Latest / Found in AI: AI Search Visibility, SEO, & GEO / What Is Entity Authority and Why Does It Matter More Than Domain Authority?

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What Is Entity Authority and Why Does It Matter More Than Domain Authority? · Found in AI: AI Search Visibility, SEO, & GEO

• 0:41
  (Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hey, welcome back to Found in AI. I'm Cassie Clark, a fractional content strategist, an AI search optimization nerd, and your host for the show where we break down AI search, GEO, and what all of this means for how brands get found. Today, I'm sitting down with Lars Lofgren. Lars has spent his entire career in organic marketing, content, SEO, conversion, optimization, affiliates, you name it, he has done it. He built an affiliate business that had $7 million in revenue in a single year. He's consulted for enterprise brands like Automatic and Perplexity, though he can't tell us what he did for Perplexity, and I'm still a little bit mad about it, so we'll just let that name drop sit there and torture us. Here's why I wanted to have this conversation with Lars. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I had to take a tiny step back for the platform to recalibrate. That's a good way to say that. But just today, I searched for conversations around AEO and GEO, and nearly every single one of them mentioned entity authority. Entity authority is something that we talk about here on the show and the newsletter quite often, and there's a reason the A in the FSA framework stands for authority. But Lars comes at it from a really interesting angle. He went through a period where his entire SEO mental model just kind of broke. It crumbled. Nothing was working. The sites with incredible domain ratings were getting crushed, and what came out on the other side is a framework that I think every marketer and founder needs to hear, especially if you're trying to figure out where to even start with AI visibility. Let's get into it. Yeah, so I'm Lars Lofgren. I've spent my whole career in my online marketing, usually on the organic side, so a lot of content, growth hacking early on, doing a lot of conversion optimization, a lot of content, a lot of SEO. I've done SaaS. I've done info products back when, you know, before. Now we just call it creator businesses, and everybody has this like video course that they're schlepping around. Before that, we called them info products, and it was not as well respected. It was kind of a shadier part of the internet. So I did a bunch of that. I did affiliates. I built a big affiliate business. At its top, we did $7 million in revenue in one year, so that was exciting. I wound that down for a multitude of reasons that we can talk about if you want, but round that down, and since then, I've been doing consulting just for a couple select clients, and usually for like enterprise, like SEO type engagements. Automatic was a client of mine. Perplexity, I have some others. So that's what I've been doing lately, and I'm just futzing around and trying to do good content. When everybody else is just shipping AI slop, I'm trying to go the other way and actually still be entertaining and insightful.
• 3:45
  We'll see if that works out. Yeah, so the perplexity mentioned, that's interesting.
• 3:51
  Can you tell us what you were doing with perplexity? I can't. I can't. I got NDAs and contracts and all sorts of things. You're just going to name drop it and just tease us a little bit. Yeah, I just name drop it. No biggie. No, but I do a lot of content in SEO in general for my clients, and perplexity was no different. Yeah. Okay, so speaking of SEO, you have been talking about GEO on LinkedIn. You've been following the conversation. Yeah, a little bit.
• 4:21
  You were talking about Entity Authority last week, a couple of weeks ago, whenever that was.
• 4:26
  Tell us in your words what Entity Authority is. Yeah, so this is probably one of the bigger shifts that I've had in my SEO thinking. I think it's definitely started at the end of 2022, really hit in 2023, and came to fruition in 2024. During that time period, I was in a very, very competitive SEO category. We were making a lot of money. We were ranking number one for a lot of insane competitive terms, so we were deep into SEO. We felt this change immediately.
• 5:00
  During that two-year period, my whole mental model, I feel like my whole mental model of SEO just broke. Just nothing made sense anymore. I was like, I'm losing my mind. Nothing works.
• 5:11
  This is insane. What is happening right now? The algo felt 100% different. During that journey, one of the things I decided to do was like, okay, I'm just going to toss out my whole old model. I don't know what's wrong with it. I'm just going to assume everything's wrong with it.
