There is a step before optimisation that almost nobody audits: does the engine actually know who you are? Not whether it rates you highly. Whether it has a confident, single, correct picture of your business at all.
In our audits this is the most common blocker, and it is invisible from the inside because you know who you are.
What an entity is
An entity is the model's internal idea of your company: name, what you do, where, who runs it, what it is known for, and every source that mentions it. Recommendations are made about entities. If your entity is fuzzy, split across variants or contradicted by stale sources, an engine will hedge and name someone whose picture is clearer.
The four ways entities break
- Name variants. Trading name, legal name, an abbreviation, an old name from before a rebrand, and the version with Pty Ltd. Each appearing in different places, none of them linked. The engine may be treating these as several companies, each with a fraction of your evidence.
- Category drift. Your site says one thing, your directory listings say something broader, an old press mention says something else entirely. The model cannot decide what you actually do, so it does not recommend you for anything specific.
- Location contradictions. An old address in a directory, a service area that expanded without the listings being updated, a closed branch that still shows as open somewhere.
- Confusion with someone else. A similarly named business, often in another city or industry, whose information gets blended into yours. This one is more common than people expect and it is corrosive.
How to fix it
The work is unglamorous and it is the highest return item in most first months.
Pick one canonical form of everything. One name, one one sentence description, one address format, one phone number, one category. Write it down as a reference document.
Push it everywhere. Your site, your schema, your Google Business Profile, every directory, every social profile, every industry listing. Anywhere your business appears, it should appear identically.
Link the profiles together. The sameAs array in your Organization schema should list every one of them. This is what tells an engine these scattered listings describe one company.
Hunt down the stale records. Old addresses, dead branches, previous names, defunct directory entries. Correct them at the source or get them removed. This is tedious and it is often what unlocks everything else.
An engine will not confidently recommend a company it is not confident exists in one piece.
How to tell if this is your problem
Ask three assistants to describe your company and compare the answers. If they disagree with each other, contradict your website, mention things you stopped doing, or blend you with another business, your entity is the bottleneck. No amount of content will fix that, and fixing it often produces movement within weeks.