A new open standard designed to help AI systems understand website knowledge more accurately has entered a 33-day public consultation. EntityMap gives organizations a way to publish a structured, machine-readable map of their facts, relationships, and evidence, aiming to reduce the need for AI systems to infer meaning from fragmented web pages.
The specification is available at entitymap.org/spec/v1.0. The consultation runs until June 30, 2026, with the official launch scheduled for July 1, 2026. Developers, publishers, structured-data specialists, AI retrieval practitioners, SEO professionals, and data-quality experts are invited to review the specification, test implementation, and contribute feedback through the EntityMap community forum and GitHub repository.
Fred Laurent, CTO of InLinks and Waikay, said: “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. AI systems are increasingly being asked to summarise, recommend and explain organisations. If the underlying information is fragmented, incomplete or ambiguous, machines are forced to infer relationships. EntityMap gives them a structured source of truth to work from.”
AI systems are now used to answer questions that would historically have been asked through search engines, websites, professional advisers, or customer-service teams. Yet organizations have limited control over how those systems interpret their websites. A company’s products, services, expertise, locations, leadership, accreditations, and relationships may be spread across many pages. AI systems often retrieve small fragments of this content and reconstruct meaning probabilistically, leading to incomplete answers, weak attribution, or inaccurate representations.
EntityMap addresses this problem by allowing organizations to publish a single structured file that declares key entities, defines relationships, and links each claim back to its source evidence. The file can be reviewed by humans before publication, then read by machines in a consistent format.
Dixon Jones, co-founder of Waikay and a long-standing specialist in search, entities, and AI visibility, said: “The web was built around pages, links and prose. AI retrieval needs a clearer layer of meaning and evidence. EntityMap is designed to help organisations say: these are the things we know, these are the relationships between them, and this is the evidence that supports those claims. This consultation is about opening the standard up to scrutiny. We want people to test it, challenge it, implement it and help improve it before the formal launch.”
EntityMap is published as a structured file at a predictable location on a website. It identifies important entities such as products, services, people, topics, locations, claims, or areas of expertise, then maps the relationships between those entities and links them to supporting pages. The project includes a specification, documentation, examples, and validation tools. It is published under CC BY 4.0, with no subscription, vendor lock-in, or proprietary software requirement.
The consultation is intended to give the technical community time to review the structure, test practical implementation, and identify improvements. The project team is particularly seeking feedback from developers, AI retrieval specialists, structured-data and schema practitioners, technical SEO professionals, publishers and website owners, data-quality and governance experts, organizations concerned about AI misrepresentation, and tool builders.
R.V. Guha, one of the founders of Schema.org, has reviewed the project and said: “This is a good thing for the world.”
EntityMap is relevant to any organization that needs AI systems to understand its information accurately, including healthcare organizations, financial services firms, legal and professional-services organizations, publishers, brands, and technology teams building retrieval-augmented generation systems. The project is not designed to replace existing web standards, but to add a structured evidence layer for AI systems.
To participate, review the specification at entitymap.org/spec/v1.0. The community forum and source code repository are available at github.com/entitymap. Participants are invited to test implementation, raise issues, suggest improvements, and contribute to the discussion before June 30, 2026.
