What is entity authority and how do you build it?

Entity authority is how confident Google and the AI engines are that they know who an entity is and that what they know is reliable. It is built from the strength and consistency of the signals that define the entity: a Wikipedia article where notability supports one, an accurate and well-linked Wikidata entry, an official site marked with the right schema, presence in authoritative directories, and citations from credible third parties that describe the entity consistently. The key word is consistency – when the name, description, and key attributes match across all of these, confidence rises; when they conflict, the systems hedge and the entity becomes fuzzy. Building authority is therefore as much about alignment as accumulation: a coherent set of well-sourced, mutually reinforcing signals beats a scattered pile of mentions. We build this deliberately as the entity layer, because high entity authority is what earns an accurate Knowledge Panel and a confident, correct answer from the AI engines rather than a hedged or mistaken one.