One business. One description. Everywhere.
When your business is described three different ways across the web, answer engines cannot tell which one is you. Enter your details once and get the block that should appear on every profile you own.
Entity clarity is whether an answer engine can tell, with confidence, that every mention of your business across the web refers to the same business. It is the second of five factors that determine whether AI names you, and it is the one most local businesses fail without knowing it.
The failure is often small. A suite number on the website that is missing from Yelp. An old tracking phone number still live on a directory. A Facebook page that says “serving the greater metro area” while the site says one city. Each looks harmless. Together they tell a machine that it cannot verify who you are, so it names a competitor it can.
The fix is free. Write the details once, then make every surface match.
Enter these the way they should appear everywhere.
Use your legal business name, not a shortened version. Nothing is sent anywhere. This runs entirely in your browser.
Fill in at least the business name, category, and city to generate your block.
Settle the wording once. Then never vary it.
Name, address, phone, website. This exact formatting goes in your website footer and on every profile that has an address field. Same abbreviations, same punctuation, every time.
For Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, and any field with a tight limit.
For Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, directories, and your own About page. Same facts, more room.
Paste this into your site’s head as a JSON-LD script tag. It tells a machine your details directly instead of making it infer them from page copy.
These are starting points. Edit the wording if it does not sound like you. What matters is that once you edit it, the edited version is the one you use everywhere.
Twelve surfaces, in priority order.
0 of 12 checkedWork down the list. The first four carry the most weight, and most businesses find at least one mismatch in them.
Small differences that machines treat as large.
Name variants
“Peak Sodding” on one profile, “Peak Sodding LLC” on another, “Peak Sod & Landscape” on a third. Pick the legal name and use it. Keyword-stuffed names are also a Google violation.
Tracking phone numbers
A call-tracking number on your ads and a different number on your site creates two businesses in the eyes of a crawler. If you use tracking numbers, keep the primary number consistent everywhere and let tracking live behind it.
Suite and unit numbers
Present on the website, missing on Yelp, abbreviated differently on Facebook. Pick one format and repeat it exactly.
Category drift
Listed as a general contractor in one place and a remodeler in another. Engines use category to decide which questions you are eligible to answer.
Service area wording
“Greater metro area” on one profile, three named counties on another. Name the same places, in the same words, in the same order.
Dead profiles you forgot
An old location page, a former partner’s directory listing, a profile from a previous business name. Claim it and correct it, or get it removed.
Before you start editing profiles.
What is entity consistency?
Entity consistency means every mention of your business across the web describes the same business in the same way. Identical name, address, phone number, category, and service area. Answer engines resolve a business by cross-referencing sources, and when those sources disagree the engine has lower confidence that they refer to one entity. Lower confidence means it is more likely to name a competitor it can verify.
Does my NAP really have to match exactly?
Close is usually good enough for a human and not good enough for a machine. Street versus St, Suite 200 versus Ste 200, and a missing area code are all differences a crawler has to reconcile. Matching exactly costs nothing and removes the question entirely.
I do not have a storefront. What do I use for an address?
Leave the street address out and describe your service area instead. Google Business Profile has a service-area business setting for exactly this, and hiding the address is the correct choice for home-based businesses. What matters is that the city, state, and service area are consistent everywhere.
How long does fixing this take?
Most businesses can update the critical four in a single afternoon. The full list of twelve is usually a week of small tasks. Some directories take a few days to approve an edit, and a few require claiming the listing first, which can add time.
How soon will it show up in AI answers?
Entity fixes are foundational rather than immediate. Engines need to recrawl the corrected sources and rebuild confidence, which typically takes 60 to 90 days to register. The change is not deterministic either, since the same question can return different sources between requests. What consistency does is remove a reason to discount you.
Do I need schema markup if my profiles are consistent?
Consistency without schema still helps, and schema without consistency is contradicted by the rest of the web. Schema is the fastest way to state your details unambiguously on the surface you fully control, so it is worth doing. It is also the piece most likely to need a developer.
Will fixing this make AI recommend my business?
Not on its own. Entity clarity is one of five factors, alongside citation frequency, content extractability, source corroboration, and local relevance. A business can be perfectly consistent everywhere and still go unnamed, because nothing about it is specific enough for an engine to quote. Consistency clears an obstacle. Being worth citing is separate work.
What if I find a listing I cannot edit?
Most major directories have a claim process that verifies ownership by phone or postcard. For a listing under a former business name or a former owner, the claim process is still the route, and support can usually merge or remove duplicates once ownership is proven.
Consistency removes a reason to skip you. It does not make you the answer.
See every gap, scored.
This tool fixes one of five factors. The AI Visibility Audit scores you across six sections and 30 criteria, runs a tracked prompt set against the engines, and tells you exactly what to fix first.