Entity Resolution for Businesses

Entity resolution (also called entity matching or record linkage) is the process of deciding whether two or more records or mentions refer to the same real-world entity. For businesses, that means deciding whether “Acme Roofing LLC,” a Maps pin, a website, and a registry row are one company — or two similar names in the same city.

When resolution fails, customers and models experience wrong phone numbers, merged competitors, and ghost locations. When it succeeds, answers and search features can attach attributes to the correct organisation.

Why business entity resolution is hard

  • Similar trading names in the same market
  • DBAs that differ from legal names
  • Multi-location brands with uneven NAP quality
  • Rebrands, mergers, and domain changes
  • Thin websites with little corroboration
  • Spam and fake listings

Large famous brands accumulate dense consistent mentions. SMEs often do not. Encyclopaedic notability rules also exclude most SMEs from public graphs that could otherwise stabilise identity. See Wikipedia notability for SMEs.

Signals systems use

Different systems weight signals differently, but common inputs include names, addresses, phones, domains, geo coordinates, registration identifiers, Place IDs, and link graph context. Consistency across independent surfaces is more valuable than repeating the same claim on twenty low-quality directories.

What operators can control

  1. Canonical naming policy (legal vs trading)
  2. NAP consistency
  3. Domain longevity and redirects after changes
  4. On-site schema that matches visible facts
  5. Accurate Maps categories and service-area honesty
  6. Selective public passports that do not invent notability

Related: reducing entity conflation, NAP consistency, trading vs legal name.

AI Verified’s role

A Type A passport is a selective, fetchable identity document keyed by forensic hash. It does not magically resolve every system’s internal graph, but it adds a stable public node that agrees with Maps and registry evidence when operators maintain consistency. Gold adds domain attestation so the website and passport are bound by control proof.