Entity SEO: the reference wiki
Entity SEO is the practice of helping search engines and answer engines recognise the real-world things your content is about (people, organizations, places, products and ideas) and connect them to what they already know. It sits on top of ordinary SEO: a page that cannot be crawled and indexed cannot teach a search engine anything about an entity.
EntitySEO.wiki explains how Google and other engines model “things, not strings”,[1] how to find the entities that matter for a topic, how to describe your own organization or person with structured data, and why solid SEO is the foundation for answer engine optimization. Every factual claim links to a source, and tactics carry an evidence label:
Officially documented documented by the search engine or standards body · Independent study a published study found it · Practitioner practice common practitioner practice, not confirmed by vendors · Not supported contradicted by vendors or unsupported.
Key facts (September 2026)
- Google launched its Knowledge Graph in May 2012 with “more than 500 million objects” and more than 3.5 billion facts about them.[1] By 2020 Google said it held “over 500 billion facts about five billion entities.”[2]
- Knowledge panels are generated automatically from sources across the web; people and organizations shown in one can claim it and suggest changes.[3][4]
- Google recommends JSON-LD for structured data but “does not guarantee” that markup will produce any search feature.[5][6]
- Google says SEO best practices “remain relevant” for AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special schema or extra files required.[7]
- Wikidata data is released under CC0, and an item needs only one of three notability criteria.[8][9]
Start here
Definition, scope and what it changes.
Things, identifiers and attributes.
Disambiguation, panels, AI answers.
How the two approaches fit together.
SEO fundamentals
The crawl, index, serve pipeline.
Googlebot, robots.txt, sitemaps.
Canonicals, noindex, duplicates.
Titles, headings, content, snippets.
Status codes, speed, mobile, JS.
Internal links, backlinks, rel values.
Relevance, distance, prominence.
Why answer engines start with SEO.
Find, map and build entities
Six practical methods compared.
Look up KG IDs and types.
Q-IDs, properties, SPARQL.
Entities and salience in text.
Turn findings into a content plan.
Entity home, schema, profiles.
Types, properties, @id, sameAs.
History, sources and panels.
Reference and tools
Use the schema generator to draft Organization, LocalBusiness or Person JSON-LD, work through the entity SEO audit checklist, and browse the glossary, FAQ, myths, tools and full source list. The contents page lists every article.
Who writes this
EntitySEO.wiki is written by Simon White, “The SEO Fire Fighter” and co-founder of Local Blitz, with AI assistance and human review. Read the editorial policy for how pages are researched and corrected. Its sister site AEO.wiki covers answer engine optimization in the same format.
See also
References
Pages accessed September 29, 2026 unless a date is given. See all sources and our editorial policy.
- ^ "Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings (Amit Singhal)". Google (The Keyword). Published May 16, 2012.
- ^ "A reintroduction to our Knowledge Graph and knowledge panels (Danny Sullivan)". Google (The Keyword). Published May 20, 2020.
- ^ "About knowledge panels". Google Knowledge Panel Help.
- ^ "Get verified on Google". Google Knowledge Panel Help.
- ^ "Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search". Google Search Central.
- ^ "General structured data guidelines". Google Search Central.
- ^ "AI features and your website". Google Search Central. Last updated December 10, 2025.
- ^ "Wikidata: Licensing". Wikidata.
- ^ "Wikidata: Notability". Wikidata.