Entity
An entity is a thing a search or answer engine can identify and hold facts about, such as a company, a person, a product or a place, as distinct from the words used to describe it.
Search moved from matching strings to resolving entities, and answer engines went further because a model has no link graph, only text. The practical consequence is that a site has to state plainly what it is, what it sells and who runs it, in places a machine reads: an Organization block defined once, a consistent name, and external sources that corroborate it.
Ambiguity is the failure mode. If a brand name is also a common word and nothing on the site disambiguates it, a model will confidently describe a different company.
Related
Structured data
Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, that states what a page is about in a defined vocabulary rather than leaving it to be inferred from the prose.
Unlinked mention
An unlinked mention is an occurrence of a brand name on another site that does not carry a hyperlink back to it.
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