What is NAP consistency?

NAP consistency means rendering a brand's Name, Address, and Phone — and, for digital-first brands, its canonical name, URL, and legal entity — identically everywhere the brand appears online. Originally a local-SEO discipline, it has become a core entity-disambiguation signal for AI search: an engine resolving a brand to a single knowledge-graph node reads inconsistent references as evidence of several weakly-linked entities rather than one strong one. When a homepage says 'Acme, Inc.,' a footer says 'Acme Software,' a LinkedIn page says 'Acme Technologies,' and a directory says 'ACME Corp.,' each variant is a small disambiguation tax that collectively lowers citation confidence. Common causes are rebrands and acquisitions that update the homepage but leave old names across profiles and schema, and multi-market brands using different regional names without sameAs links tying them together. The fix is a canonical-name decision on the entity home followed by a systematic sweep reconciling every other surface — profiles, listings, schema, directories — to it, prioritizing the high-authority nodes that move resolution confidence most.