By Mehdi HassanWhat is a knowledge panel?
A knowledge panel is Google's summary card for an entity it recognizes. Search a well-known software company's name and you'll usually see one: the logo, a short description, the headquarters, founders, and links to official profiles. On desktop it sits to the right of the results; on mobile it appears near the top.
The panel is a visible sign that Google understands your brand as a thing, not just a string of words. That same understanding, called entity SEO, shapes how search engines and AI assistants describe you. It's one of the brand-facing terms in our SEO and AEO glossary.
Where does a Google knowledge panel get its information?
A Google knowledge panel gets its information from the Knowledge Graph, Google's database of entities and the facts connecting them. The Knowledge Graph draws on public sources it trusts, so the panel reflects what the web broadly agrees about you.
Source | What it contributes | How much you control it |
|---|---|---|
Your website | Name, logo, description, Organization markup | Fully |
Official profiles | LinkedIn, X, Crunchbase, app stores | Mostly |
Wikidata and Wikipedia | Structured facts and descriptions | Little, with strict notability rules |
News and independent sites | Mentions confirming the entity exists | Indirectly, through PR |
Google Business Profile | Location details for local businesses | Fully, once verified |
Because so much of this sits off your site, independent mentions carry weight. In Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks, a sign of how much engines rely on what others say about you.
How do you get a knowledge panel for a startup?
You get a knowledge panel by making your brand easy to recognize as one consistent entity, then waiting for enough independent confirmation. There's no form that creates one, but these steps raise the odds.
Use one name everywhere
The same company name, spelling and one-line description on your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and directories.
Add Organization markup
Put Organization JSON-LD on the homepage with your logo and a sameAs list of official profiles. See what schema markup is.
Build a real About page
State what you do, who founded it and when, in plain sentences a machine can quote.
Earn independent mentions
Press, podcasts, partner pages and reviews confirm the entity exists outside your own site.
Claim it once it appears
Use Google's verification flow from the panel to become an authorized representative and suggest edits.
What does a realistic path look like?
For most startups, a knowledge panel follows funding news, a launch or steady press, rather than any single technical fix.
Hypothetical example: a seed-stage B2B data startup
For example, suppose a seed-stage data startup has a generic name shared with a café chain. Google can't tell them apart, so no panel shows.
The team settles on one full name, adds Organization markup with sameAs links, rewrites its About page with founding facts, and gets its funding round covered by two trade publications. Branded searches start returning its own pages first. Later, a panel appears with its logo and LinkedIn link. Nothing here is guaranteed, but every step also makes AI answers about the company more accurate.
The longer playbook is in entity SEO for startups. If a platform move is on the table, carry your markup across with the checklist in migrating metadata, schema and Open Graph.
