Hello,
Thank you for contacting the support.
We removed the Social Meta options for “sameAs” Schema because Google doesn’t use it anymore. It is like the keyword meta tags that many webmasters spend extra time on but it is also ignored by Google and there is zero advantage of having the sameAs code just like there is zero advantage if you have the meta keywords on your website.
Google has changed a lot and they get more intelligent every passing minute with AI and countless algorithm they have in place. They pick the Social profiles from across the web and they do not need you to have the “sameAs” tag to show the social profiles in your Knowledge Panel.
Here is an example you can confirm from your end as well.
If you search for “Walmart”, these are all the social profiles you see:
https://i.rankmath.com/ij1CeL
Go to their website and you will notice that they don’t have a single “sameAs” tag:
https://i.rankmath.com/MpmFjU
You can run it through Google Rich Results test as well and notice they don’t have any Schema for those social profiles:
https://i.rankmath.com/JNrFJk
As you can see, the social profiles are shown in the knowledge panel not because you have the “sameAs” code, but rather because you are an established brand with a strong social media presence.
This is why we removed the “sameAs” tags in Rank Math and here are links from Google and Bing that essentially tell you that having sameAs tags doesn’t affect the addition or removal of social profiles from your knowledge panel:
https://support.google.com/knowledgepanel/answer/7534842
(screenshot for reference: https://i.rankmath.com/Ut3CGr )
&
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/markup-businesses-and-organizations-cc507c09
The Twitter and Facebook fields are still there because they are used for “OpenGraph” and “Twitter Cards” code that we bring in your website’s source code.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
