Entity

An entity is a distinct thing that a search engine or AI system recognises as itself — a brand, a product, a place, a person, a concept — rather than as a string of characters. Google made the shift explicit in 2012 with the phrase "things, not strings": instead of matching the letters in a query to the letters on a page, the engine tries to identify what the query is about and which pages are about that thing. Modern language models work the same way, at a larger scale.

For a store, being an entity means the machine has a stable idea of who you are, what you sell, and how you connect to other things it knows — a category, a country of origin, a maker you carry. That's what allows you to be recommended in a context you never wrote a page for, and it's what lets model memory recall you at all. An unrecognised store is just text on pages; a recognised one is a candidate. Entities are established by consistency and corroboration: the same name, description and details on your site, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and your suppliers' listings, tied together with Organization schema.