The Knowledge Graph, it’s been all the rage with Google over the last couple of years, but a minor change made last week by the search giant might make businesses take the Knowledge Graph a bit more seriously, and more importantly their Wikipedia listings.

Last week Google announced a new feature in it’s search results to help searchers better identify if a search result is really what they are looking for.  If it’s available, Google uses data from the Knowledge Graph to add a small dropdown with the name of the entity associated with the page in the search results, giving the searcher more details about that particular website.  I’ve seen it in the wild for a number of queries and if you have a strong, accurate Wikipedia presence it’s a nice little addition to your ranking listing.  But what happens if you don’t have an accurate article, or no Wikipedia article at all for your business?  Yesterday, I found out.

What you see above is an actual search result for an agency client I work with.  You’ll notice that instead of having information about the brand that controls the website, it is about a particular product the company makes.  If this were appearing on a page that features this particular product type I might be a bit more ok with this result, but what I uncovered was that this particular entity is associated with every page of the website that appears in Google’s search results.

After doing some digging I discovered that the company I am working with has somehow never had their company and brand information established on Wikipedia, despite being a major cosmetics brand.  Instead, Google was displaying this data based on a mention of the brand in an article about makeup primer on Wikipedia.

The cool thing about this is that it shows how powerful Google is at associating websites with brand names even when a link isn’t involved.  But sadly, it also shows that Google still hasn’t perfected the art of connecting entities using the knowledge graph.  As Google rolls this feature out to more websites, it is going to be increasingly important for businesses big and small to ensure that they have established themselves on Wikipedia and more importantly, that they are being properly represented on Wikipedia.  After all, Wikipedia and the Knowledge Graph have inappropriately represented a brand before in Google’s search results before.

Last October a Knowledge Graph incident featuring the St. Louis Cardinals showed just how vulnerable the Knowledge Graph can be.  During their World Series appearance against the Boston Red Sox pranksters rewrote the team’s description using gay slurs on their Wikipedia entry.  Despite being live on Wikipedia for only minutes, the slurs appeared in Google’s Knoweledge Graph results for days.  Needless to say, there are worse words that could appear next to your search results listing than “Primer.”  Regardless, now is a better time than ever to ensure that what Wikipedia and the Knowledge Graph say about your business are as accurate as possible,