Named Entity Recognition
Named entity recognition, or NER, is the job of finding the words in a text that are names of things, such as people and companies, and labeling what kind of name each one is. Each name it finds is called a named entity. Stanford's NER tool, for example, sorts names into three groups: person, organization and location.
Source: Stanford NLP Group, Stanford Named Entity Recognizer (NER), checked October 29, 2026
What Named Entity Recognition means for your business
We can't see how Google Search or ChatGPT reads the names on your pages, but we can test software that does the same job. Google sells one version in its Cloud Natural Language API. Its entity analysis takes a block of text and returns the known names it finds, such as public figures and landmarks, with information about each one. We'd run your About page and a few of your reviews through a tool like that and see whether your business name comes back as an organization, or gets split up or missed.
A business named after a common word, or after its owner, gives software less to go on. We'd make sure your full name sits next to what you do and where you do it, in plain sentences on your own site.
If AI answers mix your business up with a person or place that shares its name, sorting out which business is which is the work we'd do.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited IBM, Wikipedia, Google Cloud, Microsoft and YouTube tutorials, while the results under it were mostly about the word "entity" alone. ChatGPT gave a textbook answer with example tables and cited nothing.
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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