We have been made aware of a bug in one of our data sources which affects GMB and Shopping panels, meaning the more of the columns than usual are displaying N/A. This has been scheduled for fixing.
Entity Scout Help & FAQs
Our help section and FAQs explain how to setup a company on Entity Scout and how to use the dashboard and backend areas of the site. If you have any issues not explained below, please contact support and let us know.
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Setup
Dashboard
General FAQs
Still Need Help?
If you can’t find the answer below, please contact support. We’re open Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm (UK time)
Step 1: Company Details
Information about how to set up your brand or company on Entity Scout for the first time.
Company Details (required)
Enter the brand name of your company here, for example Entity Scout, Nike, Apple without any legal suffixes.
Domain (optional)
Enter your domain here without the http / https and www e.g. entityscout.com or apple.com – you can use subfolders if you wish e.g. entityscout.com/fr/
This is used for domain categories tracking.
Additional Names (optional)
Add any additional names, abbreviations or nicknames that your company is otherwise known by here. One per line. For example, Entity Scout UK, Apple Incorporated
Country (required)
Choose from the dropdown which country you’d like to search in. Bear in mind that this will apply to the whole company panel, so if you have the same brand name in multiple countries, you will want to run setup for each individual country so that you can track the results. More countries are coming soon.
Company Type Variations (optional)
Tick which legal entities your company has, for example if your company is Entity Scout Limited, you would tick both Ltd and Limited.
AI Mode Tracking (optional)
This tracks your brand in AI overviews.
Keyword to track in AI Overview – enter your brand name here, or alternatively, you can enter a product or service you want to track, e.g. best running shoes. This can be changed later if necessary.
Location – select the location you’d like to track here from the dropdown
Known KGMIDs (optional)
If you already have kgmids that you know about you can add them here in this format – one KGMID per line, e.g: /g/11abc123 or /m/11xf42
Step 2: Entity Search
Next, you move on to the entity search screen. After you've submitted your company information, the tool finds brands it thinks could be yours. It's up to you to choose the correct brand based on the information provided.
Searching
Once you click continue on the company details screen, it will say Searching Google Knowledge Graph. Please wait until this is completed.
View Knowledge Panels
The tool will return any knowledge graph results it finds, which may or may not be your company. You can click on the little arrow to open the panel in a new tab so that you can check whether or not it is correct.
You can also view the relevancy score, which is how relevant Google thinks the search term is to the panel. This is the relevancy for your company name compared to the panel it has found. Some weaker panels may only have a very low score e.g. 1.0.
Tick Panels To Track
Once you have confirmed that the company is yours, tick the little box to track it. Each box ticked = one entity to track, so choose wisely!
Continue to GMB
When you’ve finished ticking the ones which are relevant, click the green button at the bottom to continue to GMB.
No results found
If this step returns no results, it may mean that your business is not strong enough yet to warrant a knowledge panel. You can still move on to track a Google Business Profile panel and Shopping panels by clicking the green button. If you experience an error here, please contact support.
Step 3: Google Business Profile Search
After you've selected the knowledge panels to track, you can also select Google Business Panels to track too (optional).
Company Name
Either accept the company name given in the box already, or change it to the name which you have for your business profile panel in Google. Click the grey search button to start searching.
View Results
The tool will find relevant Google Business Profiles for your business.
Tick the boxes of any that you’d like to track. Tracking runs weekly.
If you have more than 10 locations, not all of them may show here.
Continue to Shopping
Once you’ve ticked all the boxes of panels you’d like to track, click the green button to move on.
If you don’t want to track any panels, you can click this green button straight away. Don’t worry if you accidentally clicked this before clicking search, you can add more GMB panels on your dashboard.
No Results Found
If no results were found at this step, it may be that the company name you searched for is not similar enough to the GMB panel name. You can try again with a different name. If it continues to not show results when you are 100% sure there is a panel available, or shows an error, please contact support.
Step 4: Shopping Search
A shopping panel is normally only found for companies who have Merchant Center profiles or those who sell products, such as e-commerce stores. Most small businesses will not have a shopping panel.
Automatic Searches
The tool will automatically search for a shopping panel for your company, based on the information already provided.
No Results Found
It’s quite normal for no results to be found at this stage, especially if you are a small business or not an e-commerce store.
If you are 100% sure that your company has a shopping panel, and it is not being found, please contact support.
