Content is Everything
Pillar 4 of 6

Entity & trust

Spencer Thursfield · Last reviewed 2026-08

Machines resolve things more than they rank pages: this business, at this place, run by this person, doing this work. If the web's records of your business disagree, or if your business shares a name with someone else's, systems merge you, split you, or confuse you with a stranger. This pillar is about being one clear thing, consistently, everywhere.

  • An entity is the unit of trust. Reviews, mentions, credentials and content all accrue to an identity, and only if the identity resolves. Strongly supported
  • Consistency is the mechanism. Same name, same address, same description of what you do, on your site, your profiles and your directories. Disagreement reads as doubt. Official recommendation
  • Trust cannot be added as a tag. It accumulates from named authors, real contact details, primary sources, and independent corroboration. No platform sells a shortcut. Strongly supported
  • We speak from experience. bernard shares its name with unrelated older businesses, and search systems have merged them. Untangling that collision is live work we will document here as a case study. Context-dependent

In this pillar

What bernard does about this pillar

bernard generates and validates the structured data that states your identity, and keeps it matching the visible page. verified

Detecting identity inconsistency across the wider web, in profiles, directories and knowledge graphs, is not built yet. It is a named product direction. we're building this

made with