Entity Building: How to Craft Your Identity in Google's Knowledge Graph (and AI Systems)

In June 2025, Google deleted over 3 billion entities from its Knowledge Graph in a single week. 6.26% of the entire database — wiped. That's twice as much as everything added the previous year. Gone overnight.

It wasn't a bug. It was a surgical cleanup. Google decided to shift from an accumulation model to a precision model. Fewer entities, but better defined. Less noise, more signal. The reason? AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini need a reliable fact base, not a semantic dumping ground.

And your brand in all of this?

If you're among the entities Google knows, understands, and associates with verified facts — you're protected. If you're just a "string" with no anchor in the Knowledge Graph — you're a ghost. AI will never recommend a ghost.

In 2026, Google's Knowledge Graph contains over 1.6 trillion facts about 54 billion entities. AI no longer searches for pages. It searches for knowledge nodes — connected entities, disambiguated, corroborated by multiple sources.

Here's how to become one of those nodes. Not tomorrow. Now.

Source: Search Engine Land — "Google's great clarity cleanup: 3 shifts redefining the Knowledge Graph and its AI future" (August 2025). Jason Barnard / Kalicube tracking data since 2015.

1. The Ghost Diagnostic: The 30-Second Test

Before building anything, you need to measure the extent of the damage. And the test is brutally simple.

Open ChatGPT. Open Gemini. Open Perplexity. Type: "Who is [Your Brand]?" or "Who is [Your Name]?".

Three scenarios:

It's the third answer that should terrify you.

For generative answer engines, a recommendation is a trust transfer. AI doesn't transfer its trust to an unknown entity. You can have the best content on the market — if the algorithm doesn't know who produced it, it will cite the one it knows. And that will be your competitor.

Tactical Action with Ahrefs

Use Ahrefs Brand Radar.

1. Enter your brand and 3 to 5 competitors.
2. Check the "AI Share of Voice" report: out of 100 transactional prompts, how many times does your brand appear in the Top 3 AI recommendations?
3. If the answer is 0% — you're not an entity. You're just text.

2. The 4 Pillars of Entity Building: Building the Evidence File

Building an entity isn't "adding Schema". It's constructing a convergent body of evidence that machines can verify autonomously. AI is paranoid. It doesn't take your word for it. Multiple independent sources must confirm the same thing.

According to Kalicube data, which has been tracking Google's Knowledge Graph since 2015 with over 71 million indexed brands, Google uses more than 40,000 different sources to corroborate entity information. Your website is just one of those sources.

Here are the 4 pillars, in order of priority.

Pillar 1: JSON-LD Organization or Person (Your Declaration of Existence)

This is the technical foundation. On your homepage (for a brand) or author page (for a person), the markup must be exhaustive, not cosmetic.

The properties that 90% of sites forget:

• sameAs: The king property. It tells Google: "This LinkedIn profile = This Twitter account = This website = This Wikidata entry = The same entity." Without sameAs, AI sees 5 separate profiles instead of a single individual. According to Schema App, it's the bridge that allows Google to "connect the dots" between your site and your official identity.
• knowsAbout: Explicitly declare your areas of expertise. Don't let AI guess.
• disambiguatingDescription: If your name is generic ("Consulting Agency"), this property tells AI exactly who you are and who you are not.
• @id: The unique internal identifier that allows referencing your entity across your entire site. According to Momentic, it's the key to creating a coherent semantic graph between your pages.

Pillar 2: Wikidata (Your Knowledge Graph Passport)

Wikidata is the structured database that directly feeds Google's Knowledge Graph, ChatGPT responses, and Knowledge Panels. It's the world's largest consumer of structured data, and Google is its primary client.

Each element in Wikidata is an "Item" identified by a unique Q number, linked by "Properties" (P numbers) to other items or values. This web of interconnected facts is exactly what LLMs ingest to build their understanding of the world.

The good news: Wikidata's eligibility criteria are less strict than Wikipedia's. You don't need a complete encyclopedic article. An entry with your basic properties (name, organization type, founding date, website, social identifiers) is enough to get on the machines' radar.

The critical action: Once your Wikidata entry is created, add its URL to your Organization markup via the sameAs property. This is the feedback loop that closes the circuit between your site and the Knowledge Graph.

Pillar 3: Third-Party Sources (Your Verifiable Reputation)

AI operates by consensus. If you're the only one saying you exist, that's suspicious. Others need to confirm it.

Sources that matter: Crunchbase (tech companies), verified LinkedIn Company Page, industry professional directories, trade press articles, Google Scholar (academic publications), professional association listings.

According to a study cited by Search Engine Land, there is a 0.664 correlation between brand mentions on the web and visibility in Google's AI Overviews. Each external mention is a confirmation vote that strengthens your node in the Knowledge Graph.

Pillar 4: The Google Knowledge Panel (Your Official Showcase)

The Knowledge Panel is visible proof that Google recognizes you as an entity. It doesn't appear on request — it triggers automatically when Google has enough convergent reliable data.