• 5:30
  Let's just redo everything from scratch, every tactic, every model, everything. Everything has to be proven again. Let's go do that. I've been working with a lot of sites since then, running just a lot of tests and projects and trying random shit. I feel like I'm starting to come out the other side and things kind of make sense. This shift in my mental model, I think is kind of the core of it. The old model, we were focused on domains. That's the unit of analysis within the web, certainly within SEO. Everything came down to domain. I'm not talking about just LLM mentions and AIOs or GEOs or whatever we're calling it. I'm even talking about just the old, yeah, whatever. Everyone's got a different name. It's fine. What I'm talking about, even if you're just trying to get the old school 10 blue links from Google, this is still relevant. If anything, I actually see a lot of similarities between the two. I don't think they're nearly as different as some people say. That's because the Google algo has evolved so much. It's not just the LLMs that have evolved. The actual Google algo has evolved a lot in the last couple of years. It's not the same at all. We used to use this domain level analysis, thinking the domains, that's how we ranked in Google. Some people will still start with that with trying to get into chat GPT or whatever. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not enough.
• 6:57
  Your domain in all the old frameworks could look amazing, but it could actually perform like shit.
• 7:05
  That's the world that we're in. This is why a lot of people have been screaming bloody murder in the last couple of years. The helpful content update hits so many, actually like really high caliber sites with really amazing content that I would argue should rank. And I'm not just talking about mine. I'm not being, I'm not trying to protect my ego here. I'm like looking at other people's sites. I'm like, that's pretty good. Google would benefit if they rank that stuff.
• 7:28
  But a lot of those sites got murdered, absolutely destroyed. And domain rankings, I see this with clients. I work a lot on the enterprise side and with bigger brands, really established sites. A small site for me has a domain rating in the 70s. I've worked on domains in the 90s, multiple of them. One of the domains I worked on was a top 100 site on the internet. So I tend to play on the bigger side with really strong domains that you think could just clean up and do whatever they want and just throw their weight around. Five years ago, that would have been the case. Today, that's not. In some cases, it's good. In some cases, it actually creates all sorts of weird behavior and search results. So basically, we're in a world where that domain level of thinking doesn't work anymore, right? Really strong domains either struggle and then weak domains can just like outperform all the time. There's like all this wonky craziness. And there was always exceptions in the past. But in the old world, there was some correlation between domain strength, you know, how many links, how good is the domain, and how you perform in Google, right? There was a correlation, not a perfect correlation, but a correlation.
• 8:39
  Now, I would argue there's like zero correlation. I think there's just none. Out of everything else.
• 8:46
  Everything else I look at, that's not even on the list. I'm like, I'll take a glance at domain rating. But just to give me a sense of what roughly the link profiles like, but I'll immediately start focusing on other stuff if I want the site to actually perform.
• 9:00
  When you say perform, just for the listeners, you mean inside of these AI engines or do you mean traditional search? All of the above. Okay. All of the above. Yeah. Okay.
• 9:10
  And you're like, okay, well, if we're not looking at the domain, if we're not analyzing things from the domain level, then what are we looking at? And I think the mental framework I have is in this AI world, the level we've gone up a level in the abstraction, right? We were at domains previously, and we have to go up a level. The domain is now just a small component of a much bigger picture.
• 9:34
  And what is that primary unit at that next level above? A lot of SEOs will call that brand. That's the shortcut they use. And that's somewhat true. I think it's a fine term. I personally use the term entity because I think brand can lead you down some like wrong roads, right? If you say, oh, just work on the brand. Like, right. Okay. What the fuck does that mean? Right.
• 9:56
  It's like, what? Um, like, okay, I should be Nike. I need to be, you know, you know, Apple, like what? No, none of us are building Apple. We're, we're mortals. Apple's a once in a lifetime company. That's not happening, right? We cannot be Apple. Um, but there's a lot of things we can do. Um, and it's not just being like, yes, you should do brand stuff. That's all a good idea.
• 10:17
  You should do that. But when you're thinking like more tactically, like, how do I actually get Google to recognize me? How do I get Google to think that I'm a trustworthy website? How do I get LLMs to start referencing me even in a small niche where I don't have a big budget or a big brand or I'm, I'm new to the space. How do I start at least like making some, um, inroads there.
• 10:40
  Right. And so I like to use the word entity, right? It's like, it's not just your domain, but like, what is the primary entity of your business? It's usually the company name, the brand name, although a lot of people will fuck that up and get it all messy, but hopefully it's clean. It's like an individual personal brand. It's a single company brand, whatever that is, that is that entity. And that entity, like if we think about Google and how LLMs work, right, it's all even for like informational content, all LLMs do is they just break everything down into individual topics, individual items, individual words.
