Entity authority is how strongly an AI system associates your business with a specific topic. It has two parts: whether a model can identify you at all, and whether it connects you to a subject confidently enough to name you. Both are built from consistent facts and independent corroboration, not from publishing volume.

The short version

Identification and association

Identification is whether a model can confidently say your business exists and is distinct from everything else with a similar name. This is where most problems live and where almost nobody looks. A company trading under three variations of its own name, with a different description on its website, its LinkedIn and its Companies House filing, is not one clear entity to a model. It is a cluster of weak signals that may or may not refer to the same organisation.

Association is whether the model links that entity to a topic. You can be perfectly identifiable and still never cited, because nothing connects you to the subject in question. Association is built from what independent sources say about you, far more than from what you say about yourself. Your own site asserts; third parties corroborate. Models weight corroboration higher, for the obvious reason.

This is why publishing volume disappoints so many firms. Fifty articles on your own domain raise association slightly. Three genuine mentions on sources the model already trusts for that topic raise it considerably more.

How to check it yourself

Ask an assistant two questions:

  1. “Tell me about [your company name].” This tests identification. Watch for hedging, conflation with a similarly named business, or plainly wrong details.
  2. “Who are the leading UK firms for [your specialism]?” This tests association. If you are identifiable but absent here, association is your gap rather than identity.

The two failure modes need different fixes, which is why separating them is worth two minutes.

How to build it

  1. Make the facts consistent everywhere. One canonical name, one description, the same key details on your site, your profiles, your filings and every directory that carries you.
  2. Publish the facts in one place. An entity page and a machine-readable fact file. We publish our own rather than only recommending it.
  3. Mark it up. Organisation schema with sameAs links connecting every profile back to one entity.
  4. Earn corroboration on sources that already get cited for your topic. This is the slow half and it is the half that decides outcomes.
  5. Attach named humans to the expertise. Author entities with real credentials carry weight that a faceless brand does not, particularly in professional services.

The practical checklist version is at entity signals for AI search visibility, and the deeper treatment is in building your brand’s entity signals.

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