Tactical action: Use Kalicube's free Knowledge Graph API Explorer tool to check if your brand already has a "Machine ID" (KGID) in the Knowledge Graph. If so, claim your Knowledge Panel through Google. If Google corrects its entry, Gemini will correct its answers. It's a domino effect.

3. Disambiguation: When AI Confuses You with Someone Else

This is the slow poison of Entity Building. Your brand has a generic name, or a homonym exists in another country, another industry, or went out of business after a scandal.

During the June 2025 cleanup, Google reduced the number of entities labeled "thing" by 15.27% — poorly defined, ambiguous entities with no precise typing. The signal is clear: Google wants unityped entities (a single clear type, no ambiguity). The proportion of single-type entities went from 23.9% to 28.7% after the purge.

If AI confuses your brand with a homonym, you inherit their problems. It's a hallucination through entity confusion. And it destroys you silently.

The Disambiguation Protocol

1. disambiguatingDescription (Schema.org): On your homepage, add a description that says exactly who you are and who you are not. Code: "disambiguatingDescription": "DataFlow is a BI software company founded in 2019 in Bordeaux, distinct from DataFlow Inc. (USA) closed in 2023."
2. Wikidata P1889 (different from): On your Wikidata entry, use the P1889 property to formally link your entity to the problematic homonym. It's a separation signal that LLMs ingest directly.
3. alternateName (Schema.org): List all variations of your brand name to cover spelling variations that AI might encounter.

Tactical Action with Ahrefs

Use Ahrefs Web Explorer.

1. Search for your brand name.
2. Sort by date.
3. Identify pages that talk about you vs those that talk about the homonym.
4. If authority sources confuse the two, contact them for correction. Each rectification in a trusted source propagates through AI RAG systems.

4. The Entity Gap Audit: Mapping Your Missing Connections

An isolated entity is a weak entity. A node's power in the Knowledge Graph is measured by its connections. The more you're connected to relevant adjacent concepts, the more AI considers you a complete and legitimate source.

According to Search Engine Land, the "entity-first" strategy involves building an internal mini Knowledge Graph where each page (node) reinforces your overall topical authority. Entities gain strength through context: internal links, sameAs references, and Schema relationships (Product → Category → Brand).

Tactical Workflow with Ahrefs

1. Go to Site Explorer > Organic Keywords.
2. Filter keywords that trigger AI Overviews (filter available in Ahrefs).
3. Identify adjacent concepts that AI cites in these responses, but for which you don't have a dedicated page.
4. Each missing concept is an "Entity Gap" — a hole in your topical coverage that AI perceives as incompleteness.

The corrective action: For each Entity Gap, create a dedicated page marked up with appropriate Schema properties and linked to your main pages through internal linking. Use the about property in each page's Schema to point to the corresponding Wikidata entity.

This isn't content marketing. It's semantic topology. You're building the roads that connect your entity to adjacent concepts in the machine's brain.

5. The Personal Knowledge Graph: The Human Entity

In 2026, people are entities as powerful as brands. According to Ahrefs Brand Radar data, AI frequently cites individuals — especially in YMYL domains (health, finance, law) where personal expertise is the algorithm's primary selection criterion.

E-E-A-T authority signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) have become the primary filter. According to MRS Digital, entities with strong E-E-A-T signals are prioritized in AI results, AI Overviews, and Knowledge-driven results. Without these signals, even a perfectly marked-up entity won't be recommended.

The "Person Brand" Protocol

1. The Author Page (/author/first-last): This is your personal entity hub. ProfilePage markup with:
   • sameAs: LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Google Scholar, external publications, personal Wikidata entry.
   • knowsAbout: Explicitly declared areas of expertise.
   • hasCredential: Degrees, certifications, accreditations.
   • worksFor: Your organization, linked to its own Organization markup.
2. The External Corroboration Network: Publish under your real name on third-party platforms. Each guest article, each podcast interview, each appearance in trade media creates a corroboration link.
3. The Complete Trust Chain: Article on your site → Author Page → sameAs → Verified LinkedIn → Real Human Being. If AI can follow this chain without interruption, your "Trust Score" is maximal.

Tactical action with Ahrefs: Set up a Brand Radar project not for your company, but for your lead expert or CEO. Analyze their personal visibility in AI responses. Compare them to competing thought leaders.

6. Measuring Entity Building: The New Era KPIs

Classic metrics (traffic, rankings) don't capture the impact of Entity Building. Traditional organic search volume is projected to drop by 25% by 2026 and 50% by 2028 according to projections cited by multiple market analyses. You need new indicators.

Final Word

In June 2025, Google didn't delete 3 billion entities by accident. It sent a message: the era of accumulation is over, the era of clarity begins.

Schema makes you readable. Entity Building makes you memorable.

In 2026, AI no longer ranks pages. It connects trust nodes. When it "understands" who you are — your identity, your expertise, your verified connections — it stops evaluating you article by article. It starts trusting you by default. And that trust, once earned, propagates to every new piece of content you publish, with no additional effort. That's the compound effect of identity. And it's the only competitive advantage that AI will never commoditize.