How does Google rank search results for branded queries?

Branded query ranking blends classical ranking factors with entity-layer signals that have grown in importance over the last five years. Classical factors include domain authority (the trust signal accumulated by the source), page authority (the same applied to the specific URL), relevance to the query, click and engagement behavior, and freshness. The entity layer adds: whether Google recognizes the brand as an entity in the Knowledge Graph, what attributes it associates with that entity (from Wikidata, schema, and authoritative sources), and how strongly different content is connected to that entity through sameAs links and structured data. The combination has shifted reputation work upstream toward the entity layer because that is the layer that increasingly determines both which results rank and what AI engines say. Optimizing for relevance and links alone, without the entity work, is now an incomplete program.