Who you REALLY are - managing your brand entity for GEO gains

If you want your name to show up in AI search results, then taking control of your brand entity is key.

Over the last year, search has become very dispersed and decentralized. Rather than just using Google or Bing, people are searching across multiple search engines—including LLMs and tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini—to find their answers. Search is not as centralized to the main players anymore. If you start managing this trend now, when it does become more mainstream, you will see long term gains.

Why Your Brand Entity Matters More Than Ever

One of the things that’s really important to consider is the way that LLMs work and the way that people are using them on a regular basis. Even within traditional search engines, the influence is everywhere. If you use Bing, you see Copilot; Google has rolled out AI Overviews to the EU and wider markets.

When we look at how people are discovering content, a lot of traffic is starting to come from ChatGPT and Perplexity. But I am talking about visibility rather than just traffic. Within certain AI search tools, you don’t necessarily get links. However, if someone is investigating a particular brand or a topic related to you, and you have "good relationships" with your entities, then you’re more likely to show within the content.

The "Barbie" Lesson in Latent Entities

To give you an example: When the Barbie movie came out, I put the movie description into an NLP tool. The description doesn’t actually mention "dolls" or "Mattel," but the tool pulled out "Mattel" and "fashion doll" anyway.

The AI understands that the entity of Barbie is a fashion doll, and it understands that if you want to find out about fashion dolls, you should know about Barbie. While it’s very difficult for anyone to replicate the IP of Barbie, it is vital to think about which entities are related to your brand and which searches you should see within those.

Modern Optimization: The Digital Phone Book

I have seen businesses say they aren’t in ChatGPT because they searched for "10 marketing agencies in New York" and weren't shown. There are two things to remember here.

First, timing. ChatGPT is essentially like the phone book. Once upon a time, they delivered a big book with everyone’s number. It didn’t come out every week—it came out once a year. ChatGPT updates its models in rounds; if you launched something in 2024, you might not be in the "printed" version yet.

Second, distinctness. How solid is your entity? How clearly is your content attributed to you, and how connected is it to things that are definitely within the model’s training set?

How to Take Control of Your Entity

To optimize your entity presence for generative engine optimization, you need to invest in things that make you more clear and more disambiguated within the knowledge graph.

• Disambiguate Your Brand: If I say "Steve McQueen is a man known for his films," that could be the 60s actor or the British director. But if I say "Steve McQueen, Academy Award winner and Turner Prize-winning director," I have used named entities to verify exactly who he is.

• Audit Your Footprint: Think about what your Wikipedia is saying (if you have one) and how it aligns with your Wikidata information.

• Technical Foundations: Make sure you have schema markup that is accurate and reflective of your brand. Ensure your LinkedIn and other social profiles are pulling through accurately.

• Create Deeper Content: If you are creating unique content that is deeper and requires users to "sit with it," you’re more likely to be referenced as an expert source.

  
  

What to Stop Doing

The future of search includes even more generative elements than we have now. If you think about your brand holistically and manage your entity today, you'll be well-placed for whatever the next update brings.