We study equivariant Kazhdan--Lusztig (KL) and $Z$-polynomials of matroids. We formulate an equivariant generalization of a result by Braden and Vysogorets that relates the equivariant KL and $Z$-polynomials of a matroid with those of a single-element deletion. We also discuss the failure of equivariant $γ$-positivity for the $Z$-polynomial. As an application of our main result, we obtain a formula for the equivariant KL polynomial of the graphic matroid gotten by gluing two cycles. Furthermore, we compute the equivariant KL polynomials of all matroids of corank~$2$ via valuations. This provides an application of the machinery of Elias, Miyata, Proudfoot, and Vecchi to corank $2$ matroids, and it extends results of Ferroni and Schröter.