sameAs is a small property doing a specific job: it declares that a set of URLs refer
to the same thing. For a clinic it is the machine readable version of saying "and that is also us",
and it is the connective tissue of entity consolidation.
What it is and is not
It is a declaration by the publisher. It is not a verified link and it does not create a relationship where the facts disagree. A system reading it can check the referenced page and see whether it describes the same business, and if the address on that page differs from yours, the declaration has drawn attention to an inconsistency rather than resolving one.
That means quality is the whole game. Ten accurate references outperform forty of which half are stale.
What belongs in the list
- The Business Profile, referenced by its Maps URL with the place identifier.
- Public register entries, such as the CQC location record in England, and professional register entries for practitioners on their own pages.
- Professional body and association listings where membership is genuine and current.
- Review platform profiles you actively maintain.
- Social profiles that are active, branded consistently and carry accurate details.
- Sector directory listings that are claimed, accurate and used by patients.
- Companies House, where the registered entity is the same organisation.
What does not belong
- Profiles created years ago and abandoned, with an old address or an old logo.
- Listings you cannot edit and that carry wrong details.
- Pages about the clinic rather than pages that are a record of the clinic, such as a news article. Those are references, not identity records.
- Any URL where the details contradict your canonical facts. Fix it or omit it.
- Personal profiles of the owner, on the clinic's organisation block. Those belong on the person block.
Open every URL you intend to list and check the name, address, phone number and website against your canonical document. Anything that disagrees either gets corrected first or stays out of the list. Declaring a connection to a record that contradicts you is worse than declaring nothing.
Where the property goes
The organisation block carries the organisation's identity records. Each practitioner's Person or Physician block carries their own. Do not mix them: a clinician's professional register entry is not a record of the clinic, and listing it on the organisation block muddles two entities you have worked to keep distinct.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@graph": [
{
"@type": "MedicalClinic",
"@id": "https://example.co.uk/#clinic",
"name": "Example Clinic",
"url": "https://example.co.uk/",
"sameAs": [
"https://www.google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:REPLACE_PLACE_ID",
"https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/REPLACE_LOCATION_ID",
"https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00000000",
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/example-clinic",
"https://www.instagram.com/exampleclinic"
]
},
{
"@type": "Physician",
"@id": "https://example.co.uk/team/dr-example#person",
"name": "Dr Example Surname",
"worksFor": {
"@id": "https://example.co.uk/#clinic"
},
"sameAs": [
"https://www.gmc-uk.org/doctors/REPLACE_REFERENCE",
"https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-example"
]
}
]
}Multi-site groups
The group organisation block carries group-level records. Each location block carries records specific to that site, most importantly its own Business Profile. A group with four sites has one group entity and four location entities, each with its own connections and each declaring its parent.
Maintaining the list
- Review annually, and immediately after any rebrand, move or change of phone number.
- Remove any URL that now 404s or redirects somewhere unexpected.
- Remove profiles you have stopped maintaining, rather than leaving a stale record declared.
- Add new records as they are created, at the point of creation rather than later.
- Re-check that every listed record still shows the canonical name, address and phone number.
Directories and citations
HIGH CONTROL- The name, address and phone number you submit, character for character
- Which directories you claim and which you deliberately ignore
- The website URL and category on every claimed listing
- Whether an aggregator republishes stale data it scraped years ago
- Whether a directory ranks for your brand name
- The design and quality of the directory itself
- Search the exact phone number in quotes and read every result
- Search the brand name plus the town and audit the first three pages
- Keep one canonical NAP string in a document and diff every listing against it
What to expect from it
No immediate ranking effect, and that is the correct expectation. What it does is make the entity easier to resolve, which shows up as being described correctly rather than as a position change. The place it becomes visible is in generated answers and knowledge panels, where correctness of description is the entire outcome.
Knowledge panels
A knowledge panel for a clinic is assembled from many sources, not from your markup alone. A consistent entity with well-declared connections is more likely to produce one, and where a panel exists, verified ownership through the standard process allows some corrections. Neither is a lever you can pull directly, and both follow from the same consolidation work.
The short version
Keep the list short, accurate and maintained. Check every URL before adding it. Keep organisation records and person records separate. Review it once a year. That is a twenty-minute annual task that supports every other entity signal on the site, which is an unusually good ratio.
Ordering the list deliberately
Order carries no formal meaning in the property, and it carries meaning to whoever maintains the file next. Put the strongest records first: the Business Profile, the public register entry, the company record. Then professional bodies, then review platforms, then social profiles. A list ordered by weight is easier to audit, because the entries that matter most are the ones read first and the ones least likely to be skipped.
The five mistakes that recur
- Listing a social profile that has not been posted to since a rebrand and still shows the old name.
- Listing the group's Business Profile on a location page instead of that site's own profile.
- Mixing a practitioner's professional register entry into the organisation block.
- Listing a directory profile that was never claimed and shows a previous address.
- Copying the same sameAs array onto every page in the site through a template, so each location declares the others' records as its own.
The last one is the most common on group sites and the least visible, because the markup validates perfectly. It is only detectable by reading the block on a location page and asking whether every entry in it is a record of that location.