Knowledge Graph
A knowledge graph is a structured database of entities, such as businesses, people, and places, and the relationships between them, which search engines like Google use to answer factual questions directly and to understand what a business is.
A knowledge graph stores facts as connections. Instead of a pile of web pages, it holds nodes (a dental practice, a dentist, a city, an insurance network) and edges (located in, owned by, accepts). Google's Knowledge Graph is the best-known example; it's what powers the knowledge panel that appears when you search a business name and see its hours, address, reviews, and photos assembled in one card without clicking anything.
Knowledge graphs get built from many sources. For a local business, the biggest contributor to Google's is your Google Business Profile, followed by your website, major directories, and review platforms. The graph reconciles those sources into one entity with one set of attributes. When they agree, the entity is confident and complete. When they conflict, the graph may leave attributes blank or attach the wrong ones.
It's worth separating a knowledge graph from what a language model knows. An AI model like the ones behind ChatGPT or Gemini has memorized patterns from training text, but that memory is fuzzy and frozen at a point in time. A knowledge graph is explicit and updateable. When an answer engine grounds its response, it's often pulling from both: retrieved web pages for current detail and, in Google's case, structured entity data for the basics. Nobody outside these companies has measured how much weight each gets.
For a plumber or law firm, the knowledge graph is why keeping your Google Business Profile accurate matters beyond the map. It's the most structured, most trusted source of facts about you that Google has, and those facts propagate. Google announced Google Business Profile integration in the Gemini app on June 10, 2026, which lets owners manage their profile and get operational suggestions inside Gemini. That's an owner-side tool, not a documented change to how Gemini recommends businesses to users, so don't overread it.
The practical work is the same as for entities generally: make your website the canonical source, keep listings consistent, and state your services and service area in plain text. Structured data markup can help classic search engines populate the graph more reliably, but Search Atlas found no correlation between schema coverage and LLM citation rates, so treat markup as tidying, not as a visibility strategy.
Keep exploring the glossary
- EntityAn entity is a distinct, uniquely identifiable thing such as a business, person, or place that search engines and AI systems recognize as a single node with attributes, so Smith Plumbing in Dayton is one entity however it's written online.
- Google Business Profile (GBP)Google Business Profile is the free listing a business manages in Google that holds its name, address, hours, phone, categories, photos, and reviews, driving Google Maps and local 3-pack results and serving as a heavily cited source in AI answers.
- Structured Data (schema.org / JSON-LD)Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org vocabulary written as JSON-LD, that labels facts like a business's name, address, hours, and services so search engines can index them precisely, though no study shows it causes AI citations.
- GroundingGrounding is when an AI model bases its answer on live, retrieved information, such as a web search result, instead of relying only on what it learned during training, which is meant to make answers more current and accurate.
Common questions about Knowledge Graph
- Do AI engines like ChatGPT use Google's Knowledge Graph?
- No. Google's Knowledge Graph is Google's. ChatGPT and Perplexity build their understanding from the pages their own crawlers retrieve, plus any licensed data such as Yelp's, which disclosed an OpenAI agreement in February 2026. Gemini and Google's AI surfaces can draw on Google's graph.
- How do I get my business into Google's Knowledge Graph?
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, keep its name, address, phone, and hours identical to your website, and make sure major directories match. There's no application form; the graph assembles you from consistent sources. A knowledge panel appearing for your business name is the sign it worked.