AI SEO Projects · Area 2 of 5
Entity Authority
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Entity authority is the work of making every entity a model must resolve — your organization, each product line, each hardware generation, your services, your key people — resolvable to one canonical home the model can connect. Optimization has moved from keyword strings to entities, and earned, third-party validation now outweighs anything you publish about yourself.
The sequence is settled and cheap at the front: entity home and sameAs rollout first, then Wikidata and Wikipedia stewardship, then the slower earned-media and disambiguation work. Verify structure against the entity checklist; the nested Person author schema template and the JSON-LD entity graphs briefing carry the patterns.
Projects in this area
Disambiguation kit for generic-word product names
Canonical "what is [product]" pages per product per market, with Organization/Product schema and dense sameAs links, targeting the names most likely to collide with common usage.
Earned-media entity program
Rank the outlets assistants actually cite for your category, aim PR there, and build correction pathways for the stale high-cited articles models keep repeating.
Entity home & sameAs rollout
Give every entity a model must resolve — organization, product lines, generations, key people — one canonical home with linked schema and verified sameAs profiles.
Multilingual entity parity audit
Query the major assistants with brand and product prompts across your largest markets; score accuracy, staleness, and name collisions; rank markets by entity risk.
Wikidata & Wikipedia stewardship
Complete, sourced, multilingual coverage for every entity in your hierarchy — maintained through the verifiable public record, with drift monitoring across language editions.
What this area buys you
- Entities now outweigh keywords as the dominant signal — brand mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664 versus 0.218 for backlinks, and one brand raised its Perplexity citation share from 10% to 26% just by implementing sameAs links.
- A resolvable entity home is cheap and high-leverage — entity home, then Wikidata, then sameAs schema cost almost nothing but implementation time, and models resolve the entity before deciding whether to cite it.
- Earned coverage is the main carrier of brand facts into the next training run — only ~5–10% of what AI cites comes from your own site, so tech press, gaming media, and creator reviews carry most of the citation weight.
Where it goes wrong
- Entity work decays by default in a divisional org — no single team naturally owns the shared organization-level entity, so it rots quietly while product teams optimize around it.
- Fast product cycles cause brand drift the model layer holds onto — a training cutoff can leave an assistant confidently describing last generation's console for months after launch, and owned-content edits can't directly overwrite it.
- Authority is not solved once but per market — AI can describe the same brand with different attributes in different languages, so disambiguation and sameAs hygiene are a standing burden across dozens of markets.
Myths worth striking
- Myth: More sameAs links always add authority.
- Reality: Links to weak or unverified profiles add noise, not authority, and dilute the graph. Verified, maintained profiles only; prune dead or off-brand ones.
- Myth: You can fix a stale AI answer by updating your website.
- Reality: Owned content moves the retrieval layer, not the model layer. What a model "believes" about your brand changes with entity and earned-media signals across training cycles — measured in model releases, not page edits.
- Myth: You edit Wikipedia and Wikidata to control your entity.
- Reality: You build the verifiable public record — sourced coverage, consistent facts — and let the community reflect it. Direct editing for promotion is the fast path to reversal and reputational risk.