Wikidata is the structured knowledge source that LLMs cite directly. A complete entity record — sameAs, founded, founder, industry, HQ — correlates directly with citation inclusion.
Wikidata is a free, collaborative knowledge base maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It provides structured, machine-readable data about entities — including companies, products, and people — that major LLMs use as a ground truth for entity disambiguation.
When an LLM processes a query about your brand, it may query Wikidata to verify facts: when was this company founded, who leads it, what category is it in, and what other authoritative sources describe it. A complete Wikidata entity gives the model more material to generate substantive, accurate citations.
Creating or claiming your entity
Search Wikidata (wikidata.org) to determine whether an entity already exists for your company. If one exists, claim the associated properties. If not, create a new item. The process is straightforward — create a new item, add the label and description in multiple languages, then populate properties.
The properties that matter most
Based on citation correlation analysis, these are the highest-impact Wikidata properties for LLM citation probability:
- P856 (official website) — link to your main domain
- P31 (instance of) — set to Q4830453 (business) or Q1371849 (software company) as appropriate
- P452 (industry) — link to the relevant Wikidata industry entity
- P571 (inception) — your founding date
- P1128 (employees) — headcount
- P17 (country) — country of headquarters
- P131 (located in administrative entity) — city/state of HQ
- P127 (owned by) / P749 (parent organization) — for subsidiaries
- P112 (founded by) — link to founder entities
- P169 (chief executive officer) — link to current CEO entity
- P856 (official website) — canonical URL
sameAs links are the critical multiplier
The sameAs pattern in schema.org corresponds to Wikidata's external ID properties. Adding links from your Wikidata entity to LinkedIn (P4264), Crunchbase (P2088), Twitter/X (P2002), and other authoritative sources creates a verifiable entity graph that dramatically improves LLM resolution confidence.
Add at minimum: your LinkedIn company URL, your Crunchbase profile URL, and your Twitter/X handle. For developer-tool companies, also add your GitHub username (P2037) — this links your Wikidata entity to your GitHub organization presence and is a strong entity signal for AI engines querying about software companies. If you have a Wikipedia article, Wikidata will automatically link to it — but verify this connection is present.
Maintenance cadence
Review your Wikidata entity quarterly. Employee count, CEO, products, and funding status change. Stale data is worse than no data for citation accuracy — an LLM citing outdated revenue figures or a former CEO can create reputational issues. Keeping the entity current takes 20 minutes per quarter.
What this means for citation strategy
A complete Wikidata entity is the lowest-cost, highest-leverage citation infrastructure investment available. It requires no domain authority, no content creation, and no ongoing expense. It is permanent, machine-readable, and updated by the global editor community if you maintain basic accuracy. Pair it with a Wikipedia article and Organization schema for the complete entity identity stack. Scan your domain to check your current Wikidata and entity coverage score.
Measure your current position
Veezow scans your domain for the signals covered in this playbook — robots.txt access, structured data, Common Crawl presence, bot permissions, and off-site mentions — and scores them in one report.
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