aeo-entity-optimization
AEO Entity Optimization
AI engines don't rank pages — they recognize entities. An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing: a company, product, person, or concept. When an AI engine confidently associates your brand with a category ("Acme is a revenue intelligence platform"), it cites you. When it doesn't recognize your entity, you're invisible regardless of how good your content is.
Entity optimization is the foundation of all AEO work. Content extractability matters, but only after the AI engine knows who you are and what you do. A well-structured page from an unrecognized entity gets skipped for a mediocre page from a recognized one.
How AI Engines Build Entity Understanding
AI models learn about entities from three sources:
| Source | How it works | Your lever |
|---|---|---|
| Training data | Models learn from web crawls. If your brand appears frequently in the context of your category across many sites, the model "knows" you | Increase brand × category co-occurrence across the web |
| Retrieval / RAG | Engines like Perplexity search the web in real-time and retrieve pages. Your pages are candidates for retrieval | Make pages retrievable with clean structure, schema, and authority signals |
| Knowledge bases | Models reference structured knowledge (Wikidata, Wikipedia, curated datasets) for entity grounding | Create and maintain entries in structured knowledge bases |
The entity equation: Recognition = training data presence + retrieval accessibility + knowledge base entries.