Why your business does not appear in AI answers.

The usual assumption is that this is a ranking problem, and usually it is not. There is an earlier step, and most small sites fail it: an answer engine has to work out who you are before it can risk naming you.

The step everybody skips

An entity is a specific thing a model can name, such as a company, a person, a product or a place. Entity resolution means matching the words on a page to a thing the model already holds a record of.

Entity clarity is the degree to which your pages make that identification obvious rather than inferable. A model that cannot resolve you will still read your page, and will then attribute the useful sentence to somebody it can name.

This carries 12% of the overall grade in our report card, level with Citability and ahead of every other AI-search module. The AI-search half is 45% of the total, so a third of it turns on being identifiable.

The five signals we score

These are the checks the module actually runs, with the point value of each. Nothing here requires a developer beyond the first row.

Signal	Points	Full marks needs
Organization or Person markup	20	All four of name, web address, logo, social profiles
Name used consistently	15	Title terms appearing in headings and body text
A link to an About page	10	One internal link, from the navigation is fine
Contact details	10	Three of contact link, readable email, phone, postal address
Social profile links	10	Three or more, on platforms a model already knows

The markup, and the property people forget

Structured data describing your organisation is worth the largest single share of this module. We check four properties, and award the full 20 points only when all four are present.

Name. The legal or trading name, spelled the same way it appears in your footer.
Web address. The canonical home page, so the record has somewhere to anchor.
Logo or image. An image a model can associate with the name.
Social profiles. The property named sameAs, which is the one almost everybody omits.

The sameAs property is a list of other addresses on the web that describe the same entity. It is how you tell a model that the company on this page and the profile on that platform are one organisation rather than two.

Two of the four properties earns partial credit rather than nothing, so a half-finished block is still worth writing. Getting from two to four is usually ten minutes of typing.

Consistency is measured, not assumed

The name consistency check takes the meaningful words from your page title and looks for them elsewhere on the page. Full marks needs at least 50% of them to appear in your headings and at least 70% to appear in the body text.

Sites fail this by rebranding halfway down the page. The title says one thing, the headings say a shortened version, and the body text uses an internal nickname that appears nowhere else on the internet.

Contact details are an identity signal

A phone number and a postal address are not only there for customers. They are the details that separate a real organisation from a thin page, and a model treats them the same way a person does.

One detail catches people out. A clickable email link on its own does not count, because we also require the address to be readable in the visible text of the page.

Fix it in this order

Add Organization markup carrying all four properties, including social profiles.
Settle on one spelling of your name and use it in the title, the headings and the footer.
Link to an About page from the main navigation, on every page rather than one.
Publish a readable email address, a phone number and a postal address.
List three or more profiles you control, and repeat them inside the markup.

None of this improves your writing, and that is the point. Trust Signals and Citability are graded on what the page says, while this module is graded on whether anyone can tell who is saying it. Trust Signals carries a further 5%.

Common questions.

Is this a ranking problem?

Usually not. Ranking decides which documents a search engine offers a person, while entity clarity decides whether a model can say who you are with confidence. A site can rank respectably for its own brand name and still give a model nothing solid enough to attribute a claim to.

Do I need a Wikipedia page to be recognised as an entity?

No. What helps is a consistent name used the same way everywhere, plus links out to profiles you control on well-known platforms. Those links are how a model connects your site to records it already holds, and you can add them this afternoon.

Why does my logo or address matter to a language model?

They are the properties that turn a name into a specific organisation. Two businesses can share a name, so a model needs corroborating details before it risks naming one of them. Structured data carrying a name, a web address, a logo and social profiles resolves the ambiguity.

How long does entity recognition take to improve?

The markup takes an afternoon and the recognition takes longer, because a model has to encounter your corrected details more than once. Treat it as a floor you raise rather than a switch you flip. Nothing else on the AI-search side works properly until this is right.

The free scan reports each of the five signals above by name, so you can see which one is costing you. No account and no card. Paid teardowns start at $79 and check every page rather than one.

Run a free scan →