Finish Setup
Once you’ve ticked any shopping panels that you’d like to track, click the green Finish Setup button to save all of your tracking information.
Step 5: Complete Setup
Once the shopping section has been completed, you need to wait for the dashboard to populate.
Added Panels
It will show you how many entities you have added, including Knowledge Panels, Google Business Profiles and Shopping Panels.
Finish Setup
Please wait to be automatically redirected once the dashboard has populated.
If after a few minutes, it does not automatically redirect, then you can click the green button.
Dashboard Introduction
The dashboard screen is where you can view all of the information about the different companies that you are tracking. The dashboard is made up of several parts called sections. Each section is explained briefly below, with full explanations further down.
Top Bar
You can see your current amount of used entities at the top of the dashboard along the top bar. This shows you your current plan and also how many you have used. If you’d like to track more entities, then you can upgrade your plan, or contact us to discuss a custom plan.
You can also download a PDF of the whole dashboard from here, or upgrade your plan.
Company Pills
The Company Pills are for each individual brand or company that you are tracking. Click on each one to view that company.
The little B or C next to the company name stands for Brand (yours) or Competitor.
Tracked Entities
This is a table of the search terms you are tracking for knowledge panels and their current state. See general FAQs for what these mean.
Next Scheduled Run
This part of the dashboard shows you when the panels were last updated and when your next run is scheduled for.
Jump Links
You can use these to jump further down the dashboard to a specific section.
Delete Mode
Delete mode is primarily used for deleting knowledge panels. You enable delete mode by clicking the button at the top, and then you can tick which panels you’d like to delete. This deletes the data permanently, so be careful with this.
Alternatively, you can delete individual brands or companies from each knowledge panel using the red buttons underneath each panel.
Download TXT/PNG/CSV
Most of the sections of the dashboard have the option to download a PNG, TXT file or CSV so that you can save the data. There’s also a Download PDF button at the top of the dashboard, which enables you to download the whole dashboard.
Knowledge Panels
This section tracks search terms over time and how relevant they are to knowledge panels on Google. You can track multiple search terms per panel.
Table
The table shows the results each day for each search term. You can see anything that has changed from the day before as it says CHANGED in red. Scroll right to view more information. Download as a CSV if you want. You can filter by search term to only see that term at the top and change your data period. These figures are from Google’s Knowledge Graph database.
Chart
The chart shows the relevancy scores each day for each search term. You can download this as a PNG. You can toggle each search term on and off at the bottom.
Other Features
You can also set this panel as a brand panel or competitor panel, check for any new panels for these search term(s) and pause updates if you want to.
N/A Items
Some parts of the table may have N/A and be greyed out. This is normally because that data is not available for the panel. This can sometimes be the case even if this information shows on your Google Knowledge Panel on the SERPs. Only very large companies typically get things like founders, URL (entity home), revenue, stock prices etc. If you think this is in error, please contact support.
Improving Scores
- Bespoke structured data
- NAP consistency
- More brand mentions (linked and unlinked)
- Improved about us content
- Google Business Profile & Shopping Merchant optimisation
We offer brand entity audits and bespoke structured data if you need any help.
AI Overview Tracking
The AI Overview tracking works by checking Google's AI overviews to see if your query appears. Note that this is based on the location you choose when setting up the company.
Table
The table shows whether or not your query has shown up in AI overviews each day. If it has, it will say Appeared = Yes along with the position and how many sources there are. You can download the text file.
Chart
The chart shows how many times you have appeared in the AI overviews.
Not Appearing?
Sometimes, you may trigger an AI overview manually when checking on search yourself, but it doesn’t show up here. This is because it can’t be predicted when they will appear, so unfortunately we cannot force this chart to be 100% accurate as it depends on many factors.
Branded Search Volume
This gathers information from Google and Bing for the average number of branded searches per month. It shows the competition level and the average cost per click.
Chart
The chart shows the AMSV for your brand. The toggles at the bottom allow you to turn Bing and Google on / off on the chart.
Table
The table shows the AMSV over time which you can download as a CSV.
ChatGPT Presence
This is available for Silver tier members and above only. This tracks whether ChatGPT is aware of your brand.
Boxes
The boxes show whether or not your brand has been mentioned, in any format, in ChatGPT when asked. It also tells you how many sources were cited in the answer and the word count.
