Entity-First Indexing
An indexing model in which entities and their relationships are the organising primitives rather than URLs. Coined by Cindy Krum of MobileMoxie in 2018.
What it actually means
The classic model indexes documents and answers queries with URLs. Krum's argument was that Google had begun organising around entities first, assembling answers from fragments attached to things rather than from whole pages.
That inverts the unit of optimisation. If the index is entity-shaped, a page is a contribution to an entity's record rather than a competitor in its own right.
The 2018 date is the point
This was published five years before the generative wave, and it describes the retrieval behaviour that AI answers now make visible. The models did not create entity-first retrieval; they exposed it.
Krum also coined Fraggles for the fragments themselves, and the two ideas are best read together: entities as the organising layer, fragments as the units assembled into answers.