---
title: "Before you can be visible, a machine has to know who you are"
canonical: https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility
language: en
author: Fernando Vilches (https://entia.systems/#founder)
publisher: ENTIA Systems (https://entia.systems/#organization)
date_modified: 2026-09-17
alternate_language: https://entia.systems/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility
json_ld: https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility.json
html: https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility
---

# Before you can be visible, *a machine has to know who you are.*

The web solved company identity for people. For an AI system that is not enough. Entity resolution comes before positioning.

## A person tolerates ambiguity. A machine should not have to

For years the web represented a company well enough for a person: a name, a logo, a website, an address and some external mentions. A person interprets those signals, infers that two names probably refer to the same company and tolerates minor contradictions.

An AI system should not depend on that ambiguity. Before deciding whether a company is relevant, visible or recommendable, it has to resolve a more basic question: **which entity is this exactly, and what evidence supports that identity?**

> Before positioning *comes entity resolution.*

## A website is not a machine identity

A corporate website is a claim made by the company itself. It matters, but it does not resolve identity on its own. A trading name may differ from the legal name, an address may have changed, a tax identifier may be absent, two companies may have almost the same name and a directory may keep stale data.

For a machine, a useful representation separates at least four things: the claim, the source, the date it was obtained and the strength of the evidence. If those layers are mixed, the system receives text. If they are separated, it receives a verifiable entity.

## Canonicity reduces the interpretation space

A canonical URL does not make a claim true. What it does is give a stable point where different representations converge: HTML for people and search engines, JSON for software, Markdown for textual retrieval, and APIs or MCP for agents.

Identity is more useful when all those surfaces describe the same entity with the same identifiers. That is the ENTIA principle: one entity, several representations, explicit provenance and a stable identifier.

## Visibility comes later

SEO, generative search, citation and recommendation are downstream problems. A system cannot reason reliably about a company if it has not first resolved who it is. The greater the contradiction between sources, the more work it must do before trusting a representation.

That is why I care less about “how do I get an AI system to mention a company?” and much more about “what does an AI system need to find to identify it correctly?”. The second is an infrastructure problem. Solve it well and the first stops depending only on promotional content.

> The question is not how to get an AI to mention you. *It is what it needs to identify you.*

The hypothesis is observable. Publish a canonical representation, measure which agents retrieve it, observe which formats they consume, and later test whether systems make fewer identity errors or retrieve the source more consistently.

That whole loop is the ground I work on at ENTIA.

## Notes in this series

- [From Master Hair Academy to ENTIA](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/from-master-hair-academy-to-entia) · [JSON-LD](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/from-master-hair-academy-to-entia.json) · [Markdown](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/from-master-hair-academy-to-entia.md)
- [Before you can be visible, a machine has to know who you are](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility) · [JSON-LD](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility.json) · [Markdown](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/identity-before-visibility.md)
- [I did not block the bots: I took them off the origin](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/bots-at-the-edge-not-the-origin) · [JSON-LD](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/bots-at-the-edge-not-the-origin.json) · [Markdown](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches/notes/bots-at-the-edge-not-the-origin.md)
- [Profile: Fernando Vilches](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches) · [JSON-LD](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches.json) · [Markdown](https://entia.systems/en/fernando-vilches.md)