Only 3.3% of Homepages With Organization Markup Link Their Brand to Wikipedia or Wikidata

Summary

Picture a regional HVAC company that has been around for 40 years. Its homepage markup says who it is: a name, a logo, a phone number, a Facebook page. What it does not say is which entry in the world's public knowledge bases describes the same company. When an AI assistant tries to decide whether "Acme Heating" on that site is the same Acme Heating it read about elsewhere, it has less to go on.

The sameAs property in schema.org markup is how a site says "this entity is also described at these URLs." Links to Wikipedia and Wikidata are the strongest version of that signal, because both are structured, widely crawled and used by search engines to build their knowledge graphs.

We checked every homepage in the top 1M sites that carries Organization markup. Only 3.3% of them, 7,737 out of 233,602, link their brand to a Wikipedia article or a Wikidata item.

What we measured

We used the October 2026 HTTP Archive crawl (mobile) and kept homepages of sites ranked in the top 1M. For each homepage we took the JSON-LD as rendered in the browser, parsed every script block and walked every nested object, including @graph arrays, so an Organization tucked inside a WebSite or WebPage node still counts.

A homepage is in the sample if it has at least one Organization-type node. We collected the sameAs URLs from all of those nodes and flagged a Wikipedia link (any wikipedia.org URL) and a Wikidata link (a wikidata.org item URL with a Q number). Platforms come from HTTP Archive's technology detection.

Most brands with markup list sameAs links, very few point to a knowledge base

Linking out is common. 59.1% of homepages with Organization markup list at least one sameAs URL. The gap is in where those links go.

Wikipedia links outnumber Wikidata links by more than two to one. Only 1,588 homepages give machines both references.

Bigger sites are far more likely to claim a knowledge-base entry

Popular sites are more likely to have a Wikipedia article in the first place, so it is no surprise the share climbs with rank. The size of the drop is the useful part.

Below the top 100,000 sites the share falls to 2.6%. That is where most small and mid-size businesses sit.

Adoption differs by platform

Platform mix tracks the kind of organizations that use each one. Drupal is common among universities, governments and large nonprofits, many of which have Wikipedia articles.

These figures describe which sites use the link, not what any platform does. Site owners add sameAs URLs through settings, plugins or custom code on every platform listed.

What this means

If your business has a Wikipedia article or a Wikidata item, add both URLs to the sameAs list in your Organization markup. It is one of the clearest ways to tell search engines and AI assistants that your site and that public record describe the same company. If you do not have either, do not create a Wikipedia article for promotion; Wikidata items need independent sources too. Start with the profiles you control and keep the name, logo and address identical everywhere. Cleaning up those profiles is part of what AI search optimization services cover each month.

Very few smaller sites have done this, so a business that qualifies for a knowledge-base entry and links it is ahead of most of its peers. Want to know how AI engines currently identify your brand? Start with a free AI SEO audit and we will show you where your entity signals are missing.

Limits

HTTP Archive crawls one homepage per site; markup on other pages is not counted here.

A Wikipedia link may point to a related article rather than an article about the business itself. We did not check the article's subject.

Organization-type detection relies on schema.org type names; misspelled or custom types are not counted.

Rank buckets use Chrome UX Report popularity rank, which is approximate.

Frequently asked questions

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