EntityMap opens consultation on open standard for AI website citations

SEO firms may soon have to sell more than technical fixes and content plans. EntityMap’s new consultation pushes a deeper deliverable into view: a structured, machine-readable map of a client’s knowledge that AI systems can quote, summarize, and retrieve with less guesswork.

The 33-day public consultation runs until June 30, 2026, with a public launch scheduled for July 1. The draft specification is already live as EntityMap v1.0, described as a structured, entity-first index of website knowledge for AI systems, retrieval pipelines, and language-model-based applications. Its aim is blunt: help websites publish what they know, not just where a page lives.

That distinction matters because AI systems are increasingly being asked to answer the kinds of questions search engines and site navigation once handled. EntityMap argues those systems often have to infer meaning from fragmented pages, which can lead to incomplete answers, weak attribution, or inaccurate representations. For agencies, that turns entity design into a potential line item of its own, one that sits beside crawlability, internal linking, and content production.

Fred Laurent, CTO of InLinks and Waikay, framed the logic this way: “Where a sitemap tells search engines which pages exist on a website, EntityMap tells AI systems what an organisation is, what it does and how its knowledge connects.” The validator page identifies EntityMap v1.0 as initiated by Laurent with support from Dixon Jones, via Waikay and InLinks Optimization Ltd.

The standard is meant to describe brands, products, services, concepts, people, places, methodologies, metrics, and topics across a site. Instead of a flat list of URLs, the model is built to expose the relationships among those entities and point to the evidence that supports them. The implementation guidance says the GitHub repository contains the JSON schema and a minimal example, giving technical teams a concrete starting point for experimentation before launch.

EntityMap’s consultation is also part of a broader industry shift toward entity-based SEO and structured data. Schema.org remains the most familiar precedent: a collaborative community activity for structured data on the web, with support for entities, relationships between entities, and actions. EntityMap is trying to push that logic further into the retrieval layer itself, where AI systems are already making decisions about what to say on behalf of a brand.

That is why the consultation is more than a product announcement. It is a chance for developers, publishers, structured-data specialists, AI retrieval practitioners, SEO professionals, and data-quality experts to shape a new layer of web infrastructure before it hardens into convention. The agencies that learn that plumbing first may end up with the clearest path to AI search visibility.