Link Building in the Era of AI
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Link building in AI search: a glossary

Entity development

What is Entity development?

Entity development is the work of making a brand resolvable as one clearly defined thing, so that mentions of it accumulate onto a single record rather than scattering across several ambiguous ones.

Who uses the term Entity development?

Entity development and the closely related entity SEO are used by semantic SEO practitioners and by the agencies positioning around AI visibility.

The underlying concept comes from entity resolution in information retrieval, which long predates its use in marketing.

How does Entity development differ from related terms?

Entity development is foundation work on identity. Link building is acquisition work on evidence. The book's position is that doing the second without the first wastes the second.

Brand building addresses what people think of you. Entity development addresses whether a machine can tell who you are at all.

What does Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines say about Entity development?

The book puts entity work before everything else and is blunt about why: every link you build points at an entity, and if that entity is a mess you are corroborating confusion. Its image for building links onto an inconsistent entity is pouring water into a cracked bucket, and it notes most businesses are carrying years of cracks.

Read about the book's argument.

Related terms

  • Entity record

    An entity record is the set of attributes a search or AI system holds about a thing, assembled from every source it has read and used when the system needs to say what that thing is.

  • Corroboration

    Corroboration is the agreement between independent sources on the same claim about an entity, and it is what raises a retrieval system's confidence that the claim is true.

  • Semantic triple

    A semantic triple is a fact expressed as subject, predicate and object, such as 'Omnipressent publishes Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines', which is the form machines extract facts in.

  • Brand mention

    A brand mention is any reference to a brand on a third-party page, whether or not it carries a link.

All 14 terms Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines