What is an entity in the context of search and AI?

An entity is a thing that search and AI systems recognize as a distinct, identifiable subject with its own attributes and relationships, as opposed to a keyword, which is just a string of characters. The distinction is the foundation of modern reputation work. ‘Apple’ the company is an entity with a CEO, a headquarters, products, and a Wikipedia article; ‘apple’ the fruit is a different entity; the word ‘apple’ is a keyword that could mean either. Google and the AI engines resolve which entity a query refers to, then assemble what they know about that specific node to answer. This is why reputation has shifted from optimizing for keywords to building entity recognition: the goal is for Google and the AI engines to know, with high confidence, who or what a client is, what attributes attach to them, and which other entities they relate to. We call this layer of the work the entity layer, and getting it right is what makes everything downstream – Knowledge Panel, AI summary, accurate disambiguation – possible.