What should my About page say for AI to trust it?
Your About page should state, in plain declarative sentences: what the business is, who runs it, who it serves, what it has actually done, and where to verify those claims. When an AI assembles its picture of your business, the About page is one of the first places it looks for the official definition. Most About pages answer none of those questions: they tell a founding story full of passion and mission and never say what the company actually is. The machine reads that and learns nothing it can repeat.
- AI reads your About page as the official definition of you.
- State what, who, for whom, proof, and where to verify.
- Vague mission language is invisible to a machine.
- Every claim should be checkable somewhere else.
Why the About page matters to a machine
When a model tries to answer "what is [your business]", it hunts for a self-description it can trust and quote. The About page is the canonical place for that. If yours says "we believe in transforming journeys through passion for excellence", the model extracts nothing: no category, no service, no market, no proof. It will either guess your definition from scattered fragments, badly, or skip you for a competitor whose About page reads like a fact sheet. Your About page is not a branding exercise anymore. It is entity definition, and the entity is what AI reasons about when deciding who to recommend.
The structure, section by section
1. The one-sentence definition, first
Open with the sentence you want the AI to repeat: "[Name] is a [category] in [location/market] that [what it does] for [who]." Boring on purpose. This is the single most extractable sentence on your site, write it like it will be quoted, because it will.
2. Who is behind it
Name the people, with real credentials and history. "Founded by [name], who has done [specific thing] since [year]." AI weighs identifiable humans with verifiable backgrounds far above faceless brands, and so do buyers.
3. Who it is for, and not for
State your buyer and their problem in their words. Saying who you are NOT for is a trust signal both machines and humans read as honesty, and it sharpens the match when the AI decides whether you fit a specific request.
4. Proof with mechanism
Not "hundreds of satisfied clients". Specific outcomes with the how: "ranked a software house under one year old #1 for its core term, organically." Specific and checkable beats big and vague, every time, for every reader.
5. Verification links
Link the claims outward: profiles, reviews, published results. A claim the model can confirm somewhere else is worth multiples of one it cannot. This is also exactly what your llms.txt should mirror, same facts, same names, zero contradictions.
Read your About page and ask: could a stranger, or a machine, state in one sentence what you are, for whom, and why to trust you? If not, it is a story, not a definition.
The phrases that make AI skip you
These are invisible to a machine because they contain no verifiable content: "passionate about excellence", "innovative solutions", "customer-centric approach", "your success is our mission", "a different kind of company". None of them survives extraction. Cut them and replace each with a fact: what you did, for whom, with what result. If a sentence could appear unchanged on a competitor's site, it is telling the AI nothing about you.
The advanced layer
- Add AboutPage and Person/Organization schema with sameAs links, so the page's role as your definition is machine-explicit.
- Keep one canonical description. The one-sentence definition on your About page should match your llms.txt, your schema and your profiles word for word where possible. Consistency compounds; drift erodes.
- Update it like a fact sheet. Stale claims teach the AI wrong facts about you, which is how models end up misrepresenting companies. Review it quarterly.
Common questions
Should my About page be about me or the customer?
Both, in layers. The definition and proof must be about you, that is what the page exists to establish. The 'who it is for' section is where the customer enters. Advice to 'make it all about the customer' produces pages that never define the business, which is exactly what makes AI skip them.
How long should an About page be?
Long enough to answer the five questions: what, who, for whom, proof, verification. Usually 300 to 600 words. Length matters less than extractability: short declarative sentences a machine can lift whole beat long narrative paragraphs at any length.
Does AI really read About pages?
Yes. Ask Perplexity about a company and watch the citations: About pages appear constantly, because that is where a business defines itself. Models hunt for canonical self-descriptions, and the About page is the conventional home of exactly that.
Not sure your site defines you clearly?
Scan it free. I will show you whether AI can find, read and understand what your business is, and what is missing.
Run my visibility check