Why Entity SEO Is the Future of Rankings

James Dooley: On the FatRank Podcast today, I’m joined by **Luis Salafar Herado** and we’re talking about entity brand SEO in 2026. A lot of people ask whether it really matters, and what the real benefits are when you focus on your entity and your brand as part of an SEO strategy. **Luis Salafar Herado**, where should people be paying attention right now?

Luis Salafar Herado: Brand searches becoming more important isn’t new, but the key is connecting your brand to an entity and communicating that clearly across the internet so Google understands what you are, what you do, who your audience is, and what you sell. To make your entity and brand clear, you need to provide the attributes related to your brand and communicate them through third-party sources like social media profiles, press releases, citations, and other external references. The goal is to connect the dots and create relationships because you’re ultimately feeding a bot that gathers information into the knowledge graph. The better you structure, organize, and communicate this information on your site and across the wider web, the stronger your brand values, awareness, recognition, and third-party validation become.

James Dooley: So if nobody knows the brand and nobody searches for it, Google has no real reason to rank it, because it doesn’t see it as important or widely recognized.

Luis Salafar Herado: Exactly. If you don’t show up anywhere and nobody searches for you, how is Google going to understand what you do, what you sell, and who your customers are? That’s why brand signals are critical if you want to rank better, faster, and higher. And now the competitive field is broader because AI is everywhere. You need visibility in AI Overviews and AI interfaces. If you’re not in the model, you’re not in the game. If Google doesn’t have information about you and can’t compare that information with third-party sources, there’s no corroboration, no consensus, and no validation. Without that, you don’t show up in AI answers.

James Dooley: You’re basically saying the brand becomes the primary focus, and then you build the system around it.

Luis Salafar Herado: Yes. You need to assemble the pieces properly, build the pillars, and grow from there. That requires having your presence organized in a way that fits how bots process information, so it stays accurate. Think of it like this: imagine **James Dooley** as an entrepreneur. The internet needs to validate that **James Dooley** is an entrepreneur. If you want another analogy, it’s like buying a business. The business is the entity, and the buyer does due diligence. Bots do the same when they crawl your site and collect information. In business due diligence, you don’t just look at financial statements; you research, talk to people, and validate information externally. In SEO terms, Google doesn’t just read your website. It checks social profiles, reviews, citations, press releases, and other sources. If that broader body of information is trustworthy, you get trust and rankings. If it isn’t consistent, the confidence drops.

James Dooley: That’s exactly what made that analogy land for me. If I’m looking at a business and the numbers are wrong, I immediately think: if they don’t know their numbers, what else don’t they know? And it’s the same with Google—confidence has to be high before trust can exist. A lot of SEOs understand branding has been important for years—branded clicks, branded mentions, branded anchors—but far fewer people talk about entity SEO. You referenced the knowledge graph and what **Jason Barard** calls the algorithmic trinity: knowledge panels, traditional rankings, and visibility in AI systems like Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Staying on the knowledge graph side, you mentioned a KGM ID, the Knowledge Graph Machine ID. Am I right that if a brand doesn’t have a KGM ID, Google doesn’t really recognize it properly as an entity?

Luis Salafar Herado: You’re right. Think about offline identifiers: phone numbers, passports, identity cards. They’re all IDs connected to the same person. Online, each entity has an identifier, and that’s the KGM ID. If you launch a brand and Google doesn’t have that identifier, it doesn’t know who you are. Google may know the identifier internally, but if you don’t know it and you don’t structure things clearly, it’s like not knowing your own phone number—connection becomes difficult. In technical terms, it’s a way to connect with the knowledge graph, effectively an identifier that ties you into the universal data of the internet. Without that, you’re an isolated entity, and isolation makes understanding and validation much harder.

James Dooley: That’s why we’re going to go deeper on this in a series—how to trigger a KGM ID, how to improve the confidence score of the entity, how to find the identifier, and how to avoid Google creating multiple IDs. I had three different KGM IDs because of different facets—podcasts, books, and digital PR signals—and I didn’t even know it was happening until I started understanding how important the knowledge graph is for a personal entity. That brings me to schema. I still see people saying schema isn’t a ranking factor and you don’t need JSON-LD, but my view has completely changed. If there are hundreds of people with the same name, it’s not enough to hope Google works it out. You need to differentiate and connect the right profiles and references to the right entity. How important is schema in strengthening those connections and raising Google’s confidence?

Luis Salafar Herado: It’s very important. Schema is a standard created by Google, Bing, and other search engines, and it’s machine-readable information. It’s one of the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient ways to communicate with machines. The more granular and accurate the information, the better. If there are many people with the same name, disambiguation requires both the identifier and unique, accurate information that you control and can consistently corroborate across the internet. JSON-LD helps because bots don’t need to crawl the whole site in depth; they can extract structured information quickly. When it’s designed well, you control the message, the data, and the connections, and you reduce uncertainty.

James Dooley: The way I’ve been thinking about it is that schema is the glue. It helps connect everything so the algorithms can understand quickly who you are, what you do, and who you serve. And once they’re clear, they become confident, and then trust becomes possible.

Luis Salafar Herado: That’s the right sequence. Disambiguation is expensive for Google because the internet is huge and growing, and processing entities at scale costs resources. The more accurate and granular the information you provide, the cheaper and easier it is for the algorithm to understand you. That becomes a competitive advantage because new brands appear every day, and there’s a constant flood of information to crawl. When Google isn’t sure and has to choose between multiple options, uncertainty works against you. But when your entity data is clear and corroborated by third parties, it becomes more “sticky” and more trustworthy.

James Dooley: And that’s where backlinks have evolved too. It’s not only about PageRank and link juice. It’s also about extending your presence and repeating who you are and what you do across third-party sources in a way that strengthens confidence. That connects to what we’ve been discussing: clarity, confidence, and trust.

Luis Salafar Herado: Exactly. Algorithms don’t trust a single source of information. Trust comes from multiple sources agreeing over time, similar to how humans rely on recommendation and repeated exposure. Online, third-party validation is the equivalent of recommendation. It’s faster because it’s algorithmic, but the principle is the same: you need corroboration across sources. When you provide accurate data and it’s validated externally, Google can understand what you are, what you do, and what you sell with higher confidence.

James Dooley: That’s also why I think people misunderstand the semantic SEO community. They pigeonhole it into just on-site content and technical theory, but the reality is it’s holistic. Backlinks, branded searches, mentions, schema, third-party validation, and omnipresence all matter. So if someone thinks they can just build a topical map and a semantic content network and ignore everything else, they’re missing the bigger strategy. How would you frame that?

Luis Salafar Herado: Think of it like solving a puzzle. You need all the pieces, organized in the right order, to solve it. One piece alone doesn’t solve the whole problem. Topical authority by itself won’t solve everything. Backlinks alone won’t solve everything. JSON-LD alone won’t solve everything. Success comes from the full puzzle assembled in the right sequence with the right strategy, executed well. You’re competing against other brands, and the algorithm is constantly comparing data across competitors. It’s also like football: one player doesn’t win a match. You need the full team. And on the internet, the game never stops. It’s always on, and if you stop, you lose momentum. Google re-evaluates over time, and you need to keep earning your position by continuing to meet all the requirements that support trust and visibility.

James Dooley: That’s the takeaway for me: be omnichannel, be omnipresent, and build the entity and the brand alongside the content. This is the first part of a series on branding SEO, entity SEO, and KGM SEO in 2026, and we’ll go deeper based on what people want next. **Luis Salafar Herado**, it’s been a pleasure.