ChatGPT Response
The response comes directly from ChatGPT. Sometimes, as in this example, it’s not sure who you are referring to without extra context. This means that your brand needs a bit more work to strengthen it and disambiguate it from other terms.
You can copy the response to clipboard or download as a txt file.
Chart
The chart shows you the weekly progress and whethere or not your brand appeared over time. You can download this as a PNG file. The View On ChatGPT button allows you to see the current response.
Domain Categories
This is available for Silver tier members and above only. The domain categories section takes information from the main domain you gave in setup. It looks at ranking buckets for different categories (top 3 only) and how you perform over time.
Boxes
Here are the boxes and what they mean:
- Total keywords – this is the total keywords for that category that you rank for
- ETV value – estimated traffic volume for this category
- Equivalent ad spend – this is how much on average, you’d haev to spend to get the same amount of traffic via paid ads
- Keyword count – how many keywords you rank for
- New – how many new keywords you appeared for this week
- Up – how many keywords you improved position for this week
- Down – how many keywords you dropped in position for this week
- Lost – how many keywords you dropped out of the top 100 for this week
Organic Positions
This chart shows how many keywords are in each bucket, with blue showing last week and green showing this week. This helps you to see where most keywords have improved or declined. You can down load this chart as a PNG.
Category Mix
This pie chart shows you your strongest 3 categories that week.
Top Categories Chart
This shows your progress over time for each of the categories, so that you can see which categories are getting stronger. Some of these are sub-categories of main categories.
SERP Domination
This shows you how much of the first page on Google your brand dominates. In order to dominate, each result needs to be either your own website or your social media profile which belongs to your brand. It also shows you resulated searches (People Also Search For) at the bottom for reference.
SERP Score
This is a score out of 100% of how many positions you appear for at the time. Sometimes this can be out of 6 or 7, depending on whether the first page shows 10, 6, 7 results etc.
Table
The table shows you the title of the website, the URL and whether it’s a brand, social, or other match. Ideally, you want these to be brand or social for full SERP domination. It’s not normally possible to get a 100% score here, anything over 50% is considered good domination.
Domination Over Time Chart
This chart shows your SERP score over time and whether your domination is improving or declining. Bear in mind that sometimes only 6 or 7 results show, so these results may not take that into account. For example, if you are 70% one week, and 30% the following week because there were only 6 results, rather than 10, that can affect how the table is displayed.
Related Questions
This shows whether you appear for any related questions when searching for your brand.
Questions
Each question is displayed along with the answer and whether or not that answer came from your website. If not, then try to answer these questions on your own site to get domination of this section, which can lead to higher CTR.
Brand Mentions
This shows you up to the top 1,000 brand mentions for your company online. Your company name will be highlighted so that you can see which ones are actually about your business.
Total Mentions
This little chart shows you how many mentions were found overall. You are limited to the top 1,000 to download. It shows how many of the mentions were positive, negative and neutral at the current time.
If you look along the top bar, you will see how many are in the database – this may be less than 1000 mentions as the tool will try to dedupe them for you so that you have a wider selection. This is the number available to download via the CSV.
You can change what company name you are tracking by entering it in the top bar and pressing Save. It will look for the new name the next time it runs.
Search Function
Use this to search for any particular mentions you are interested in. You can also use it to search for certain keywords within the mentions.
Table
The table shows the source webite of the mention, a short snippet, the sentiment (which is obtained via machine learning, so it may be inaccurate), the DR (domain rank) and the date it was published. Not all mentions will have a date published.
DR Scores
The domain rank scores are calculated on a 0–1000 scale from the backlink data. 0 is a bad domain and 1000 is amazing. A normal website will have a rank of around 150 – 300, really good websites will have a domain rank of 500+.
Sentiment Over Time
This little chart shows your positive, negative and neutral sentiment over time for the brand or company. You can download it as a PNG file.
Mentions By Type
This small chart shows you where your mentions are mostly coming from for this week – blogs, news articles, organisation directories, shops or forums. You can download this as a PNG as well.
Local Brand Visibility
This is a simple local pack display, to show you your competitors in local search. This is still under development and will be completed shortly.
Your Company
This is a simple box showing you the name of your company, whether you are tracking it, the address, telephone number and opening hours. You can use this to see if there are any profiles you have which you weren’t aware of.
Competitors
These are other profiles which Google believes are related to your brand. They may be competitors or profiles that you weren’t even aware of. It’s not uncommon to find duplicate GMB profiles which you didn’t know existed!
