Entity first: Google and AI need to know who you are

Most SEO advice starts with keywords and content. I think it should start with a simpler question: does Google, or ChatGPT, or Perplexity, actually know who you are?

Not whether your site exists. Whether the systems reading it can confidently connect it to a specific person or organization, tell you apart from others with a similar name, and link your site to the other places you appear online.

That's what people mean by entity SEO. It sounds abstract, but the work is concrete, and most sites haven't done it. In my post on getting cited inside AI answers, I called identity the piece most sites skip. This is the longer version, using the site you're reading as the worked example.

What an entity is, in plain terms

Search engines have moved from matching strings of text toward understanding things: people, companies, places, concepts, and the relationships between them. Google's Knowledge Graph is the most visible example. When you search a well-known company and get a panel with its logo, founders and social profiles, that's Google showing you what it believes about an entity.

AI tools have a related problem. When they answer a question and cite a source, it helps to know who stands behind that source. A claim from an identifiable organization with a consistent footprint is easier to trust than the same claim from a page with no clear owner.

For most businesses and professionals, the goal isn't a knowledge panel. It's removing ambiguity. You want every system that encounters you to reach the same conclusion: this is one entity, this is its home, and these other profiles are also it.

Pick one canonical home

The first decision is where the authoritative version of you lives. For a company, that's usually the main website. For a person, it's often a personal site rather than a social profile you don't control.

I built hectorherrera.me for exactly this reason. My name shows up in a lot of places: professional profiles, project sites, media appearances. Without a single home, each of those is a disconnected fragment. With one, every other profile can point back to it, and it can point out to them.

A canonical home should:

• Be on a domain you own and control. Platforms change their rules, their layouts and their existence. Your domain doesn't.
• State plainly who you are and what you do. An About page with real specifics, written for people, not for keyword density. My about page is the one every profile points back to.
• Stay stable. URLs that don't move, a name that doesn't change spelling, a description that evolves slowly rather than being rewritten every quarter.
• Be fast and readable without JavaScript. My site is plain PHP, server-rendered, no trackers. That's a personal preference, but it also means any crawler gets the full content on the first request.

Make your name and details consistent everywhere

This is tedious and it matters. If your name, title, company name or description varies across profiles, you're making the matching problem harder.

A checklist I use:

• Name. Same spelling, same format. Decide whether you use a middle initial and stick to it.
• Organization name. Exactly one version. If the company is "Example Systems," it's never "ExampleSystems" in one place and "Example Systems LLC" in another unless there's a reason.
• Short description. One or two sentences you reuse, lightly adapted, across profiles.
• Photo and logo. The same images, so the visual identity matches.
• Links. Every profile that allows a website link points to your canonical home, not to a random project page.
• Contact details. For local businesses especially: name, address and phone that match across your site, your Google Business Profile and directories.

Go through every profile you have and fix the drift. Delete or update the ones you no longer maintain. An abandoned profile with an old title and a dead link is a conflicting signal.

Structured data that connects the dots

Schema.org markup lets you state these relationships in a machine-readable way. For a person, the core is a Person object on your canonical home. For a business, it's Organization (or a more specific subtype).

A simplified version of the kind of markup I'd put on a personal site:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "@id": "https://example.com/#person",
  "name": "Jane Example",
  "url": "https://example.com/",
  "image": "https://example.com/photo.jpg",
  "jobTitle": "Digital strategist",
  "description": "One or two sentences that match your About page.",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-profile",
    "https://github.com/your-profile"
  ]
}

A few things that make this useful rather than decorative:

• sameAs lists profiles that are genuinely you. It's a claim that these URLs refer to the same entity. Only include ones you control and keep current.
• Use a stable @id. Then reference that same ID from other markup, like the author of each article, so everything points at one node instead of creating a new anonymous person on every page.
• Match the visible page. The name, title and description in the markup should match what a person reads. Don't put claims in schema that aren't on the page.
• Link people and organizations deliberately. If you founded a company, Person can reference the Organization and vice versa. That relationship is part of what defines you.

Validate with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. Neither will tell you whether Google "believes" you, but they'll catch errors.

Worth being honest about the limits: structured data is a hint, not a command. It helps systems interpret what's on your page. It doesn't create authority that isn't there.

Authorship and the rest of the site

Entity signals aren't just the homepage. Every article should make clear who wrote it, with the author name linking to a profile or About page, and the article schema pointing to the same Person @id. On a company site, that means real author pages for real people, not "Admin" or "Staff Writer."

This matters more in topics where trust is central, like legal, medical or financial content. Google's quality guidelines put a lot of weight on who is behind content in those areas. An anonymous page about a serious topic starts at a disadvantage.

Corroboration you don't own

Everything above is you describing yourself. The final layer is other sources describing you the same way.

That comes from real activity: being listed in maintained directories in your field, appearing on podcasts and interviews with a link back to your canonical home, being cited by others because you published something useful. Each consistent mention is one more piece of evidence that your self-description is accurate.

You can help this along. When you appear somewhere, give them your exact name, your standard description and your canonical URL. Don't let each host improvise a bio.

Where to start this week

If you do nothing else:

1. Decide your canonical home and make sure it's on a domain you own.
2. Rewrite your About page so it states who you are, what you do, and your specifics, plainly.
3. Add Person or Organization schema with a stable @id and an honest sameAs list.
4. Audit every profile you have for name, description, photo and link consistency.
5. Make every article point to a real author.

None of this is exciting. It's the kind of foundational work that doesn't show a jump in a chart next week. But content, links and AI citations all sit on top of it. If the systems reading your site aren't sure who you are, everything else you publish is working harder than it should.