Definition
What is entity consistency?
Entity consistency is the degree of agreement between all the public sources that describe the same company: its website, its Business Profile, its professional profiles, directories, the press, public data and its job postings. It covers what the company does, for whom, where and at what scale. When these sources contradict each other, a language model produces an imprecise description rather than no answer at all.
What "entity" means here
An entity, for a search engine or a language model, is something it recognizes as unique: your company, with its name and the facts attached to it. The model does not read only your website. It cross-checks what each source says about you, then builds a synthesis that leans toward what is repeated most often. An old description repeated across several directories can therefore outweigh your website.
Consistency covers four facts: what you do, for which type of customer, in which region and at what scale. The most costly gap concerns the type of customer served, because that is the one that can bring you the wrong enquiries.
How to spot it in your own case
The most common sign is not absence from answers. It is the wrong category: an assistant recommends you to customers who are too small, for a specialty you dropped, or in a region you no longer serve. The diagnosis is done by hand, by asking two models the same questions three separate times. What comes back three times describes the model's understanding. What appears only once proves nothing.
A renovation company moved from residential to commercial work two years ago. Its website says so clearly. Four directories, two old job postings and one partner's professional profile still talk about kitchens and bathrooms. An assistant asked about commercial contractors in its region does not name it. It suggests the company to homeowners instead. None of the sources was false when it was written: they simply no longer say the same thing.
We treat entity consistency as convergence work rather than publishing work: publishing more does not help as long as the existing sources contradict each other. The first step is a leadership decision, a reference statement that says what you do, for whom and where. It is then copied without variation, starting with the website, which the other sources cite. The Business Profile, the partners' profiles and then the directories follow.
A source you cannot correct (an old press article, an archived job posting) is offset by the frequency of recent, dated and clear sources. The diagnosis is repeated about eight weeks later.
Not to be confused with
- False information
- False information contradicts reality (outdated hours, a discontinued service shown as active) and has its own procedure. A consistency problem contains no error: the sources simply do not say the same thing.
- Location master record
- The master record is an internal file that is authoritative for each location's data. Entity consistency is observed outside, in public sources: for a network of locations, the master record is how you achieve it.
- Third-party mention
- A third-party mention adds a source that names you. Consistency checks that all those sources say the same thing: an outdated mention can do more harm than a missing one.
Related concepts
- Google Business Profile
- Third-party mention
- Location master record
- AI-assisted shortlisting
- AI visibility measurement
- Answer surface
Further reading
- Does AI understand your business? How to check
- What to do when AI gets your business information wrong
- Your Google Business Profile is now a source AI answers cite
- Getting cited by AI: the role of comparisons and brand mentions
- GEO: 3 areas of work that complement your SEO strategy
Related services
Frequently asked questions
Do my job postings really count?
Yes. A job posting describes the company in precise, recent terms, it is well indexed, and nobody rereads it once the position is filled. It is one of the sources that most often contradicts the website.
