DefinedTerm · Glossary
What is sameAs in Schema.org
sameAs is a Schema.org property that declares two or more web resources refer to the same real-world entity. By listing URLs of authoritative profiles — Google Business Profile, Wikidata, LinkedIn, industry directories — inside a LocalBusiness or Person schema block, a business tells the Knowledge Graph that all those profiles describe one entity, not several. This entity disambiguation is the foundation of knowledge-panel eligibility and a key signal that AI assistants use when deciding whether to cite a business in a generated answer.
Full definition
sameAs is a property in the Schema.org vocabulary whose expected value is a URL or an array of URLs. Each URL must point to a page that unambiguously identifies the same entity — not a homepage or a category page, but the specific profile page for that entity on an authoritative platform.
For a home-services business the canonical set of sameAs URLs typically includes the Google Business Profile URL (the maps?cid= form), a Wikidata item URL (`https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/), the LinkedIn company page, the Facebook business page, and any major industry-specific directory listing such as Houzz, Yelp, or Checkatrade.
The property is inherited by every Schema.org type, so it appears on LocalBusiness, Person, Organization, Product, and others. In practice it is most impactful on local business entities where the Knowledge Graph must reconcile dozens of third-party mentions.
Why it matters in 2026
Knowledge Graph entity disambiguation is the precondition for a knowledge panel, and knowledge panels are the precondition for prominent AI-generated citations. When Google or an AI assistant encounters a business name in a query, it looks up the entity in the Knowledge Graph to retrieve authoritative facts. If sameAs links are present and consistent, the system finds the canonical node immediately, pulls verified data (address, phone, hours, reviews), and presents it confidently.
Without sameAs, the system resolves the entity probabilistically from co-occurrence signals — a slower, error-prone path that frequently produces stale or incorrect information in AI-generated answers.
How it works
At crawl time, Google's structured data parser extracts each URL from the sameAs array and adds a same-as edge in the Knowledge Graph between the crawled entity node and the referenced profile nodes. If the referenced profiles also carry structured data (for example, the GBP entity has its own Knowledge Graph node), the two nodes are merged and all properties from both nodes become available when answering queries about the entity.
The process is iterative: the more consistent the information across all sameAs targets, the stronger the entity signal. NAP mismatches across the declared profiles — different phone numbers, different address formats — create conflicting edges that reduce confidence and can delay or block knowledge-panel surfacing.
Difference from url and identifier
| Property | Purpose | Value type | Quantity per block |
|---|---|---|---|
url | Canonical URL of this document | Single URL | One |
sameAs | External profiles of the same entity | URL or array | Multiple allowed |
identifier | Industry or system-specific ID (VAT, DUNS) | Text, URL, or PropertyValue | Multiple allowed |
mainEntityOfPage | Declares this page is the primary document about the entity | URL | One |
Related terms
LocalBusiness schema, JSON-LD, E-E-A-T.
Fuentes
Términos relacionados
- localbusiness-schema
- json-ld
- e-e-a-t