Entity SEO: why AI search mixes up your company with others

In a patent, Google describes an entity as “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable,” such as a person, a place or an idea (Google patent US 10,339,190 B2 (external site)). A patent shows how Google describes a method. It doesn’t show whether or how Google uses it.

So that machines can recognize the same entity everywhere, it gets an identifier. In Google’s Knowledge Graph Search API (external site), every entity has its own identifier, such as kg:/m/0dl567 in the documentation’s example. In Wikidata, a free knowledge base, every item is identified by a Q followed by a number, such as Q42 for Douglas Adams (Wikidata’s introduction (external site)).

On your website, you can link your company to entries like these with structured data. The sameAs property from the Schema.org vocabulary points to a page that “unambiguously indicates the item’s identity,” such as a Wikidata entry or the official website (Schema.org on sameAs (external site)).

Our guide to generative engine optimization (GEO) compares how each AI system chooses its sources. For the facts about your company, four sources matter most:

• Profiles and your website: Google compiles its Business Profiles partly from publicly available information, such as a company’s official website. It also uses licensed third-party data, information from users and business owners, and its own interactions with a place or business (Google on where Business Profile information comes from (external site)).
• The Knowledge Graph: According to Google, AI Overviews work in tandem with Search’s ranking systems and the Knowledge Graph. AI Mode draws on facts from the Knowledge Graph (Google’s explainer on AI Overviews and AI Mode (external site)). AI answers can also include information about local businesses. Google says a Business Profile can help a business become visible there (Google’s guide to generative AI features (external site)).
• The search index: In its Bing Webmaster Guidelines (external site), Microsoft says that Bing and Microsoft Copilot rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as traditional search. For its web search, ChatGPT sometimes partners with other search providers. For nearby businesses, it can use third-party services (OpenAI on searching the web with ChatGPT (external site)).
• Training data: Without a web search, a language model answers from what it learned in training. That knowledge stops at a cutoff date. For the current Claude models, Anthropic gives June 2026 (Anthropic’s models overview (external site)). Anything that happened after that, such as a change of address, isn’t in it.

Shared names

Search systems that retrieve documents for question-answering applications favor the better-known entity when two share a name. In a 2021 study, they retrieved wrong documents twice as often for questions about the less popular of two entities with the same name (Chen et al., 2021 (external site)).

Language models also struggle to keep entities with the same name apart. Researchers tested this with documents about different entities that share a name, such as several people named Michael Jordan. The leading models at the time often gave ambiguous answers or wrongly merged information about different entities (Lee et al., 2024 (external site)). Our assessment for small businesses: if a better-known company has the same name, its facts can easily end up in answers about you.

Little coverage

Language models know more about well-known entities than about little-known ones. A 2023 study with 14,000 questions about lesser-known entities found that models answer questions about less popular facts less accurately, and that larger models barely change this. By contrast, retrieving relevant documents and passing them to the model helped significantly (Mallen et al., 2023 (external site)). A second study found that the more documents relevant to a factual question were in a model’s training data, the better the model answered it (Kandpal et al., 2023 (external site)).

Researchers at OpenAI attribute hallucinations, meaning plausible but false statements, in part to individual facts with no pattern behind them in the data, such as birthdays (Kalai et al., 2025 (external site)). In our assessment, the owner, founding year or address of a small business is often exactly this kind of fact.

Outdated details

If you move or change your name, the old details can stay online for a long time, for example in directories and in articles on other sites. They can also remain in what language models learned in training. Bing’s guidelines advise notifying Bing quickly about new and changed content. According to Microsoft, this reduces outdated or incorrect links in Copilot’s answers.

Google may update a Business Profile itself if other sources report its details as incorrect or outdated. For certain edits that users suggest, Google notifies the owner before publishing them. If the owner doesn’t respond within four days, Google may publish the edit as long as other publicly available information, such as the business’s website, supports it (Google on updates to Business Profiles (external site)). So an old address on your website can support a wrong edit.

Inconsistent names

Bing’s guidelines call for “clear and consistent naming for people, organizations, products, and locations.” According to the same guidelines, a clearly defined entity improves citation accuracy. In a Business Profile, Google expects the name a business uses consistently on its storefront, website and stationery. Extras such as marketing taglines aren’t allowed in the name and can get the profile suspended (Google’s guidelines for Business Profiles (external site)).

Google introduced its Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012. It was meant to help Search understand “real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings” (Google’s Knowledge Graph announcement (external site)). Google’s example was a search for “Taj Mahal,” which could mean the monument, a musician or a casino. Now that Google can tell these entities apart, it can narrow the results to the one you mean.

According to Google, the facts come from content on the web and from open and licensed databases. Wikipedia is a commonly cited source, but just one of hundreds (Google on its Knowledge Graph and knowledge panels (external site)). We haven’t found a more recent total from Google than the one from May 2020.

Source: Google (external site), May 20, 2020 · size of the Knowledge Graph

Google creates knowledge panels automatically when there’s enough information about an entity on the open web. Google doesn’t rule out errors: the scale of search is so large, it says, that “no system can be perfect.” That’s why anyone can report problems (Google’s help page on how the Knowledge Graph works (external site)).

The numbers in the Sources column refer to the source list at the end of this article.

