Link Building in the Era of AI

Link building in AI search: a glossary

Entity record

What is 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.

Who uses the term Entity record?

Entity record is used in semantic SEO to describe what a knowledge graph holds about a subject. Google's own entity identifiers, the KGMIDs, are pointers into records of this kind.

This book's own entity record in the Google Knowledge Graph carries the identifier /g/11nvd73qzl.

A knowledge panel is a rendering of an entity record for a human. The record itself is larger, mostly unrendered, and is what an AI system reads.

A profile is something you write about yourself. An entity record is something a machine assembles about you from many sources, most of which you do not control.

The book calls it your file, and treats it as something that can be damaged as well as built: agreement raises the machine's confidence, disagreement lowers it, and lowered confidence is invisible in any metric you track until the machine quietly stops recommending you.

Read about the book's argument.

Related terms

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Corroboration ledger

    A corroboration ledger is a running record of which independent sources assert which claims about an entity, kept so that link work can be measured as evidence gathered rather than as links acquired.