Entity SEO is search optimization organized around entities — people, companies, organizations, products, places — rather than around keywords. An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing with attributes and relationships, and modern search engines (and AI answer engines) reason about entities by reconciling their attributes across many sources. Entity SEO ensures those attributes are consistent, authoritative, and machine-readable.
The shift from keyword SEO to entity SEO reflects how search has evolved. Search engines no longer match strings; they understand things. They build a knowledge graph of entities and their relationships, and they return results and summaries based on that understanding. For reputation, this means the question is not "what ranks for this query" but "what does the engine know about this entity, and where did it learn it."
Entity SEO practice includes defining the entity's canonical attributes clearly and consistently across owned properties, marking them up with structured data (schema.org Organization, Person, Product), securing presence in authoritative sources the engines trust (knowledge panels, verified profiles, authoritative directories, Wikipedia where applicable), and ensuring the entity is correctly disambiguated from other entities with similar names.
Entity SEO is foundational to generative engine optimization. AI answer engines synthesize answers by reconciling entity attributes across sources; if those attributes are inconsistent, the engine produces a low-confidence or contradictory summary, and inconsistency favors whichever source is loudest — which is often not the entity itself. Clean entity definitions are the prerequisite for accurate AI representation.
For reputation management, entity SEO is the bridge between traditional search visibility and AI representation. An entity whose canonical facts are consistent, authoritative, and well-structured across the web will be represented accurately in both ranked results and synthesized answers. An entity whose facts are scattered and inconsistent will be represented however the loudest source describes it — which is the root of most AI-reputation problems.