthy to describe.