• 11:16
  And they're just looking for relationships between everything, right? Obviously the advanced models get more complex than that, but that's the core. And so when you're thinking about that giant web of topics and everything that Google and all the LLMs have mapped, and they're constantly remapping and constantly trying to, um, improve their, their dataset on where does your entity sit within that more abstract map? And that map exists all over the web. It's everywhere, right?
• 11:42
  It's not just on your domain. It's on Reddit. It's in open Facebook groups. It's on LinkedIn.
• 11:49
  It's on Instagram. It's on anything that anything, any of these tools can crawl.
• 11:53
  That is a component of your entity or could be. And if you're good, you can actually like really manipulate these things and create fake brands. I've seen this. I have examples of this. Yes, yeah. It can absolutely, it absolutely exists. Um, especially if you, I like researching like shady corners of the internet because I find it entertaining. Uh, and I think if you get into the shady corners of the internet, it actually teaches you how the algorithms actually work instead of just like, Oh, build a brand and create great content. Like, no, no, no, no. It's way more complicated than that. Um, and there are absolutely sectors of the internet where people are just using these exploits to create these fake entities. And because they built up the entity that carries over to the domain, because Google and the LLMs have figured out those two things are related, right? Here's the entity domain is under it. If I trust the entity, I trust the domain.
• 12:46
  Even though the domain, the domain rating is like zero, right? There's like, we're practically nothing. Um, and then it's ranking number one for stuff. And Google was like, yeah, yeah, we trust this. You're like, should you, this is fake. Um, so that happens. But even if you're for a legitimate business, it's like, okay, I have a domain, but like, what are the rest of my profiles doing? What is do, are we doing something on Reddit, either something shady or something real? Um, are we doing some like, what are we on YouTube? Are we on somewhere else? Are people looking for us? All these indicators can really add up. And so if you kind of move your unit of analysis from the domain up to the entity, I think like, at least when I do that, a lot of the things that I would find completely perplexing and being like, this makes no sense. It flips. And I'm like, ah, actually this makes perfect sense. Yeah. So yeah. Happy to take this anywhere you like. Yeah. So I, one of the pressing question I have at the moment, and I'm just thinking about this from marketing brand perspective, because I've been talking about entity authority for a while. And then it's what you're doing on Reddit and YouTube and LinkedIn everywhere that you composed, it all connects together. Even if it's not linked, even if it's not entirely linked across your profiles, if you're a brand and you're trying to create a stronger entity for these LLM to pull from, should you be on the places where your audience necessarily isn't hanging out? I mean, there is, there's probably like every social network isn't a perfect overlap, right? Like I'm sure someone listening to this will have an audience that does like, just is not on TikTok. I'm like, okay, don't go on TikTok. It just could be because I've not paid attention, but I've not seen TikTok pulled into answers. Have you?
• 14:43
  No, but it is crawlable. So, well, and I know a lot of scammers are going hard on TikTok, right?
• 14:49
  So I think it's, it's less like, I'm not trying to, I wouldn't advise anybody to do all these. If you're thinking about any of these like marketing channels and like, you want to find the channels that kind of hit a couple of criteria, right? First one is yes, your customers are there like in mass, like you're selling a bunch of like, I don't know, tactical axes. Like, are you going to be on Pinterest? Probably not. I don't know. Go, go for wherever the wannabe alpha males are. Go hang out with them. Right. Total dismatch. Yeah. Reddit, Reddit, Reddit's perfect.
• 15:21
  Amazing. Right. But so like, yeah, there's going to be some obvious ones like that, but go find the, whatever channels really overlap with your audience. But you also want to like, pick channels that like you're excited by over the longterm, right? Like even you don't have to do the, or like do a ruthless prioritization of like, oh yeah, this is the perfect channel. Like which channel is your, and your team going to get really excited by, even if it's just like a mid tier channel in the prioritization stack, right? Like Reddit is weird place.
• 15:58
  Even though Reddit is preferred heavily by LLMs and Google. Oh my God. It's like off the charts.
• 16:06
  But Reddit is weird. It's got a weird kind of set of norms. I would totally understand a lot of marketing teams were like, you know what? We just do not like Reddit. We know our customers are there. It's a weird fucking place. We don't want anything to do with it. It is, but that's okay.
• 16:21
  And for the people that use Reddit, I've had a weird thing going on where I've needed actual people who have been through the thing. And they're all on Reddit from 14 years ago, and it's still relevant from today. So I get why it's a marketing channel that we should prioritize. I also get why we might not want to because of the weirdos that are there.
