Entity Salience
Entity salience is a score for how central a person, place, company or thing is to a piece of text. Google's Cloud Natural Language API gives each entity it finds a salience score from 0 to 1. A score near 1 means the entity is central to the whole text, and a score near 0 means it matters less.
Source: Google Cloud, Natural Language API reference, Entity, checked October 29, 2026
What Entity Salience means for your business
The salience score comes from a text-analysis tool that Google sells to developers. Google's documentation for it explains the score, but it doesn't say Google Search uses that score to rank pages, and we haven't found a Google page that does. So we use salience as a check on a page's writing, and leave rankings out of it.
Run a page through a text-analysis tool and see which names come out on top. If your service page is about your bakery but the top name is your town, a supplier or a competitor you compared yourself to, a reader could come away with the wrong idea too. We'd fix that by making your business the subject of the opening sentences and saying plainly what you do. When SEO writers talk about entity-rich content, this is the measurable version: a page where your business, and the things it does, come out on top.
Some glossaries call this a prominence signal, which is easy to confuse with Google's local ranking. On Google's own help page, prominence means how well-known a business is, based on things like links to your site and the number of reviews you have. That one is about your reputation across the web, and salience is about one piece of text.
If AI tools describe your business by the company you're compared with, or by your town instead of your trade, making your own pages say plainly who you are is the first thing we'd rewrite.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited SEO blogs, LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube, and said search engines use salience to judge what a page is about, which Google's API docs don't say. ChatGPT cited nothing and said Google hasn't confirmed it affects rankings.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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