Why this matters: every major AI engine (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Apple Intelligence) grounds factual claims against Wikidata. A business without a clean entity footprint is effectively invisible to AI grounding pipelines, regardless of on-site SEO.
Think of your entity as having five layers, from strongest to weakest identity signal:
Each layer reinforces the ones below. Wikidata is the most leveraged because it's structured, open, and explicitly consumed by LLMs.
Search: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Search — by name + city.
If found:
Q + number, e.g. Q12345678)If NOT found:
Search Google: exact business name. Look for the right-side panel.
sameAs complete in on-site JSON-LD?The sameAs property is how you declare "these external URLs represent
the same entity as this page". It's the single most impactful entity
signal after Wikidata.
Minimum recommended sameAs for a local business:
"sameAs": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q123456789", // if exists
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/name",
"https://www.facebook.com/businessname",
"https://www.instagram.com/businessname",
"https://www.pagesjaunes.fr/pros/12345", // FR
"https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nom_Entreprise" // if exists
]
For a SaaS / international brand, add:
"https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/name",
"https://github.com/organization",
"https://www.g2.com/products/name",
"https://www.producthunt.com/products/name"
For a Person (author, founder):
"sameAs": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q987654321",
"https://www.linkedin.com/in/name",
"https://twitter.com/name",
"https://github.com/name",
"https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XYZ", // academics
"https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000" // academics
]
@id used consistently?Across all JSON-LD blocks on the site, the same entity MUST use the
same @id. Pattern: https://example.com/#org for the organization,
https://example.com/about#author-{slug} for people.
Split across multiple pages? Use @id with fragment identifiers to
tie them back to one canonical entity node.
Not every business qualifies for Wikidata. Criteria (simplified):
If qualified, the creation workflow:
instance of (P31) → enterprise (Q6881511) or more specificcountry (P17) → France (Q142)headquarters location (P159) → city QIDofficial website (P856) → domain URLinception (P571) → founding dateindustry (P452) → industry QIDSIRET (P3893) → SIRET number (FR)VAT number (P3608) → VAT IDThis is labor-intensive and failure-prone for non-notable entities. Do NOT invent sources. Better to skip Wikidata than create a deletable item.
For Wikidata specifically: no full-automation tool is reliable because it requires sourced statements. Human curation is the bottleneck.
sameAs pointing to dead profiles — validate each URL resolves.@id is an identifier,
not a mandatory-resolvable URL (though resolvable is better).geo-schemas.md) — check @id + sameAs integrity