Entity authority is not a single switch you flip. It is the accumulated weight of consistent, corroborated signals across multiple authoritative sources — each one telling the same story about who your business is, what it does, and where it operates. The more sources that agree, the more confidently Google, AI platforms, and other discovery systems can resolve your entity and treat it as a known, trusted quantity.
This guide covers the universal stack — the baseline every UK business should have in place before pursuing vertical-specific citations. It is not a list of directories to spam. It is a structured model of corroboration across five distinct surface types: government databases, structured entity repositories, business presence platforms, search engine surfaces, and your own website schema. Each surface type plays a different role in entity resolution. Together, they form an interconnected evidence base that is significantly harder to fake or accidentally undermine than any single signal.
If you are in a regulated profession — law, healthcare, financial services — this universal stack is the prerequisite, not the destination. Law firm entity authority and SaaS entity authority both build on this foundation. Get the foundation right first.
The Model: Entity Authority as Corroboration Across Surfaces
Most businesses think about entity SEO as a checklist — add Wikidata, tick. Add Google Business Profile, tick. Add schema markup, tick. That framing misses the point. Each signal is not valuable on its own. Its value comes from the fact that it agrees with every other signal.
The model that actually matters is corroboration across distinct surface types. Google’s entity resolution engine is essentially a confidence-building process: it looks for the same entity described consistently across multiple independent, authoritative sources and consolidates that into a unified entity understanding. Inconsistency — a different founding year here, a different trading address there, a different name format — introduces ambiguity that undermines the whole stack.
The five surface types in the universal stack are:
Government databases — Companies House, ICO register. These are the hardest signals to fake and the most trusted by machine systems because they are authoritative UK government records.
Structured entity repositories — Wikidata, OpenCorporates. Machine-readable, semantically structured, directly linked to Google’s Knowledge Graph in Wikidata’s case.
Business presence platforms — Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, LinkedIn company page. These are where people and AI assistants look for current, operational entity data.
Industry authority directories — CrunchBase, Clutch (for agencies), sector-specific registries. High-domain-authority structured directories that feed AI corroboration systems.
Your own website schema — Organisation and Person schema in your JSON-LD output, with sameAs references linking to all of the above. This is the connective tissue that ties the whole stack together machine-readably.
Step 1: NAP Consistency Audit — Do This Before Anything Else
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. It sounds elementary, but NAP inconsistency is the most common reason entity corroboration fails — and the most common reason businesses do not get the entity authority their content deserves.
The audit is simple. Open a spreadsheet. List every platform where your business exists: website footer, Google Business Profile, Companies House, LinkedIn, Bing Places, any directory you have ever registered on. Record the exact business name, address, and phone number as they appear on each platform. Then compare.
Common failure patterns: “Ltd” vs “Limited” in the company name. A registered office address on Companies House that differs from the trading address on GBP. A phone number with a space format that varies between platforms. A trading name that differs from the registered legal name. Any of these create entity ambiguity. Resolve every inconsistency before adding new signals — adding more sources to a fundamentally inconsistent stack just distributes the inconsistency further.
The rule: your business name, address, and phone number should be identical — character for character — across every platform where they appear.
Step 2: Companies House — Your Foundational Government Signal
If you operate as a limited company in the UK, Companies House is your most authoritative entity signal. It is a UK government database, it is freely accessible, it is machine-readable, and it contains structured data about your registered company name, number, registered address, founding date, and director information. Google uses it.
The action items: check that your company name on Companies House matches exactly how you present your business elsewhere. Check that the Companies House URL for your company — https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/XXXXXXXX — is included in the sameAs array in your Organisation schema. That explicit machine-readable link between your website entity and your Companies House record is the signal.
If you operate as a sole trader, this step does not apply — but the ICO register (Step 3) still does.
Step 3: ICO Register — Overlooked, Zero Effort
The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) register records every organisation in the UK that is registered under data protection legislation. It is a government database. It is publicly searchable. It confirms that your business is a legitimate, legally operating entity that processes data in compliance with UK law.
Most SEOs never mention this. But as a machine-readable UK government record — searchable by company name and registration number, with a canonical URL per registration — it contributes to entity corroboration in the same way Companies House does. The marginal cost is zero because you are presumably already registered. The action item is to find your ICO registration entry at ico.org.uk, note the registration reference, and ensure your organisation name is listed there exactly as it appears everywhere else.
Step 4: Wikidata — The Most Powerful Structured Entity Signal
Wikidata is the structured knowledge base that underpins Wikipedia and feeds directly into Google’s Knowledge Graph. If your business qualifies — meaning it meets a basic notability threshold, which for most established businesses means having credible third-party coverage or a verifiable track record — a Wikidata entry is the single most valuable entity signal you can establish.
A Wikidata entry gives your entity a Q-identifier (a globally unique entity ID), links it to a structured knowledge graph that Google explicitly uses, and provides machine-readable data about your organisation type, location, founding date, key people, and website. Every LLM that references Wikidata as a training or retrieval source is more likely to have accurate, attributed information about your business if a Wikidata entry exists.
The full process for creating and optimising a Wikidata entry is covered in our Wikidata for SEO guide. The key action here is to add your Wikidata URL to the sameAs array in your Organisation schema once your entry exists.
Step 5: OpenCorporates — Machine-Readable Company Data
OpenCorporates aggregates company data from official government registries worldwide, including Companies House in the UK. For most UK limited companies, an OpenCorporates entry already exists — it is automatically created from Companies House data. The action item is to find your entry at opencorporates.com, confirm the company name, number, and status are accurate, and note the canonical URL.
OpenCorporates is particularly useful as an entity signal because it is explicitly designed for machine consumption — it provides structured, normalised company data via an API that developers, AI systems, and data pipelines use to verify business entities programmatically. Your presence there is essentially automatic if you are a registered UK company; what matters is that the information is consistent with your other signals.
