What Is an Entity Moat?

In Google's early years there was PageRank, and all the basic knowledge came from a PageRank value out of 10, through which we reached covering data about a site. People looked at the PageRank value to decide whether to trust a site, and reached a judgment about it on that basis. At Google's founding, Larry and Sergey set out how PageRank works in the paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“ (1998).

So what has changed since 1998? As Türk SEM we wanted to set out that change in developing your digital presence here.

In 1998 Larry and Sergey built the logic of PageRank on backlinks, and said that the more links a page receives, the greater the chance it serves valuable content. In its first period Google was in a hurry to record the content of every site, and the PageRank technology they discovered was far better quality for good ranking than what their rivals had. I met Google after reading a piece about it in PCNet magazine, and I was struck by how well it found the right answer. Its rivals, Altavista and the like, were only recording the meta information.

In the first days of the internet, how much trouble it was to write meta keywords for every page.

In 2026, an important part of developing a site's presence is no longer about backlinks, it is about what you do. Knowledge sits under the sovereignty of the academic world, and a company can only produce experience. (This, of course, is our own view as Türk SEM.) If you think you have produced a piece of knowledge for the memory of humanity as a company, you can get in touch with a university near you, prove it, and add that new knowledge to the system.

So here we have talked about producing experience for your presence. Now, what kind of work should you do for the “entity moat” that will put your brand fully under protection, so that your brand becomes an unshakeable force in its field?

Sector Reports

Compiling and publishing reports about your company's sector will add weight to you within that sector and can develop your sector expertise as well. If your scope allows you to build a sector report, you should share it; if it does not, you can compile and combine data from a few data sources and serve it as a report. Data sources such as the World Bank, the OECD, Eurostat and Google Trends can serve you valuable data. The reports you serve on your website should be the product of real research, and you must share a bibliography. You must share where each figure or percentage was taken from.

Sector Surveys

Running surveys among consumers, or among the consumers in your sector, and sharing them will strengthen your presence in the sector. Those surveys will be quoted and they will earn citations for your company. Every piece of work that produces something and provides value will develop the shield around your brand and add value to your company not only in your own market but globally. So you should think about how universal your surveys are and build the flow accordingly.

Publish a Whitepaper

Whether it is a product or a service, build the methodology of what you do and how you do it, and share it. Just as we at Türk SEM developed a methodology for our process years ago, named it the “New SEO Methodology” and set out its stages transparently, you should describe your own products or services properly along whitepaper lines.

A whitepaper on your products or services will strongly develop the moat, the shield, around your brand, and it will encourage you to become valuable in the eyes of your users. Your methodology being alive, changing along with human expectations and habits, will raise how current you are as well.

There Is Usually No Simple Road to Success

PageRank, a single figure out of 10, has evolved into a many sided structure, and success is now positioned according to both your niche and your presence in the sector.

Assoc. Prof. Remzi Başar of Düzce University has a note like this in his paper “Current Approaches in Digital Transformation: Examples from Turkey and the World”:

In saying “when it is used on a strategic basis, in a way that raises the goods and services of the website, companies can run a successful marketing activity”, he points out that the products and services on websites have to be built correctly. By building presence this way, taking your brand inside an entity moat, you can build a castle of protection around your own brand.

That marks you out as a sector expert, and at the same time it can keep you in an advantageous position through every Google core update. Because you are no longer only a ‘website’: you become an unshakeable ‘entity’ that is integrated with the academic world, produces its own data and sets the direction of its sector. Algorithms can change and systems can be updated; but those who lay the strategic foundation Assoc. Prof. Remzi Başar points to, meaning those who build their own ‘entity moat’, will always stay on the winning side in the digital world.