Entity optimization
Entity optimization is the practice of making a brand, its products and its people unambiguous to search engines and AI systems, by describing them consistently and connecting them to sources those systems already trust.
What an entity is
An entity is a distinct thing with a name and attributes, such as a company, a product, a person or a place, as opposed to a keyword, which is only a string of words. An AI engine has to recognize that "Acme", "Acme Inc" and acme.com are the same company before it can attach the right facts to it and name it in an answer.
What it involves
The work is mostly consistency. Use one name and one short description across your site, your social profiles and the directories that list you. Publish an about page that states the facts plainly: what you sell, where you operate, when you were founded. Add Organization or Product structured data with sameAs links to your official profiles. Earn references on the third-party sites engines read, and if your name is shared with something unrelated, say clearly which one you are.
Example
As an illustration, a coffee roaster called Northwind sells from northwindroasters.com, appears in one directory as "Northwind Coffee Co." and in another as "North Wind Roasters", and shares its name with an unrelated software company. Asked for small-batch roasters in its city, an engine may leave it out or describe the wrong Northwind. Settling on one name and description, linking its official profiles in its structured data and correcting the two listings gives engines one consistent entity to recognize.
Why it matters for AI search
Whether an engine answers from what its model learned or from pages it retrieves, it has to know who you are to recommend you. Conflicting signals lead to omission or to wrong facts, which is why entity work sits at the core of LLMO and answer engine optimization.
How Stellarcast handles it
To measure whether engines recognize your brand, Stellarcast matches it in each AI answer by the forms engines actually write: your name, your name without a legal suffix such as "Inc" or "Ltd", your domain and its bare label, and, in markets written in a non-Latin script, your name in that script. A mention counts whichever of those forms an engine uses.
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