Who does an AI assistant think you are?

Probably several slightly different organisations, if you have never checked. Assistants answer about entities — a company, a person, a product — rather than about URLs. When your name, your domain and your profiles disagree, the evidence for you is split across several weak entities instead of concentrated in one.

The fix is unglamorous and mostly a matter of saying the same thing consistently.

What is an entity, and why not just a page?

An entity is the thing your pages are about. Ten pages describing one company are evidence about one entity, and an assistant answering "who is X" is assembling that evidence rather than picking a page.

That assembly depends on being able to tell that all the evidence refers to the same thing. Which is where inconsistency costs you: "Acme Ltd" on the website, "Acme Digital" on LinkedIn, "acme.io" in the footer and "www.acme.com" as the canonical host reads as loosely related fragments.

How do I state who I am unambiguously?

Say it in machine-readable form, in one place, and point at the profiles that corroborate it. Google Search Central describes the general mechanism: "You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page."

For identity specifically, the corroborating links matter most. Google Search Central gives the example directly, describing what such a URL is: "For example, a URL to your organization's profile page on a social media or review site."

That is the whole idea behind an identity link. You state your name once, then link to the places that independently show the same organisation. Each link is a claim someone else can check, which is what makes it useful.

What should I actually do?

Five steps, in order, and none of them takes long.

1. Pick one canonical name and use that exact string everywhere — site, profiles,

directories, invoices.

1. Pick one canonical host. Decide between example.com and www.example.com, redirect

the other, and make sure your canonical tags agree.

1. Add Organization markup on your home page with the name, the URL and your logo.
2. List your real profiles as identity links — the social and review pages that are

genuinely yours.

1. Check your own footer and about page. Drift usually starts there, in a hand-written

line nobody has read in two years.

Then do the boring verification: open each profile you linked and confirm the name matches character for character. Abbreviations, punctuation and a trailing "Ltd" all count.

Does adding identity links make me an authority?

No. It makes you identifiable, which is different and prior. Nothing about consistent naming substitutes for having something worth citing.

The published standard for the content itself is not about markup at all. Google Search Central states it as: "People-first content means content that's created primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings." Identity work makes it possible to recognise you. What you have written is what makes recognising you worthwhile.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you what any assistant currently believes about you, because none of them expose their entity graph. You cannot read the record; you can only make yours consistent and checkable. That is a real limit on this advice, and treating identity clean-up as a fix for weak content would be a misreading of it.