Entity Attribute
An entity attribute is a fact that describes a thing, like a person's date of birth or a business's address, phone number or line of work. Database designers use the term, and IBM's documentation defines an attribute as "a characteristic or trait of an entity type that describes the entity."
Source: IBM Documentation, Key concepts: Entity, attribute, and entity type, checked October 29, 2026
What Entity Attribute means for your business
For a business, your attributes are the plain facts about you: name, address, phone, hours, what you sell, where you work, when you opened and who runs it. Schema.org, the vocabulary behind Google's structured data guides, calls them properties. Google's Organization markup guide notes that some of them, like your industry code, are used "behind the scenes" to tell your organization apart from others.
Google Business Profile uses the word differently. There, attributes are extras you tick, like outdoor seating or Wi-Fi, and Google says some can help you show up when people look for places with those features. We'd fill in both kinds.
We'd write your core facts down once, in one place, and copy them exactly into your site, your code and every listing. If AI answers get your hours, your service area or what you do wrong, correcting the facts AI tools repeat about you starts with that list.
Source: Google Search Central, Organization structured data, checked October 29, 2026
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview both treated it as a database term, with student and employee tables as examples. The Overview cited IBM, GeeksforGeeks and YouTube lessons; ChatGPT cited nothing, and neither mentioned search or business listings.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in entities and the knowledge graph
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