Keywords or Entities: Why GEO Isn't SEO With Extra Steps

🇫🇷 Version française

In SEO, you target a keyword and try to rank well on it. A generative AI doesn't rank pages on a word — it recognizes entities, things and brands and people, and decides which ones to cite. Understanding that difference changes how you should write.

For two decades, search engine optimization has rested on a simple logic: figure out the words your customers type, and make sure a page contains them in the right places. That logic hasn't disappeared for classic SEO. But it's not enough anymore to get cited by a generative AI, which doesn't work by indexing strings of text — it works by connecting entities to each other.

What exactly is an entity?

An entity is an identifiable real-world object that a knowledge engine can assign its own existence to: your company, your founder, your city, the product category you sell. What sets an entity apart from a simple word is that it has a stable identity: "GOXA" stays the same entity whether it's written "Goxa," "the GOXA agency," or "the folks at GOXA." A keyword, on the other hand, depends on the exact phrasing used.

Knowledge engines (Google's Knowledge Graph, Wikidata, and the internal knowledge bases of language models) link entities together through attributes and relationships: GOXA is a agency, GOXA offers GEO services, GOXA is based in France. The more numerous, consistent, and independently verifiable these relationships are, the "stronger" the entity looks to an AI — and the more likely it is to be pulled into an answer.

Why keyword targeting alone isn't enough

A classic keyword strategy optimizes for text matching: if a customer searches "best GEO agency Paris," the page that most precisely contains that phrase has an edge. A generative AI doesn't look for a word match — it composes an answer from the entities it judges relevant and trustworthy for the question asked, even if none of your pages contain the exact words of the query.

In practice, that means stacking variations of the same keyword across multiple pages doesn't help as much as it used to. What helps is your brand being clearly and consistently tied to what it does, so an AI can connect it to the topic without ambiguity, even when the topic is phrased differently.

How to shift your content toward entities

The principle stays the same from page to page: name the key entities explicitly (your brand, your offer, your industry, your location) instead of implying them, and keep that information identical everywhere your company appears online — website, social profiles, directories, Google listing. An AI that finds consistent information across multiple independent sources consolidates the same entity; information that varies creates confusion, and a blurry entity is one an AI hesitates to cite.

Worth noting: this isn't a one-off writing task, it's a matter of structural consistency — the kind of thing that deserves a dedicated audit rather than a checklist applied at random.

Should you still work on keywords at all?

Yes, for two reasons that still hold: classic search rankings still depend heavily on them, and keywords tell you the actual vocabulary your customers use — a vocabulary you should then tie explicitly to your entities rather than treat as an end in itself. The keyword remains a diagnostic tool; the entity is what determines whether you get cited.