We get asked about structured data (code that describes your website to machines) more than almost anything else at the moment. And the question is nearly always the same: “does it make a difference?”

SUMMARY

Entity data tells machines who you are, what you know about, and which other sites confirm it – and it matters more than the fancier schema types. It’s about trust. AI tools increasingly decide who to cite based on how confident they are you’re a real, recognised thing, and entity data removes the doubt. The sameAs property is the one to never skip: it links you to verifiable profiles like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Companies House and Wikidata. You can usually add it to WordPress yourself with an SEO plugin or a code-snippet plugin. It’s invisible. It sits in your page’s code for the machines, not on the page for your visitors.

And it’s an understandable question as there have been various reports lately claiming it perhaps doesn’t… but then you dig deeper and find that it depends on the circumstances. And it depends on the schema you use. I’ve written more about that all here – in this article I’m going to focus on what I think you do need to implement: entity data.

There’s schema for articles, products, recipes, events, reviews, opening hours, FAQs – on and on. You could spend a month tagging up your whole site and still not be finished. So if you’ve only got an afternoon, or a small budget, or one job you can hand to a developer, we’d point you at one thing before any of the others.

Entity data is the stuff that tells search engines and AI tools who you actually are, what you know about, and which other places online back that up. Below is why it matters more than the rest, what good entity data looks like, and how to get it onto a WordPress site (amongst others) without it ever showing up on the page.

What do we actually mean by “entity data”?

An entity is just a thing the web recognises as a distinct thing – your company, a person, a product, a place. Entity data is the structured information that pins down which entity you are and connects you to the version of you that already exists out there in Google’s Knowledge Graph (the big database of people, places and organisations that sits behind search) and on sites like Wikidata, LinkedIn and Companies House.

So instead of a machine reading your homepage and going “right, there’s a company called something here, probably based somewhere, possibly the same one I’ve seen on LinkedIn… maybe?”, you hand it the answer directly. This is us. Here’s our legal name, our logo, what we’re known for, and here are five other places online that confirm it’s really us.

That last part is the bit that does the heavy lifting – I’ll come back to it later.

Why does AI care who you are?

There’s a lot of hype flying about but it’s more nuanced than “AI reads your schema”.

Most AI tools don’t sit there reading your JSON-LD (a tidy block of code that holds your structured data) the moment someone asks ChatGPT a question about you. What they mostly lean on is the entity understanding that search engines and knowledge graphs have already built up over time. Your structured data feeds that understanding. So you’re not really talking to the AI directly – you’re making sure the picture it’s trained on, and the sources it pulls from, have you down correctly.

When an AI search tool like Perplexity does fetch your page live, some of them do parse your structured data alongside the visible text, and they use it to confirm facts with a bit more confidence. But – and this matters – if your schema says one thing and your actual page says another, they trust what’s on the page and mark you down as less reliable. So your entity data has to match reality. No inventing credentials you don’t have.

The reason entity data wins over the content schema types is trust. AI systems are increasingly choosing who to cite based on how confident they are that you are a real, recognised thing – not a vague website that might be a one-person reseller in a back bedroom. Clear entity data, backed by external sources, removes the ambiguity. And when the machine is deciding whether to mention you or a competitor, removing that ambiguity is often what tips it your way.

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What does good entity data look like?

Here’s a stripped-back Organization block you can copy and fill in. Swap the placeholders for your real details and bin the bits that don’t apply:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Your Company Ltd",
  "legalName": "Your Company Limited",
  "url": "https://www.yourcompany.co.uk/",
  "logo": "https://www.yourcompany.co.uk/logo.png",
  "description": "A plain sentence or two on what you do and who you do it for.",
  "foundingDate": "2014",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1 Example Street",
    "addressLocality": "Bristol",
    "postalCode": "BS1 1XX",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "areaServed": "United Kingdom",
  "knowsAbout": [
    "Something you're genuinely known for",
    "Another core service",
    "A third thing you do well"
  ],
  "hasCredential": [
    {
      "@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential",
      "name": "An accreditation you actually hold"
    }
  ],
  "contactPoint": {
    "@type": "ContactPoint",
    "url": "https://www.yourcompany.co.uk/contact/",
    "contactType": "customer service",
    "availableLanguage": "English"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-company",
    "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/your-company",
    "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00000000"
  ]
}

