Pillar 1 of 4
Entity
Does the machine know who you are?
What is the Entity pillar?
The first ECHO pillar, and the machine's unit of understanding. A single, identifiable real-world thing with attributes and relationships, as opposed to a website, which is a collection of pages.
What happens when Entity is missing?
If the machine does not know you exist, the problem is Entity.
Each of the four pillars maps to one failure mode, which is what turns ECHO into a fault-finding tool after the first read. If the symptom below is the one you recognise, this is the pillar to work on.
- EntityIf the machine does not know you exist, the problem is Entity.
- CorroborationIf it knows you exist but will not repeat what it knows, the problem is Corroboration.
- HooksIf it trusts you but never surfaces your content for the question being asked, the problem is Hooks.
- OutputIf you cannot tell which of these is happening, the problem is Output, and that is where to start.
Which chapters build Entity?
Part 2: Entity builds the Entity pillar across chapters 3 and 4.
An "entity" to a machine is a structured record of facts, an EAV (EntityAttribute-Value) filing card, not a brand narrative. The completeness and consistency of that record determines how confidently the machine can reference you.
Read the chapter › Entity Confidence: What It Is and How to Measure ItEntity Confidence is the measurable degree of certainty a machine assigns to your identity as a single, disambiguated entity.
Read the chapter ›What does Entity work involve?
In the book's 30/60/90 day rollout, Entity work falls in days 1 to 30, the entity foundation phase.
- Key actions
- Entity audit using the Chapter 4 scorecard
- Fix the Google Business Profile
- Add or correct schema
- Create the entity home
- Cross-link identity points
- Deliverables
- Completed entity audit scorecard
- Corrected Google Business Profile
- Schema markup live
- Entity home page published
- Done whenBrand and category search returns a knowledge panel, a Google Business Profile, or a clear single-source definition. Schema validates. No conflicting facts on top sources.
- Common mistakeSkipping the audit and jumping to content. Fixing low-authority directories before high-authority ones.
- ResourcingBest done in-house. The business owns the facts.
What vocabulary belongs to Entity?
12 of the book's 33 glossary terms belong to the Entity pillar. Each is defined in the book's own words.
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The digital property you own and control where every core fact about your business is stated clearly, structured for machine readability, and kept current.
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Establishing which of several possible referents a name points to.
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The first ECHO pillar, and the machine's unit of understanding.
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The set of web pages and data points that reference a business, with the entity home at its centre.
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The measurable degree of certainty a search or AI system assigns to the identity of your brand as a single, disambiguated, real-world entity, built from the consistency, structure and corroboration of the facts it can find about you across the sources it trusts.
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The specific page from which search and AI systems learn your identity, attributes and values.
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A structured store of entities and the relationships between them.
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The public-facing surface of a knowledge graph entry.
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Name, address, phone: the core identity data for a local business.
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A schema.org property that links an entity's canonical page to its other identity points across the web.
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Structured data added to a page in a vocabulary machines already parse, stating facts explicitly rather than leaving them to be inferred from prose.
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Facts published in machine-readable form, so a system can extract them without interpretation.
After Entity: Corroboration
If it knows you exist but will not repeat what it knows, the problem is Corroboration. Entity comes first because nothing else can be built on an entity that does not exist.