How co-occurrence works
Search systems and language models learn what words mean from the company those words keep. If your business name appears near remittance, Kathmandu and compliance across dozens of independent pages, that vocabulary becomes part of how the name is understood. Nobody wrote a definition; the repetition supplied one.
The same principle is used inside documents. Pages that genuinely cover a subject tend to contain a predictable spread of related terms, which is why content optimisation tools suggest terms your draft is missing. That is the on-page reading of co-occurrence, and it is really just a description of how people write about a topic when they know it.
The off-page reading is the one in the sheet definition: terms repeatedly appearing near a brand. It is closely related to entity salience, which asks how central a name is to the document it sits in.
Why co-occurrence matters
An answer engine asked to describe your business does not read your homepage and stop. It draws on the language surrounding your name wherever that name appears, so the adjectives in a directory profile written years ago can outlive the positioning you paid for last month. If the web describes you as a freelancer and your site says consultancy, the web usually wins the description.
The same goes for category. Whether you are filed under SEO agency, digital marketing consultant or web design shop depends heavily on the words that travel with your name, and that filing decides which questions you turn up for.
Where co-occurrence goes wrong
A long-standing claim in SEO circles is that co-occurrence works like anchor text without a link, so scattering your target phrase near your brand name will produce the same effect. There is no public evidence for that, and treating it as a mechanism leads directly to stuffing keywords into press releases and profile bios, which reads badly to the humans it was meant to persuade.
The second failure is inconsistency. A business that calls itself an agency in one profile, a studio in another and a consultancy on its own site gives the web nothing stable to repeat, and no description settles.
The third is describing an ambition rather than the work. If the surrounding language promises enterprise transformation while every real mention concerns small business websites, the two never reconcile, and the specific description is the one that sticks.
How to act on it
Write one short description of what you do, who you do it for and where, and use it verbatim in every profile, byline, press mention and directory entry. Choose one category word and stop varying it. Make sure your own pages state the plain facts a summariser needs, since your site is usually the most-read source about you.
Then check what actually surrounds your name today by searching it and reading the results as a stranger would. Where the description is wrong, the fix is more accurate mentions over time, which is the ordinary business of generative engine optimisation rather than a switch to flip.