How JSON-LD, Person schema and sameAs links help search engines connect your name, your domain and your work into one knowledge graph.
When someone searches your name, Google is trying to answer a question: is this a person it knows about? Structured data is how you introduce yourself formally. A Person schema with consistent sameAs links across GitHub, LinkedIn and your domain gives the crawler an unambiguous identity to build on.
The three schemas that matter
For a portfolio, you need exactly three: Person (who you are, what you do, where else you exist), WebSite (what this domain is and who owns it), and BreadcrumbList (how pages relate). Project pages benefit from CreativeWork markup; articles from Article markup with author linking back to your Person entity via @id.
The @id linking is the part most people miss. Every schema on every page should reference the same canonical Person node. That repetition is what turns scattered mentions into a knowledge panel.
Validate ruthlessly
Run every page through Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. A single malformed field can silently disqualify the whole block. In Next.js, generating JSON-LD from typed helper functions — rather than hand-written script tags — makes malformed output nearly impossible.