sameAs schema: connecting your brand entity

sameAs schema is the schema.org property that lists pages on other sites describing the same entity as your markup, such as your Wikidata item, LinkedIn company page or GitHub organization. It tells search engines and AI systems that those profiles and your site are one brand. Put it inside the Organization or Person node on your home or About page, list only profiles you own or that describe you specifically, and use the same name on every one of them.

What the sameAs property means in schema.org

Schema.org defines sameAs as the URL of a reference page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity, and gives a Wikipedia page, a Wikidata entry or an official website as examples (schema.org/sameAs). The property sits on Thing, so every type can use it, and it takes URLs only.

Google's Organization markup guide describes it more loosely, as a page on another website with additional information about your organization, for example a social or review site profile. It allows several URLs.

The key word in the schema.org version is "unambiguously". A sameAs link claims identity. It says "this page is about exactly the thing this markup describes", nothing weaker. That rules out most of what people stuff into it.

Which URLs belong in sameAs structured data

A URL belongs in sameAs when the whole page is about you and you would be happy for a stranger to treat it as you. Everything else stays out.

Two of those mistakes are common enough to call out. Theme templates ship placeholder links like https://x.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/ and nobody fills them in, so the markup claims you are Facebook. And sites list their own About or Contact page in sameAs. Your own pages go in url, because sameAs is for pages on other sites.

Directories are a judgment call. A Crunchbase or G2 profile you maintain is about you and is a fair entry. Forty listings created by a citation service add noise, and some of them will be dead in a year. I keep sameAs to the five to ten profiles I would actually defend.

If your company has a Wikidata item, link it. It is the cleanest public identifier a brand can have, and it works best when it points back, with your home page as its official website (P856). Whether you qualify for one is covered in how to get a Google knowledge panel.

Where to put the sameAs property

Put sameAs on the node that represents the entity, which means Organization for a company and Person for an individual. Never attach it to WebPage, Article or Product to describe the brand. On those types it would claim the article itself is the LinkedIn page.

That node lives once, on your home page or About page, as the Organization schema guide explains. Give it an @id so other markup can reference it without repeating the profile list. A founder or author gets a Person node on their bio page with their own sameAs. Their personal LinkedIn belongs there, not in the company's list.

A sameAs schema example in JSON-LD

This block describes a company and its founder as two linked nodes, each with its own profiles. If the syntax is unfamiliar, read what JSON-LD is first.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "@id": "https://www.example.com/#organization",
      "name": "Northpine",
      "url": "https://www.example.com/",
      "logo": "https://www.example.com/brand/logo-512.png",
      "founder": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/about/#mara-lind" },
      "sameAs": [
        "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q00000000",
        "https://www.linkedin.com/company/northpine",
        "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/northpine",
        "https://github.com/northpine"
      ]
    },
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "@id": "https://www.example.com/about/#mara-lind",
      "name": "Mara Lind",
      "jobTitle": "Founder",
      "worksFor": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/#organization" },
      "sameAs": [
        "https://www.linkedin.com/in/maralind",
        "https://github.com/maralind"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Replace the placeholder Wikidata ID with your real one or delete the line. Use the canonical form of each profile URL, the one you land on after redirects, with no tracking parameters. Our schema markup guide covers how this fits with the other types on your site.

Keep the name consistent across profiles

sameAs links only help if the pages at the other end agree with you. If your markup says "Northpine", your LinkedIn page says "Northpine Labs" and your Crunchbase entry says "NorthPine Software Inc.", a crawler has three names to reconcile and may decide it has found three companies.

Pick one public brand name and use it exactly in your name property, every profile's display name, your WebSite markup and og:site_name. Put a registered company name in legalName and a common short form in alternateName instead of letting it leak into profiles. Then update the profiles, not the markup. A logo and one-line description that match across them help too.

Check the links back as well. Your LinkedIn and GitHub pages should list your website, and a Wikidata item should name it as the official website. Links in both directions are what make the match hard to doubt.

Check your sameAs links and brand entity

Brand Entity Checker reads your home page's Organization markup and opens up to ten of its sameAs links. It flags profiles that return 404 or 410 or whose domain doesn't resolve, links left at a network's home page and links to your own site. Profiles that block the check or time out are listed for you to open by hand.

It also checks that one name appears across your Organization and WebSite markup, og:site_name, the manifest and llms.txt, and that the Organization logo loads. It looks for a Wikidata item that lists your site and tells you when sameAs doesn't link back to that item or to its Wikipedia article. A run of the brand entity checker costs 8 credits.