Entity

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.

If the machine does not know you exist, the problem is Entity. It is built in part 2: entity, across chapter 3 and chapter 4.

• Canonical source of ground truth

  The digital property you own and control where every core fact about your business is stated clearly, structured for machine readability, and kept current.

• Disambiguation

  Establishing which of several possible referents a name points to.

• Entity cluster

  The set of web pages and data points that reference a business, with the entity home at its centre.

• Entity Confidence

  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.

• Entity home

  The specific page from which search and AI systems learn your identity, attributes and values.

• Knowledge graph

  A structured store of entities and the relationships between them.

• Knowledge panel

  The public-facing surface of a knowledge graph entry.

• NAP

  Name, address, phone: the core identity data for a local business.

• sameAs

  A schema.org property that links an entity's canonical page to its other identity points across the web.

• Schema markup

  Structured data added to a page in a vocabulary machines already parse, stating facts explicitly rather than leaving them to be inferred from prose.

• Structured data

  Facts published in machine-readable form, so a system can extract them without interpretation.