Step 6: Wikidata — Already Covered — Now CrunchBase
CrunchBase is a structured business directory with domain authority above 90, consistently indexed by Google and AI platforms. It is the most accessible high-authority structured entity reference for businesses that do not yet qualify for Wikidata — and a valuable additional signal for those that do.
The setup process, optimisation guidance, and schema integration for CrunchBase is covered in detail in our CrunchBase for SEO guide. The summary: create or claim your profile using your company email, complete every field, write your description in consistent third-person language that matches your website and LinkedIn, and add the CrunchBase URL to your Organisation schema sameAs array.
Step 7: Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile (GBP) is the most direct entity signal you can give Google for local and service-area businesses. It is Google’s own database — when you verify and complete a GBP listing, you are directly populating Google’s entity records with structured data about your business. No inference required.
For entity authority purposes, the critical elements of GBP are: exact business name matching your other platforms, consistent address and phone, accurate primary and secondary categories, complete service list, regular posts, and a managed review profile. Categories matter more than most businesses realise — they are the primary signal Google uses to classify your entity’s service type and connect it to relevant searches and AI queries.
GBP also contributes to AI search surfaces. Google’s Gemini and AI Overviews pull business data directly from GBP when answering local and service queries. A well-maintained, complete GBP profile increases the probability that your business is cited accurately when AI generates answers about your service area or category.
Step 8: Bing Places — The Copilot Surface
Bing Places is easy to dismiss. Most UK businesses do not think about Bing. But Copilot — Microsoft’s AI assistant, now integrated into Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365, and increasingly enterprise software — pulls business entity data directly from Bing’s index. With Copilot adoption growing in enterprise environments, having your entity correctly defined in Bing’s systems is increasingly material.
Setup is straightforward: go to bingplaces.com, search for your business, and either claim an existing listing or create a new one. Verify via phone or email. Complete the profile with the same information as your GBP — identical business name, address, phone, categories, website. This takes 15 minutes and gives you a verified presence on a surface that millions of Copilot users interact with daily.
Step 9: Apple Business Connect
Apple Business Connect is the Apple equivalent of GBP — it populates Apple Maps, Siri, Spotlight, and the Apple ecosystem with business entity data. As Apple Intelligence expands and Siri becomes a more capable AI assistant, the data in Apple Business Connect becomes increasingly relevant to AI-driven discovery.
Apple Business Connect is particularly overlooked by UK businesses because Apple Maps has historically been less dominant in the UK than in the US. But Siri’s growth as an AI surface and the prevalence of iPhones in professional and consumer markets makes this a genuine gap. Setup takes 10–15 minutes at businessconnect.apple.com. Verify your business, complete the profile, and ensure your business name, address, and category are consistent with your other platforms.
Step 10: Organisation Schema with sameAs — The Connective Tissue
Your Organisation schema is where everything connects. The sameAs property is a machine-readable array of authoritative URLs that describe the same entity as your website. It is the explicit declaration that your website, your Companies House record, your Wikidata entry, your LinkedIn page, and your CrunchBase profile are all the same business.
A well-structured Organisation schema for a UK business should include:
{
"@type": "ProfessionalService",
"@id": "https://www.yourdomain.co.uk/#organization",
"name": "Your Business Name Ltd",
"url": "https://www.yourdomain.co.uk/",
"foundingDate": "2021",
"areaServed": "United Kingdom",
"sameAs": [
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-company/",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/QXXXXXXX",
"https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/your-company",
"https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/XXXXXXXX"
]
}The @id value anchors your entity in the JSON-LD graph. The sameAs array creates the machine-readable web of corroboration. Every URL in sameAs should point to a page that unambiguously describes your business — not your category page on a directory, but your specific business profile page.
Step 11: Person Schema for Named Founders and Key People
For consultancies, professional services firms, and knowledge businesses, the named individual behind the organisation is often as important to entity authority as the organisation itself — particularly for AI citation, which frequently cites people rather than just companies.
A Person schema node should be added to the JSON-LD graph alongside your Organisation schema. It should include the person’s name, job title, a description, their LinkedIn URL in the sameAs array, and a worksFor reference linking to the Organisation entity via @id. The Organisation’s founder property should reference the Person entity via @id — creating a bidirectional graph relationship rather than a flat inline object.
This Person entity strengthens AI citation probability significantly. When an AI system is building a response about SEO consultants, AI visibility specialists, or practitioners in your field, it is more likely to cite a named individual with a verifiable Person entity than an anonymous organisation. The content you author — guides, case studies, thought leadership — should consistently attribute authorship to that named Person entity via Article schema’s author property.
Step 12: Digital PR — The Earned Layer
Everything above is structured and managed — you are building signals you control. The earned layer is different: citations from independent, authoritative third-party sources that reference your entity by name without you placing them.
A mention in a relevant trade publication, a quote attributed to a named expert from your organisation in an industry context, a link from a topically relevant high-authority domain — these are the signals that structured directory listings cannot replicate. They provide independent corroboration that no amount of profile-filling can manufacture.
For most UK professional services businesses, the realistic earned citation opportunities are: contributed articles in trade or vertical publications, expert commentary in press coverage, speaking at industry events (which generates event listings and coverage), podcast appearances, and being cited as a source by other content creators in your field. Each of these creates an entity mention in a context that is independently editorially controlled — which is precisely why Google and AI systems weight them more heavily than self-created profiles.
The Digital PR and link building service page covers the earned citation strategy in more depth. For entity authority purposes, the key principle is that earned citations from topically relevant, authoritative sources are the ceiling of entity authority — they compound the structured foundation built in steps 1 through 11 into genuinely hard-to-replicate authority.