• 16:43
  Yeah. Well, the point is that you have options, right? Like, I mean, the options are more limited than they used to be. But when you're thinking about your marketing mix, I would, a few pieces of tactical like recommendations. One, pick a channel you're really excited by for the long term. Also don't pick just one channel, pick like at least two. You know, I've been through this.
• 17:07
  If you're a hundred percent dedicated to a single channel and that channel gets shitty, you're hosed, right? And I have to start over. So I would do at least two.
• 17:18
  And I mean, those are the big ones, you know, you want consistency long-term pick at least two. Oh, and I mean, the big, big, big change, I think, especially for marketers of my generation that came up during the same time I came up, I would not start with SEO to bring this back to the thing. Especially for like a small business or a new business, your startup of any kind, you're getting, if you're at like day zero, day one, don't start with SEO, go start elsewhere.
• 17:49
  SEO still generates so much money. And I believe SEO, good SEO is like the foundation of ranking in LLMs and getting a voice in there consistently. You know, the 10 blue links, if there's no traffic getting to the top of the 10 blue links, that still helps.
• 18:06
  ChatTBT and Gemini and Perplexity and everything else. Right. So, but you can't go straight to SEO.
• 18:12
  That's the biggest like marketing selection change that I've gone through. I'm on SEO diehard. I love SEO. I'd work exclusively on SEO if I could. That's why I built my previous business. It's a really good fit for me. But I have to come to terms with the fact that with this entity trust element that's hanging over every domain, I have to build the entity first. Then I can come back to SEO and build things out. Right. That's what Google's trying to accomplish. So pick at least one social network somewhere. And your second platform is probably going to be another social network.
• 18:50
  Get on two of them that you think is a good mix for your audience and a good mix for your skill sets and the type of media that you're really comfortable with and really build those up over time. The more you do that and the further you get, when you come back to SEO or you start kind of slowly attacking it, you'll notice that you can get way further, way faster. Whereas if you go all in on SEO, I mean, I've done this multiple times in the last couple of years. It feels like nothing works. Like just Google doesn't want anything to do with you. Everything's hard. You can go so hard on quality content and search intents and all that stuff. And, you know, doing all the on-page stuff and Google just doesn't give a shit. But if you go build a YouTube channel first, then come back to SEO, things will take off. Or if you spend time on Reddit, then come back to SEO, things will take off. Right. So try to get something at that top of funnel, social brand level, the tofu, right? Get to the top. And then as that gets built out, then you can build down into like a nice, stable, healthy SEO format. Okay. That was a packed conversation. Lars dropped a lot of information in a short amount of time. So let me pull out the practical pieces before we wrap up this episode. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, entity authority matters, but what do I actually do about it? Well, here's where I would start. First, stop thinking about your domain as the whole picture. Your domain is just one tiny little piece of your entity. What's happening on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Reddit, on podcasts, or third-party sites, or those review sites. All of that feeds into how AI engines in Google understand who you are and whether you're trustworthy. If your website is the only place that your brand exists online, well, your entity is probably, it's probably good. Second, pick at least two channels and commit to them. Lars said this, and I want to reinforce it. Don't go all in on just one platform. Pick two that align with where your audience actually is and where you or your team can show up consistently. Consistency over time is what builds the entity signal. Third, and this one is probably going to sting a little. I'm so sorry. Don't start with SEO. I know, I know, I can hear the collective gasp, but Lars is right. If you're early stage or you're rebuilding, go build your entity on social and earned channels first, then come back to SEO with the wind at your back. You will move much faster. I have seen this with my own personal brand and when I really started with AI search optimization and testing everything out. And fourth, audit how AI engines see you right now. Not what you've published, but more so how it's being read and interpreted.
• 21:51
  Because if your entity isn't showing up in those AI-generated answers, it's not a content volume problem. It's an entity authority problem and it is entirely fixable. If you're trying to figure out how your brand fits into AI first search or where to get started with your strategy, you know where to find me. Head over to CassieClarkMarketing.com to get started with your AI search visibility audit. All right, that is it for today's episode. If this one helped you rethink how you're approaching visibility, hit subscribe and leave a review. It helps more creators find the show and I would love you forever if you did that, so thank you.
• 22:28
  I will see you on the next episode. Until then, stay visible.