A few of those properties earn their place more than others. knowsAbout tells machines the topics you’re an authority on, which helps connect you to the right questions. sameAs is the one we’d never skip – more on that next. And if you’re a bigger outfit, you can add a brand for a named product and a subOrganization for separate trading entities or regional offices. Most small businesses won’t need those, so don’t feel you have to pad it out.

Why is “sameAs” the bit that matters most?

Think of sameAs as the connective tissue between your website and the wider web. Each link is an external, authoritative source that Google and the AI tools can cross-reference to confirm you’re really you. Your LinkedIn company page. Your Crunchbase profile. Your Companies House listing. And if you’ve got one, your Wikidata entry – that’s the strongest of the lot, because it feeds straight into Google’s Knowledge Graph.

This is exactly the idea I talked through in my recent Masterclass on AI retrieval as continued due diligence. Every time a machine sees you described consistently across your own site and a handful of verifiable sources, that’s a little background check passing. Do it enough times, across enough places, and you stop being a maybe and become a known quantity. sameAs is how you hand the machine the references to check.

Can you tag people too?

Yes, and this is where it gets quite fun. Well, in a nerdy way / if you’re into that sort of thing. We’ve started tagging up the people who leave testimonials on our site, so the praise comes from a verifiable human rather than an anonymous quote that could be anyone (or made up). Here’s the shape of it:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Jane Smith",
  "jobTitle": "Marketing Director",
  "worksFor": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Another Company Ltd"
  },
  "knowsAbout": [
    "B2B marketing",
    "Brand strategy"
  ],
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-smith-example"
  ]
}

So now a glowing testimonial isn’t just words on your page – it’s tied to a real person with a real LinkedIn profile and a real job, who happens to know about the thing they’re praising you for. Obviously you ask permission first, and obviously you only link people who are happy to be linked. But done properly, it’s genuinely good evidence, and it’s exactly the kind of corroboration that machines like to see.

How do you get this onto a WordPress site?

Good news first: a lot of the basics are probably half-built already. If you use an SEO plugin like Yoast, dig into its settings – there’s usually an Organization section where you fill in your name, logo and social profiles. Those social links are your sameAs, basically, so turn that on before anything else.

For the richer stuff – knowsAbout, credentials, tagging individual people – you’ll usually need to add custom JSON-LD. The easiest no-developer route is a code-snippet plugin like WPCode (or “Insert Headers and Footers”). You paste your JSON-LD block in, tell it to load across the whole site or on specific pages, and that’s it. No touching theme files, nothing to break.

When would you ask a developer? If you want a Person block generated automatically for every testimonial, or the markup applied cleverly across loads of different page types, or you’re just not comfortable pasting code – hand it over. It needn’t be a big project so don’t let it become one – use the code above to copy and paste and enter your details so you can hand your developer exactly what you need added.

Whichever route you take, test it. Pop your URL or your code into Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema.org validator and check it parses cleanly with no errors. A broken block can do more harm than no block at all.

Will this change how my website looks?

No. Your entity data lives inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in the page’s source code. Your visitors never see it. It doesn’t add a box to your homepage or change your design one bit. It sits in the background, purely for the machines reading your code. You can have the most thorough entity data on your block and your customers would never know it was there.

So there’s no design cost to weigh up. It’s a back-end job that pays off in how confidently search engines and AI tools can talk about you.

Where to start this week

If you do one structured data thing in the next fortnight, set up your Organization block with proper sameAs links to every verifiable profile you’ve got. Turn on whatever your SEO plugin already offers, then add the rest with a snippet plugin or a quick developer job.

And if you’ve got testimonials on your site, have a think about tagging the people behind them too. It’s a small bit of work that turns nice words into checkable evidence – which is the whole game when machines are deciding whether to trust you.