# What is an entity in SEO and why it matters to a store > What an entity is in SEO: an identifiable thing, not a keyword. How Google recognizes one and how a store describes its brand and products. URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/entity/ Lang: en "SEO entities" sounds like consultancy jargon, but the question underneath is simple: **does a search engine know what you sell, or only which words your page uses?** Here, entity has nothing to do with a legal entity or a banking entity. It comes from a shift Google announced in 2012, when it started treating searches as real-world things rather than strings of text. It matters to a store because its two main entities, **its brand and each of its products**, are what a search engine or an AI assistant has to recognize in order to recommend it without confusing it with another. ## How it works **Things, not strings.** That is how Google introduced its [Knowledge Graph](/glossary/knowledge-graph/) on May 16, 2012. For forty years, searching had meant matching keywords to queries, and to a search engine "taj mahal" was just two words, when a person might be thinking of a monument, a musician or a casino. The graph is a model that understands real-world entities and their relationships, and Google summed it up this way: it is not just a catalog of objects, but the relationships between them, which are the key.[^google-kg-2012] Today it describes the graph as its database of billions of facts about people, places and things.[^google-kg-help] **A machine finds them in a text.** Google Cloud's Natural Language API has a dedicated entity analysis: it looks in a text for known entities, both proper nouns (public figures, landmarks) and common nouns (a restaurant, a stadium), and returns for each one its type, the places in the text where it is mentioned and, when there is one, the reference to a knowledge repository. Its example shows what it is for: in a sentence about "Lawrence of Arabia," it **tells the film, typed as a work, from the soldier T. E. Lawrence, typed as a person**.[^google-nl-basics] That API is a tool for developers, not Google Search, but it shows well what recognizing an entity means. **A page declares them with a vocabulary.** In [structured data](/glossary/structured-data/), that vocabulary is usually [Schema.org](/glossary/schema-org/), which says of itself that its vocabulary covers entities, relationships between entities and actions.[^schema-org-home] All of its types descend from `Thing`, "the most generic type of item," which already carries the properties an entity uses to tell itself apart from another: `name` and `alternateName` for its names, `disambiguatingDescription` for a short description that separates it from similar ones, `identifier` for any identifier (an ISBN, a [GTIN](/glossary/gtin/)) and [`sameAs`](/glossary/sameas/), **the URL of a reference page that unambiguously indicates the identity of the item**, such as its Wikipedia or Wikidata entry or its official website.[^schema-org-thing] Google says it can make general use of `sameAs` and the rest of Schema.org beyond the features it documents.[^google-sd-intro] **And each one carries its identifier.** In [JSON-LD](/glossary/json-ld/), the keyword `@id` uniquely identifies each node with an address (an IRI). The W3C specification explains why: to refer to a node from outside, it matters that it has an identifier, and ideally that address leads to a description of the node itself.[^w3c-json-ld11] That is what lets you say "this brand" once and point to it from every product, instead of repeating its name with variations. ## In a store The entities on a [product page](/glossary/product-page/) and how each one is made unmistakable. **Fictitious example**: the brand, the store and the product are invented. | What the page says | Entity | What makes it unmistakable | | ----------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------- | | "Calella" in the logo and the title | The brand, typed as [Organization](/glossary/organization-schema/) | Its own `@id` and `sameAs` pointing to its official profiles | | "Calella linen shirt, blue" | The product, typed as [Product](/glossary/product-schema/) | Its `@id` and, if the brand has one, its [GTIN](/glossary/gtin/) | | "Linen" | A material, a property of the product | The value of `material` | | "Made in Vermont" | A place | A name that leaves no room for doubt | And the block that declares it, with the brand written once and the product pointing to it through its [@id identifier](/glossary/id-json-ld/): ```html ``` The line that matters is `brand`: it does not repeat "Calella" as text, it **points to the same node** that describes the organization. To a machine, that turns two mentions of a word into a single entity with two relationships. If the brand is written differently on each product page ("Calella," "CALELLA Apparel," "Calella Shirts"), an automated reader has to guess whether they are the same. Treating an entity as a keyword. A keyword is the string of text someone types; an entity is the thing it refers to. Google framed it that way from 2012: for decades, searching had been matching keywords to queries, and the Knowledge Graph was built to understand the things behind them.[^google-kg-2012] Repeating your brand name more often does not make it more recognizable; describing it the same way every time, with its identifiers, does help it stand apart. ## How to check it 1. **List the entities on a product page**: the brand, the product, the manufacturer if it is a different one, the material, the place. If any of them lacks a unique name across the whole store, start there. 2. **Search the page source for `@id`** and check that the brand and the product each have a stable one, and that `brand` points to the brand's.[^w3c-json-ld11] 3. **Review the identifiers**: the product's GTIN if it has one, and the brand's `sameAs` links, which have to lead to profiles that exist and are yours.[^schema-org-thing] 4. **Run a description through the entity analysis** of Google Cloud's Natural Language API to see which things a machine recognizes in your text and of what type.[^google-nl-basics] 5. **Search for your brand on Google** and see whether a knowledge panel appears: it is the visible sign that Google has it as an entity.[^google-kg-help] ## Related concept: Knowledge Graph The entity is the unit; the Knowledge Graph is the collection of entities and relationships that Google maintains, and the knowledge panels come from it.[^google-kg-help] Your site can describe its entities with all the care in the world, but **what gets into Google's graph is Google's call**, using information from many sources besides yours. What is usually called [semantic SEO](/glossary/semantic-seo/) starts from this same idea: write and mark up for things, not for words. To go on, the [Knowledge Graph](/glossary/knowledge-graph/) entry explains how Google's graph works, and the [structured data reading path](/learn/structured-data/) puts the rest of the terms in order.