How does Google’s Knowledge Graph work?

The Knowledge Graph (Google’s structured database of entities and how they relate) is Google’s structured map of the world: a database of distinct entities and the relationships between them, rather than a list of pages. When Google is confident enough about an entity (who a person is, what a company does, how they connect to other entities) it draws on the Graph to generate the Knowledge Panel, populate AI Overviews, and power the entity features that increasingly frame a search result before the user reads a single link. For reputation work this matters because the Graph is upstream of so much of what people see. It is fed by sources Google trusts to define entities: Wikipedia, Wikidata, official websites with schema markup (structured tags that tell search engines what a page is about), and authoritative third-party references. Influencing what the Graph believes about an entity means improving those underlying sources, which is the entity layer of a reputation program. We track how an entity renders across Google with IMPACT™, because the Knowledge Graph’s read on a client is now the foundation the rest of the result is built on.