My AI Notes

Entity Signals Are Starting to Matter More Than Links

Something I keep noticing: the brands showing up consistently in AI-generated answers aren’t always the ones with the strongest traditional SEO profiles. What they tend to have is a clear, consistent entity footprint. Named authors. Verifiable credentials. Structured data that connects the content to the person or organization behind it.

This isn’t totally new territory. Google’s documentation has been pointing this direction for a while. But the May 2026 core update made it a lot more visible in practice. Sites with strong entity signals held or gained. Sites with thin authorship and generic content took hits regardless of their backlink profiles.

The practical version of this: treat your About page, author schema, and social profile consistency like search infrastructure, not just marketing. When an AI system is deciding whether to cite your content, it’s making a trust decision. Entity signals are how you influence that.

I’ve been working this into site audits for the past year. The shift from link-based authority to entity-based authority is real and it’s moving faster than most people expect.