What is the Schema.org sameAs property?

Where you most often see sameAs is in the JSON-LD block on a store's home page, inside the node that describes the company: a list with the Instagram address, the Facebook one and sometimes a few more. That is why a lot of people treat it as the place to link social networks. It is a bit more precise than that: it is how you tell a search engine which entity your store is, and that it isn't some other one with the same name. If your brand shares a name with a town, a band or a company in another country, this property is part of the answer.

How it works

Schema.org defines sameAs as the URL of a reference web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity, and gives three examples: its Wikipedia page, its Wikidata entry or its official website. Its value is a URL and it is defined on Thing, the root type of the vocabulary, so any type can carry it: an organization, a person, a movie or a book. The documentation's own example describes a movie and links it to its Wikidata entry.⁠^{[1]Schema.org (version 30.1, September 16, 2026). sameAs}

In a store's structured data, Google documents two uses.

On the organization. The Organization type helps Google understand your company's administrative details and distinguish it in search results, and it can influence which logo is shown in Search and in the knowledge panel. It has no required properties: you add the ones that apply to your company. Google recommends putting it on the home page or on a single page that describes the organization, such as the about page. And among the recommended properties is sameAs: the URL of a page on another website with more information about your organization, for example your profile on a social network or a review site. You can give several.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data}

On an article's author. If your store has a blog, Google recommends marking up the author's type and their url, or sameAs as an alternative, with valid URLs: it understands both properties when it has to tell one author from another with the same name.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Article (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data}

What Google doesn't do is ask for sameAs on the product. Its merchant listings documentation doesn't mention it. The properties it describes for identifying a product are others: global identifiers such as the GTIN, the manufacturer's MPN, the brand and your store's SKU.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} That the vocabulary allows sameAs on a Product doesn't mean Google uses it for anything on a product page.

In a store

Fictional example. A ceramics store, Albar Ceramics, with made-up domains. This is the organization node its home page would carry:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "@id": "https://albar-ceramics.example/#organization",
  "name": "Albar Ceramics",
  "url": "https://albar-ceramics.example/",
  "logo": "https://albar-ceramics.example/logo.png",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://social-network.example/albarceramics",
    "https://another-network.example/albar.ceramics",
    "https://review-site.example/stores/albar-ceramics"
  ]
}

Its own site goes in url and the profiles on other sites in sameAs. Before writing the list it pays to put each candidate through the same question: does this page say, without doubt, that it is about this store?

How to check it

1. Open your home page's source code and look for sameAs inside a <script type="application/ld+json">.
2. Check which node it is in: it has to be the organization's, on the home page or the about page.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data}
3. Open every URL on the list. It has to load, belong to your store and still be active; a closed profile no longer identifies anyone.
4. If you publish articles with an author, check that the author carries url or sameAs pointing to a page that identifies them.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Article (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data}
5. Run the page through a schema validator to rule out syntax errors in the block.

Related concept: the @id identifier

The two serve to identify, but they look in opposite directions. The @id identifier belongs to JSON-LD, not Schema.org: the specification defines it as the keyword that uniquely identifies the nodes described in the document, with an IRI or an anonymous node identifier.⁠^{[5]W3C (Recommendation, July 16, 2020). JSON-LD 1.1: A JSON-based Serialization for Linked Data} It lets the product node, within your own markup, point to the organization's without repeating it. sameAs points outward, to pages on other sites that say who that entity is.⁠^{[1]Schema.org (version 30.1, September 16, 2026). sameAs} @id is the name you give it yourself; sameAs is the outside pages that confirm it.

To keep going, the structured data reading path puts the other terms in order, and the MPN entry explains how a product is identified, which is a different thing.