Entity authority is what AI engines use to decide whether to trust your brand as a source. It is built from a combination of signals — your own content, third-party mentions, structured data, credentials, and consistency across the web. Each signal alone is small. Together, they tell an engine that you are who you say you are.
Building entity authority is a long game, but the first thirty days can move the needle visibly. Here is the playbook we use to start.
Days one through five: audit. Pull up your homepage, About page, key service pages, and your structured data. Pull your brand mentions across the open web. Read them as a model would. Where is your description inconsistent? Where are your credentials missing? Where do you appear under different names or framings? Note every gap.
Days six through ten: canonical description. Write a single, deliberate, two-sentence description of your business. Then update every owned surface with it — homepage, About page, social bios, directory listings, schema markup. The goal is uniformity. The same words, repeated, become canon.
Days eleven through fifteen: structured data. Implement or upgrade Organisation, LocalBusiness, Article, FAQPage and any other relevant schema. Include accreditations, areas served, prices where you can, and ratings. Use Google's Rich Results Test to verify. This is the most boring step and the most rewarding.
Days sixteen through twenty: external listings. Update your profile on the major directories relevant to your category. Companies House (if UK), industry-specific directories, trade body listings. Each one repeats your canonical description and adds to the consistency signal.
Days twenty-one through twenty-five: a single flagship piece of content. Pick the most important buyer question in your category. Write the definitive, comprehensive, attributed answer. Publish it. Make sure schema, authorship and dates are immaculate.
Days twenty-six through thirty: outreach. Identify three trade publications or industry newsletters in your space. Offer them a quote, a guest piece, or a data point from your work. Earning even one external mention with consistent framing dramatically raises entity authority.
By day thirty, your entity signal has compounded enough that the next AI re-index has materially more confidence in who you are. Citation lifts typically follow over the subsequent four to eight weeks.