1. One name, the same everywhere. Settle on one spelling and use it on your website, your signage, your invoices and every profile. Step 3 of our how-to shows how to write a standard description and check your profiles against it: Are your company facts clear and consistent everywhere?
2. Structured data for your company. According to Google’s documentation, structured data of the type Organization on your home page helps Google understand a company’s administrative details and tell it apart from others in search results. Some properties are only used behind the scenes for this, such as identifiers under ISO 6523 (Google on Organization structured data (external site)). For your entity, the key properties are name, legalName for a registered legal name that differs from name, alternateName for another common name, and url. Google says the URL helps it identify a company uniquely. Our article Structured data and schema markup: what helps, what doesn’t explains how to build and test this markup.
3. Structured data for people. If one person is the face of your company, such as the owner, give them their own profile page and describe them with the type Person. For authors, Google recommends a link to a page that uniquely identifies the person. Google says it can understand both url and sameAs for this (Google on author markup (external site)). Our article What is E-E-A-T? explains what Google’s quality raters look at.
4. Use sameAs only for real profiles. With sameAs, you list pages on other websites that describe your company. Google gives profiles on social media and review sites as examples. Schema.org defines the purpose more narrowly: the page should unambiguously indicate the item’s identity. So only list profiles that you own, that you maintain and whose details match your website. Otherwise, an abandoned profile with an old address would point to exactly the details you want to change. For a short description that sets an item apart from similar ones, Schema.org provides the property disambiguatingDescription (Schema.org on disambiguatingDescription (external site)). Google’s Organization documentation doesn’t mention it.
5. Business listings on Google and Bing. Local businesses and businesses with a service area manage their presence in Google Search and Google Maps through a Business Profile, not a knowledge panel (Google on claiming knowledge panels (external site)). For its AI features, Google advises keeping your Business Profile information up to date (Google on AI features and your website (external site)). There should be only one profile per business. Otherwise, your information may not display properly in Maps and Search (Google Business Profile Help). Microsoft’s counterpart is Bing Places for Business. Listings there are free, appear in Bing search and Bing Maps, and can be imported from Google (Microsoft on the new Bing Places (external site)). Sign-up is now at bing.com/forbusiness.
6. Claim your knowledge panel. If Google already shows a knowledge panel for your company or for you, you can claim it as its subject or an official representative (Google Knowledge Panel Help). You verify your identity by signing in to an official account, such as Search Console or YouTube. After that, you can suggest changes and back them up with links. Not every panel can be claimed. If yours can’t, you can still use the Feedback option.

The Ahrefs study only covered pages that AI answers were already citing often. It leaves open whether structured data helps pages that don’t appear at all yet.

Source: Ahrefs (external site), May 11, 2026 · vendor study · 1,885 pages, 4,000 control pages

We also haven’t found any research on sentences that companies put on their own websites to set themselves apart from businesses with the same name. Whether such a sentence makes sense is also a question of trademark law. Check it with a lawyer before you publish it.

1. Find the source. Open the sources an answer cites. OpenAI recommends this itself and warns: “Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect.” If an answer cites no source, the information may come from what the model learned in training.
2. Correct your own details. Start with your website, your legal notice (Impressum) and your structured data. Google also looks at your website when it decides on suggested edits to a Business Profile (Google Business Profile Help).
3. Update profiles and directories. Update your Business Profile and review any changes Google has made itself. The profile editor shows them in blue (Google Business Profile Help). Change the same details in Bing Places, in industry directories and on review sites. If a Wikidata item about you already exists, an essay by Wikidata editors (external site) says you may correct clear factual errors. Request other changes on the item’s talk page, backed by reliable sources.
4. Submit your changes. Notify Bing of new and changed pages so its index is updated sooner (Microsoft Bing). Our how-to on Bing and IndexNow shows how.
5. Report the error to the provider. In an AI Overview, click the thumbs-down icon and then “Report a problem.” Google itself says that AI Overviews “can and will make mistakes” (Google’s help page on AI Overviews (external site)). Below a knowledge panel, you’ll find a “Feedback” link for this (Google Knowledge Panel Help). In ChatGPT, you can give feedback on a wrong answer with the thumbs-down button (OpenAI’s help article on ChatGPT (external site)).
6. Check again later. Ask the same questions again after a few weeks, ideally on a fixed schedule. Our how-to on measuring AI visibility explains how to choose the questions and evaluate the runs, in the section Which questions belong in your question panel?

Wikipedia: For companies, the German-language Wikipedia’s relevance criteria include at least 1,000 full-time employees, annual revenue of more than €100 million or shares traded on a regulated market. A company that meets none of the criteria needs other compelling arguments, because Wikipedia is explicitly not a business directory (Wikipedia’s relevance criteria, in German (external site)). If you write about your own company there, you have a conflict of interest. According to Wikipedia, intended promotion can backfire, because anyone can watch, criticize and edit its entries (Wikipedia on conflicts of interest, in German (external site)).

Source: Wikipedia (in German) (external site), Oct 27, 2026 · relevance criteria for companies

The English-language Wikipedia sets no such thresholds. Under its notability guideline for companies (external site), a company is presumed notable if multiple reliable, independent secondary sources have covered it in depth.

VAT identification number: If you have one, you can add it to your structured data as vatID. Google calls it an important trust signal, because users can look up your business in public VAT registries (Google Search Central).

LEI: The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) is a globally unique 20-character code for legal entities (GLEIF on the LEI (external site)). If your company has one, Google recommends the iso6523Code field with the prefix 0199 (Google Search Central).

Brand and legal name: Many small businesses operate under a brand that isn’t their legal name. In that case, state both together: in your legal notice, in your website’s footer and in your structured data as name and legalName.