Wikidata and AI Verified — why we use both and what each one does

Several members have asked about the relationship between Wikidata and AI Verified. They're not the same thing, they're not competing, and understanding what each one does helps you decide whether you need both. **What Wikidata is** Wikidata is a free, open knowledge base maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It contains structured data about entities — people, places, organisations, concepts — and it's one of the primary sources that AI systems draw on when building their knowledge of the world. When ChatGPT knows that a company was founded in a particular year, or that a person holds a particular role, there's a reasonable chance that information came from Wikidata. Wikidata entries are identified by Q numbers (Q identifiers). If your organisation has a Wikidata entry, you have a Q number. You can check by searching Wikidata.org for your organisation name. **What AI Verified is** AI Verified is a business identity registry. It verifies that a business name, domain, and registration number are associated with each other, and it publishes that verified record in a machine-readable format. The verification is domain-specific (we check that you control the domain) and registration-specific (we cross-check against national company registries where available). **Why they're complementary** Wikidata is broad but unverified. Anyone can create or edit a Wikidata entry. The data is generally accurate because the Wikimedia community maintains it, but there's no formal verification that the person editing the entry is authorised to represent the organisation. AI Verified is narrow but verified. We only cover business identity (name, domain, registration, tier), but we verify it. The domain verification step in particular — where you add a DNS record or meta tag to prove you control the domain — is something Wikidata doesn't do. The combination is stronger than either alone. A business with both a Wikidata Q identifier and an AI Verified Passport has two independent machine-readable identity signals: one from a widely-trusted open knowledge base, and one from a domain-verified registry. **How to link them** If you have a Wikidata Q identifier, add it to your Organisation schema's `sameAs` array: ```json "sameAs": [ "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12345678", "https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-company", "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12345678" ] ``` Your AI Verified Passport dashboard also has a field for your Wikidata Q identifier. Adding it there links the two records in our registry. **Should you create a Wikidata entry if you don't have one?** Only if your organisation meets Wikidata's notability criteria. Wikidata is not a business directory — it's a knowledge base for notable entities. A large company, a well-known brand, or an organisation with significant press coverage probably qualifies. A small local business probably doesn't, and creating a low-quality Wikidata entry that gets deleted is worse than not having one. If you're not sure whether you qualify, the Wikidata notability criteria for organisations are documented at wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Notability.