Glossary

What is sameAs schema?

sameAs is a Schema.org property you put inside your Organization or Person JSON-LD to link your entity to its authoritative profiles elsewhere, your Wikipedia article, your Wikidata item, your LinkedIn page, your official social accounts. According to the Schema.org sameAs definition, it points to a page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. One sentence captures the job it does: “sameAs tells a machine that your different profiles are all the same you.” It is the link that ties your scattered presence into 1 entity.

The short definition

You exist in more than one place online. A site, a LinkedIn page, a Crunchbase entry, a couple of social handles, maybe a Wikidata item. A search engine sees all of these as separate documents and has to guess whether they describe the same thing. sameAs removes the guess. It is a property whose value is a list of URLs, each one a reference page that the engine already trusts to identify your entity. Adding it to your structured data is you telling the machine, in a form it can parse, that these profiles are not lookalikes. They are you.

How it works

When an engine reads your Organization or Person schema and finds a sameAs array, it follows those URLs as corroborating references. If your schema says you are "Acme Roofing" and your sameAs points to a Wikidata item and a LinkedIn company page that also say "Acme Roofing," the facts line up and the engine's confidence rises. This is how disambiguation happens. There are many companies, people, and products with similar names, and the engine needs outside anchors to tell them apart. Each authoritative profile you link is another anchor. The more of them agree, the more certain the engine becomes that it has resolved the right entity, which is the whole point of structured data: stating your identity in a way that does not depend on the engine guessing correctly from prose.

Why it matters

sameAs is a core entity-clarity signal, and entity clarity is what AI search runs on. A knowledge panel, a correct AI Overview, a citation in ChatGPT, all of these depend on the engine being sure which entity your content belongs to. When your sameAs links connect your site to recognized references, you make that certainty cheap for the engine to reach. When they are missing, the engine is left inferring your identity from context, and inference is where wrong attributions and missed citations come from. We see sites with strong content that still get passed over because nothing ties their pages to a resolved entity. Adding sameAs does not guarantee a panel, but leaving it out leaves the engine guessing. The broader repair is in how to fix entity clarity for AI search.

How to apply it

Put a sameAs array inside the Organization (or Person) block in your homepage JSON-LD. Link only to pages that genuinely represent your entity, profiles you control or that are authoritative references, not random mentions. Here is a complete, minimal example:

// Organization JSON-LD with a sameAs array
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Acme Roofing",
  "url": "https://acmeroofing.com",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q000000",
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Roofing",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/acme-roofing",
    "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/acme-roofing"
  ]
}

Three rules keep it honest. Link only to profiles that truly describe this entity, since a wrong link teaches the engine the wrong thing. Keep the facts on those profiles consistent with the facts in your schema, because a contradiction undoes the corroboration. And lead with the references that carry the most weight, a Wikidata item and a Wikipedia article, since they are the sources engines lean on hardest. You can wire this by hand, or paste your link into our AEO checker and let Brimm read your site the way the engines do. We report whether your Organization schema carries a sameAs array, whether the links resolve, and where your profiles disagree. For the full picture and the fixes in order, run the audit at Brimm and start with the fix library.

See also

sameAs is one piece of a larger entity story. The hands-on repair is how to fix entity clarity for AI search, the concept it serves is what is entity SEO, and the highest-value reference to link is explained in what is a Wikidata QID.