Google Business Profile
This section tracks your Google Business Profile over time so that you can see if anything changes. It also has a great feature called Place Topics.
Table
The table shows the folowing – your business name as it appears on your profile, the main category , any additional cateogires, your address, phone number, website, reviews rating, whether or not you have claimed the profile, the total photos, a description (click read more to view the whole thing), place topics and any attributes assigned to the profile.
If anything changes, it will show CHANGED in red letters.
Place Topics
This is a very interesting feature, which shows you the entities (topics) which are associated with your Google Business Profile. They are each given a relevancy score, so for example an e-commerce website might have a place topic for “delivery” with a score of 6.
The place topics are taken from reviews that are left on your Google Business Profile. These can become “trends” over time, which help Google and customers to see what your business is most focused on. This could also potentially help local pack rankings.
Google says: Place Topics uses data from your business’s reviews to provide topics based on concise information and keywords from what your customers highlight. Topics are only created when your business has enough customer reviews. Business owners don’t need to manage Place Topics because they are based on your customers’ reviews.
Add New GMB Panel
If you want to add another GMB panel without going back to the setup, you can do so here by entering the name of the business and then clicking search. You can then tick any that you want to track and click save.
N/A Items on Chart
Some parts of the table may have N/A and be greyed out. This is normally because that data is not available for the panel. This can sometimes be the case even if this information shows on your Google Business Profile on the SERPs. If you think this is in error, please contact support.
Shopping Merchant
Like the GMB tracking, this section tracks your Shopping Merchant panel each week. You can see how the images and web results change over time. Sometimes, this panel can be the same as a Company panel (where Google has merged them).
Table
The table shows you the date, the name of your merchant panel as it appears, a description (if there is one). the type of business and where you are, a rating (if you have one), reviews rating (if you have one), your website address, email, any header images (it won’t show all of them if you have a large panel) and any web results which are relevant to your panel. Like the GMB, if anything has changed it will show CHANGED in red.
Add a Shopping Panel
If you want to add another shopping panel without going back to the setup, you can do so here by entering the name of the business and then clicking search. You can then tick any that you want to track and click save.
N/A Items on Chart
Some parts of the table may have N/A and be greyed out. This is normally because that data is not available for the shopping panel. This can sometimes be the case even if this information shows on your Google Knowledge Panel on the SERPs. Only very large companies typically get things like ratings, URL (entity home), reviews etc. If you think this is in error, please contact support.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some FAQs about Entity Scout in general. More will be added over time.
What Is A Company vs Brand vs Search Term?
Entity Scout has certain limits on how many companies and search terms you can track at any one time.
Company Pill = Company / brand names along the top of your dashboard. Each pill could have multiple brand names on it for that company, and each company can have multiple search terms (depending on your package).
Company / brand = your client/brand pill (e.g. “Your Company Name”). You have one pill per company you’re tracking. You also have separate pills for each country that a company is being tracked in. You can track companies, for example “Entity Scout Limited” is a company. You can also track brands, for example “Entity Scout” is a brand.
Knowledge Panel = a specific Knowledge Panel Google has for that brand. Most brands have one, but sometimes a company has separate panels (e.g. one for the brand, one for the legal name).
Search term = the exact phrase or keywords used to find/track that company on Google (e.g. “Your Company Name Limited” or “Your Company Name Kent”). You can track the same knowledge panel woith multiple search terms to see which gets the best score. You could also use this to track products as well if you wanted. You can also track search terms related to a company or brand, for example “Entity Scout SEO Tool”.
There are limitations to how many Company Pills and Search Terms you can track per package. Once you have run out, Entity Scout will let you know.
Knowledge Panel Levels
You can see how strong your company is by what kind of knowledge panel you have:
🌱Baby sprout – This means your panel has literally just a name and nothing else. This is also listed as “none” on the backend under Recently Tracked Entities.
🌿Sprout – This is the most common type of panel. This is listed as “thin” on the backend under Recently Tracked Entities.
🌳Full – This means you have a good size knowledge panel. This is listed as “full” on the backend under Recently Tracked Entities.
🛒 Shopping – These panels are normally created via Google Merchant Center and are called “brand panels”.
📍Local – These panels are created via Google Business Profile and are normally managed by your company if they are claimed.
My Dashboard Isn't Populating All of the Sections
Some parts of the dashboard don’t populate if your company / brand is not strong enough yet.