Entity Home

An entity home is the single page or profile an AI system treats as the canonical, authoritative source for a business's core facts — the place it defers to when other sources disagree, and the place it points to when it needs to confirm something rather than infer it. Citations across directories and review platforms validate that the entity exists; the entity home is where its actual definition lives.

For local businesses, the entity home usually operates on two layers rather than one.

GBP as local entity home: Google's own structured entity database — authoritative specifically for searches inside Google's own systems, since Google trusts its own verified data over third-party claims.

Website About page as web entity home: the business's own page, ideally carrying complete entity information and schema, authoritative for the broader web and for AI systems that crawl outside Google's ecosystem.

What makes an entity home strong rather than nominal

A page can exist under the name "About Us" and still fail to function as an entity home. What actually makes it work:

• Complete business name and founding year, stated plainly rather than implied
• Team credentials named, not summarised in adjectives
• A physical address that matches the GBP address exactly, down to formatting
• LocalBusiness schema carrying full attributes and sameAs links
• Specific, verifiable facts — not claims that can't be checked against anything
• Factual entity definition rather than generic marketing language

The gap most Indian business websites have

Most Indian local business websites treat the About page as a marketing opportunity rather than an entity-defining one. The typical result reads something like "we are dedicated to serving the community with excellent service" — sentences that assert quality without stating a single checkable fact. No founding year. No named team credentials. No service area defined precisely. That's a missed entity home, and it's common enough that fixing it is one of the more reliable ways to get ahead of competitors who haven't noticed the gap exists.

Why two entity homes instead of one

Google trusts GBP data for its own local search and Maps results because it's verified through Google's own process. But AI systems outside Google's direct control — ChatGPT, Perplexity — don't have privileged access to GBP data the way Google's own products do. They crawl the open web, which means the website's About page functions as the entity home for anything happening outside Google's ecosystem. A business that only maintains a strong GBP and neglects its own About page has one working entity home instead of two, and loses ground specifically on non-Google AI citations.

Common mistakes

The most common failure is address mismatch between GBP and the website — a minor difference like "2nd Floor" appearing on one and not the other is enough to weaken the connection between the two entity homes rather than reinforce it. The second is writing the About page once at launch and never updating it as the business adds locations, credentials, or certifications, which leaves the entity home stale relative to what's actually true.

Relationship to entity SEO

Entity SEO is the broader discipline; the entity home is the specific asset that discipline is built around. sameAs links, LocalBusiness schema, and consistent NAP all exist partly to strengthen the entity home's authority by connecting it to every other place the business is mentioned.

Related terms: Entity SEO → · sameAs → · Local Schema → · Knowledge Graph → · Entity Authority → · NAP Consistency → · E-E-A-T →

Example: A dermatology clinic's entity home About page states: "Sharma Skin Clinic was founded in 2016 in Koramangala, Bengaluru, by Dr. Priya Sharma (MBBS, MD Dermatology, AIIMS New Delhi). The clinic specialises in acne, laser, and cosmetic dermatology, and is NABH-certified." Every sentence there is a fact that could be verified against an external record — that's what separates an entity home from an About page that just sounds nice.