Most About pages are written for one reader: a human who has already decided to like you. They open with a founding story, wander through a mission statement, mention a dog, and eventually, three scrolls down, reveal what the business actually does.
That worked when the About page was a courtesy. It doesn’t work when the first reader is a machine.
Here is the uncomfortable reframe: your About page is an API. Not literally, of course. There’s no endpoint, no authentication, no versioning (though there probably should be). But functionally, it’s the place where AI assistants, search engines and knowledge systems go to request one thing: a reliable description of who you are. And like any API, it can return clean data or a mess.
Why treat the About page as an interface rather than a story?
Because of how it gets used. When an assistant is asked “What does this company do?” it pulls from whatever sources it can resolve to your business. Your own site is one of the strongest, and your About page is the page on your site whose job is literally self-description. If the facts are clear, they get used. If they’re buried, the model goes looking elsewhere: directories, old press, a competitor’s comparison page, a forum thread from 2019.
An API has a contract. It promises that a request returns certain fields in a predictable shape. Your About page should make the same promise: a reader, human or machine, gets the core facts in the first few sentences, every time.
What did reference writers figure out centuries ago?
This isn’t a new discipline. It’s a very old one with a new audience. Three traditions got here first.
The dictionary definition. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, set a template that dictionaries still follow: the headword, then a definition that states what the thing is before anything else. You don’t open a dictionary entry with the etymology’s emotional journey.
The inverted pyramid. Newspaper writers developed the habit of putting the most important facts first and the details after, so an editor could cut from the bottom without losing the story. Journalism students still learn it as the default structure for news.
The encyclopedia lead. Wikipedia’s style guidance asks that an article’s lead section stand on its own as a concise overview of the topic. Read almost any Wikipedia article and the first sentence tells you what the subject is, in plain terms.
All three solve the same problem your About page now faces: a reader who might stop after the first paragraph and still needs the right answer.
What should the first paragraph contain?
Think of it as the response body. Six fields, in plain sentences:
- Canonical name: the exact name you use everywhere.
- Category: what kind of business you are, in words a stranger would use.
- Offer: what you actually do or sell.
- Audience: who it’s for.
- Location or service area: where you operate, or “online” if that’s the truth.
- Distinguishing fact: one concrete, verifiable detail that separates you from others in your category.
Here’s an illustrative example for a fictional business:
Harbor Lane Bookbinding is a bookbinding and book repair studio in Duluth, Minnesota. We restore family Bibles, rebind cookbooks and build custom journals for individuals and small archives, and we work by appointment in our studio and by mail across the United States.
That’s two sentences. A machine can extract the name, category, offer, audience, location and service model without inference. A human can, too, which turns out to matter just as much.
Where does the story go?
After the facts. You don’t have to give up the founding story or the values or even the dog. You just have to stop using them as the front door. Put the factual paragraph first, then let the narrative breathe below it. The story becomes richer when readers already know what it’s a story about.
A useful test: cover everything below the first paragraph with your hand. Could a stranger now explain your business accurately to a friend? If yes, your API returns clean data. If no, the story is doing a job the facts should be doing.
What mistakes break the contract?
Six patterns show up constantly, and each one makes a machine work harder:
- Abstraction-first openings. “We believe in a world where every voice matters” is lovely and tells a parser nothing.
- Inconsistent naming. The logo says one thing, the page title another, the footer a third.
- Category avoidance. Some businesses refuse to name their category because they consider themselves uncategorizable. Machines will categorize you anyway, possibly wrongly.
- Undated claims. “Our new location” was new at some point. When?
- Location hidden in an image or map embed. Text beats pixels.
- Facts split across tabs, accordions or carousels. If the content requires interaction to reveal, don’t assume it gets read the way you intend.
None of these is fatal on its own. Together, they make your About page an endpoint that returns a 200 status code and an empty payload.
How does structured data reinforce the page?
The prose About page and your Organization schema should say the same thing in two dialects. The prose is for readers. The JSON-LD is for systems that prefer their facts pre-labeled. When they agree, with the same name, same URL, same address and same official profiles in sameAs, you’ve given machines two consistent sources from the most authoritative possible origin: you.
When they disagree, you’ve created exactly the kind of conflict that leads to confused answers. A surprising number of sites have schema that was set up once, by a plugin or a past developer, and never revisited after a rebrand or move.
How do you know whether it’s working?
You check, and you write down what you find. Ask a few AI assistants the questions a customer would ask about you, and record the answers with the date. Then compare them against your new first paragraph. Are the six fields coming back correctly? Which ones are wrong, missing or stale?
This is where a structured checklist pays for itself. The Free AI-Visibility Quick Check puts the clear-About-page test alongside nine related checks, including consistent naming, Organization schema with sameAs, an AI-assistant spot check and a dated baseline, on a single printable page. It’s a fast way to see whether your About page is the only weak link or one of several.
What about businesses with complicated offers?
Complexity isn’t an excuse; it’s a reason to be clearer. If your business does three distinct things, say so plainly in the first paragraph, then give each one a short section with its own plain-language summary. If you serve two very different audiences, name both. If the honest category is “consultancy,” don’t call yourself an “ecosystem enabler” and hope for the best.
The businesses that struggle most with AI descriptions are often the ones with the most interesting work, precisely because they’ve never had to explain it in one breath. The About page is the place to practice.
How do you write a distinguishing fact without bragging?
The sixth field is the one people overthink. A distinguishing fact isn’t a superlative. “The best bakery in Austin” is an opinion, and machines have learned to treat self-awarded titles with the skepticism they deserve. A distinguishing fact is specific and checkable: “We bake exclusively with Texas-milled flour.” “We work only with nonprofits.” “We’ve operated from the same storefront on Main Street since 2009.” Each of those can be confirmed, repeated and quoted without anyone needing to take your word for it.
Good distinguishing facts tend to fall into one of three types:
- A constraint you’ve chosen: who you don’t serve, what you don’t do, a material or method you insist on.
- A durable fact about you: founding year, location history, credentials that can be verified.
- A specialization: the narrow job you do more of than anyone else nearby.
Pick one. Put it in the first paragraph. Save the rest for further down the page.
What about the page title and meta description?
They’re part of the same contract. The HTML title of your About page should contain your canonical name and category, not just the word “About.” The meta description should restate the first paragraph in compressed form. These fields frequently show up in search results and get read by systems that never render your page the way a browser does. If your About page title is “Our Story | Home,” you’ve labeled the endpoint with a riddle.
While you’re there, check the page’s URL. A clean `/about/` is easier to cite and reference than `/page-id-4471-copy-2/`. Small things, but APIs are judged on small things.
A small rewrite with a long tail
Rewriting an About page takes an hour. It’s one of the few AEO changes that improves things for humans and machines in equal measure, and it compounds: every system that reads your site, now and later, gets a cleaner answer to the most basic question it can ask.
Start there, then check the rest of your foundation. Grab the Free AI-Visibility Quick Check and run it right after your rewrite. If you want to go further, with 60 scored checks across eight areas and a workbook that turns findings into a fix plan, the AI-Visibility (AEO) Audit picks up exactly where the Quick Check ends.
Your About page has been answering requests for years. Make sure it’s returning the right data.
If you want to see the Quick Check next to the Audit it hands off to, both are on Content & SEO Workflows.
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