What Is Named Entity Recognition (NER)? How AI Identifies Entities in Content

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a natural language processing technique that identifies and classifies named entities in text into predefined categories such as person, organisation, location, date, and product.

Entity Types

Common entity types include Person, Organisation, Location, Date/Time, Product, Event, and Monetary Value. Search engines use these classifications to understand content topics and relevance.

Entity Salience

Entity salience measures how central an entity is to a document. Google uses salience scoring to determine what a page is primarily about, which directly affects ranking for entity-related queries.

SEO Implications

• Mention key entities early and prominently in your content
• Use consistent entity naming throughout your pages
• Implement Schema.org markup to explicitly identify entities
• Link entities to authoritative sources like Wikipedia to strengthen disambiguation