Entity SEO: how I taught Google and AI assistants which Arun Agrawal I am

The problem: a distinguished stranger with my name

There is an Arun Agrawal who is an environmental politics professor at the University of Notre Dame, formerly at Michigan: widely published, widely cited, and by every measure the more famous holder of our shared name. None of this is his fault, and it is not really a complaint. But for years, search engines and then AI assistants did what pattern-matchers do with two people of one name: they blurred us. Ask about "Arun Agrawal" in a business context and you might get a paragraph seasoned with academic biography.

For a consultant, that is a commercial problem. A prospect who asks an assistant about me before a call and gets a muddle does not think "namesake collision"; they think something is off, and the machines never get corrected because nobody tells them. The fix could not be persuading anyone to write about me differently. It had to be structural: give the machines an unambiguous record of which Arun Agrawal I am, and make every surface I control point at it.

The approach: one canonical record, referenced everywhere

The whole method rests on one idea from structured data: an entity can have a permanent address. Not a web page address for humans, but an identifier inside the page's machine-readable layer, called an @id. Mine is https://www.arunagrawal.com/#arun. It lives in the Person schema on my personal site, and it never changes.

Everything else follows from that decision:

• One full record, once. The complete Person definition (who I am, what I do, since when, where, and crucially, who I am not) exists in exactly one place, on arunagrawal.com. Every other site that mentions me carries only a stub that points at the @id. This site does exactly that in its own markup; view source and you will find it.
• sameAs as the connective tissue. The canonical record lists my other verified surfaces (company site, LinkedIn and so on), and those surfaces link back. The machines can then walk the loop and confirm they all describe one person.
• Explicit disambiguation. Schema has a field almost nobody uses called disambiguatingDescription: a sentence whose entire job is to say which one you are. Mine says, in effect, "the Kolkata-based technology consultant, founder of EbizIndia, not the environmental politics professor". Blunt, machine-readable, effective.

The markup, so you can adapt it

A trimmed version of the pattern, suitable for any founder with a name collision:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "@id": "https://www.yourdomain.com/#you",
  "name": "Your Name",
  "url": "https://www.yourdomain.com/",
  "jobTitle": "Founder and CEO",
  "worksFor": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "@id": "https://www.yourcompany.com/#org"
  },
  "disambiguatingDescription":
    "Technology consultant based in Kolkata, India;
     not the academic of the same name.",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.yourcompany.com/about/",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/yourprofile/"
  ],
  "knowsAbout": ["SEO", "LLM visibility", "web performance"]
}

Three practical notes. Keep the @id on a domain you will still own in twenty years. Make the disambiguating sentence factual and neutral; it is a signpost, not a boast. And resist the urge to stuff knowsAbout with fifty topics: a short, true list corroborates better than a long aspirational one.

Did it work?

By my August 2026 baseline: yes, for the person. The major assistants now identify me correctly, place me in Kolkata, attach me to EbizIndia, and no longer garnish my biography with environmental politics. That is months of slow settling after the markup went live, not an overnight flip, and I re-check quarterly because entity records can drift.

And in the same baseline, the honest other half: the assistants describe my company with outdated positioning, because they read old third-party pages rather than the surfaces we keep current. Person solved, organisation still in progress. That correction project is documented in the audit procedure, and frankly this publication is part of it: a steady stream of current, retrievable, consistently attributed material is how a stale record gets outweighed.

The lesson for any founder

Machines do not resolve ambiguity in your favour; they resolve it toward whoever has the clearest record. If your name, or your company's name, is shared with anyone or anything better documented than you, the default outcome is their story bleeding into yours. The remedy is unglamorous and almost free: one canonical record with a stable @id, a truthful disambiguating sentence, and patient consistency everywhere else. It is the closest thing entity SEO has to a silver bullet, and it is available to a one-person company as readily as to a multinational.