Recording an episode with Royce Blake last week, he asked whether we would still need websites in a couple of years. A reasonable question, and most people expect them to go the way of the fax machine.
My answer surprised him, and the reason is a mechanic almost nobody writes about.
What is an entity, and why does the machine care?
To a search engine, a page is a document. To an answer engine, you are a thing. A person, with a job, a body of work, a set of claims attached to your name. The technical word is an entity.
Before the machine can say anything about you it has to answer a prior question: is this the same person? The Richard Lowe on the ghostwriting site, the Richard Lowe on the Amazon author page, the Richard Lowe quoted in an article about answer engines. One person, or three?
That process is called entity resolution, and it is not clever. It looks for agreement. Where the sources agree, confidence goes up. Where they disagree, confidence goes down, and a low-confidence entity is one the machine will simply not name, because naming you is a risk it does not need to take.
One wrong number is enough
Because the machine cannot tell the difference between a typo and a different person.
Say your website reports 54 ghostwritten books. Your LinkedIn says over 50. Your speaker bio says nearly 60 because you rounded up for a conference two years ago. To you these are the same fact stated loosely. To an entity resolver they are three conflicting claims about the same attribute, and conflicting claims are exactly the signal that says these might not be the same person.
Nothing breaks. No error appears. You simply stop being the answer to questions you should own.
My own canon, and I do not deviate from it
- 113+ books authored, always with the plus sign
- 54+ books ghostwritten, always stated separately, never added to the first number
- 980,000+ photographs, never rounded up to a million
- 33 years in enterprise IT
- 20 years as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s
That last one matters more than it looks. I have taken a lot of photographs, and over a million would be a better line. It would also be a number I could not support, and the moment one source says 980,000 and another says over a million, I have created the disagreement myself.
Which attributes have to match?
Not everything. Prose can vary, and should. What has to hold still is anything a machine would treat as a fact about the entity.
Your name, in one form. Not Rich in one place and Richard in another. Not with a middle initial here and without it there. Every variant creates a candidate for a separate entity, and separate entities compete instead of reinforcing each other.
Countable claims. Books, years, clients, photographs. Any number that appears in more than one place.
Your role, stated the same way. Ghostwriter, or author, or consultant. Pick the one that is true and lead with it everywhere.
Organisation names. The company as it appears in your schema should match the company on your invoices and your book jacket.
Identifiers. ISBNs, an ORCID, a Wikidata item. These are the strongest of all, because they are unique by design and cannot be misread.
Where the contradictions come from
Almost never from carelessness. They come from time.
You wrote a bio in 2019 saying 40 books. You have written more since, and you updated the website. The 2019 bio is still on a conference site, a guest post, a podcast page, three directories and an old press release. None of those were wrong when you wrote them.
The other source is helpfulness. Somebody writes an introduction for you and rounds a number, or promotes you to a title you have not claimed. It reads well and it quietly contradicts everything else.
How do you fix it without spending a month?
Search your own name and read the first three pages as though you were a stranger trying to work out who you are. Write down every number and title you find. The contradictions will be obvious and there will be fewer than you fear.
Then fix in this order. Your own site first, because it is the source everything else should agree with. Then the profiles you control, which is most of them. Then the ones you can request a correction from, which is fewer than you think but not zero.
What you cannot change, leave. A single stale bio against a dozen consistent sources is noise. It is the even split that hurts, where half your sources say one thing and half say another, because then there is no majority for the machine to trust.
Why the website carries the weight
This is where the podcast question comes back. Websites are not dying, they are changing job.
A website used to be where traffic went. Now it is where your entity is defined. It is the one place you control completely, the one place that states the canonical version, and the place a machine goes when the other sources disagree. Every platform you use is rented. The site is not.
That is also why structured data matters more than it used to. Schema is how you state the facts in a form that removes the guessing: this is the person, this is the organisation, these are the same entity as these profiles elsewhere. The sameAs property exists for precisely this problem, and most sites leave it empty. I go through the whole mechanism in The Day Your Website Died.
What does consistency buy you?
Not a ranking. There is no consistency score.
What it buys is the absence of doubt. When somebody asks an answer engine who to trust on a subject, it assembles candidates and discards the ones it cannot resolve confidently. Consistency does not put you at the top of that list. It keeps you on it.
Which is unglamorous, and it is the whole game. Being the answer starts with being a coherent thing to be asked about.
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