What Should I Write on My About Page?

Six facts: who you are, what year you started, who you work for, what you make, one proof a stranger can check, and a face with a name on it. Everything past those six is decoration.

The reason the list is that short is that the page has two readers now. One is a person looking for a reason not to get this wrong. The other is an AI assistant looking for sentences it can repeat about you when somebody asks it who to hire. In theory they want different things. In practice they want the same one.

Both readers want the same thing

The person arrived here after two or three other pages, and they are not reading for pleasure. They want evidence that you have existed for a while, that you have done this before, and that you will not disappear halfway through the project.

The model is looking for sentences that contain a fact. It cannot quote an impression. It can quote “brand design studio, founded in 2023, works with product brands across the EU, the UK, the US and the Middle East”. It cannot quote “we are passionate about design”, because there is nothing in that sentence to pass on.

Both readers end up tripping over the same thing: adjectives with nothing behind them.

The sixty second test

Open your About page and delete, in your head, every sentence you cannot pull a checkable fact out of. A year, a city, a number, a name, a client category, a deliverable.

Count what survives. On most pages we open, it is under half. On our own site, before we fixed it, 8 sentences out of 100 contained a verifiable fact. If a quarter of your page survives, you have found the work already and you do not need a further analysis.

What goes on the page

Six things, in this order.

Who you are, in the first sentence. The category and the place. Not the mission. Somebody who stops after one line should still know what kind of company they are looking at.

What year you started. Age is the one claim nobody can argue with, and a model stores it as an attribute. We write 2023, the year the studio started.

Who you work for. Client types, concretely. “Product brands and private clinics across the EU and the US” says something. “Clients who want to stand out” says nothing, and it is also the sentence your three nearest competitors have on their pages.

What you do, as a short list. Services under the names people use for them, not under names invented in an internal meeting. If a prospect has to translate your service list before they can tell whether you do the thing they need, they leave instead.

One proof a stranger can check. One, chosen well, beats five general ones. A named client, with their permission. A link to a project. A public review. A profile on a platform where you genuinely appear.

A face and a name. In a small company the buyer wants to know who they will be talking to. One real face with a name and a role does more than a group shot, and far more than a stock photograph of a team that is not yours.

What comes off

The origin story, unless it carries information. Values written as a list of abstract words. The sentence about passion. The paragraph that opens with “We believe that”. The photo of five strangers in a meeting room.

None of it is ugly. The problem is that it occupies the place where a fact should have been, and the page is only as long as the reader’s patience.

The part almost everybody misses

The description on your About page has to be the same in all five places you appear: this page, your Google Business listing, LinkedIn, the title of your site, and the structured data behind your pages. Not “the same in spirit”. The same words for the category you are in.

We found this on our own site during an audit. We were describing ourselves in four different categories across five public places, and one file stated something different from the title of the home page. A model that sees four descriptions contradicting each other does not pick one of them. It picks a different company whose story is consistent.

Finding out what an assistant currently says about you takes about half an hour, and the method is in what ChatGPT says about my company. The mechanics underneath, how an engine settles on who to name, are in how AI engines decide who to recommend.

How long it should be

Long enough to hold the facts. Two minutes of reading, somewhere around 400 words, is enough for most small companies. Length only becomes a problem when it grows out of adjectives instead of information. A 1,200 word About page carrying six facts is a 400 word page with 800 words of throat clearing in front of it.

Does the page bring clients

Rarely on its own, and that is not its job. It is usually one of the last pages somebody reads before they write to you, which means its job is to remove doubt at the moment a decision is almost made, and to leave an engine the sentences it will repeat months later when somebody asks it for a recommendation.

A page that does both looks almost plain. That is what it is supposed to look like.

How we write it

We write the About page last, after the rest of the site is settled, because it is the only page that has to agree with all the others. Then we write it out of facts anybody can check, including a model that reads us without asking first. Ours is six facts and a face, in the order above.

The copywriting usually travels with entity visibility, because the same sentence does both jobs: it gives a buyer a reason to trust you, and it gives an engine something to quote.

FAQ

What should a UK business add to its About page? Your trading name, company number, location and the people behind it: facts UK customers and AI assistants both use to trust you.

What should an About page contain? Who you are, what year you started, who you work for, what you do and one proof a stranger can check. Four facts and a piece of evidence beat ten paragraphs of story, both for the person deciding whether to trust you and for an AI engine looking for something it can repeat about you.

Should I put a team photo on my About page? It helps if the team in the photo is the team the client will actually work with. It does not help if it is a stock image, or if it shows five people in a company of two. One real face with a name and a role does more than an anonymous group.

How long should an About page be? Long enough to hold the facts. A page that reads in two minutes, around 400 words, is enough for most small companies. Length only becomes a problem when it grows out of adjectives rather than information, which is what makes a long About page feel evasive instead of thorough.

Why does my About page matter for ChatGPT? Because it is where a model takes its description of you from. If the page says something different from your Google listing, your LinkedIn and the rest of your site, the model sees versions that contradict each other and recommends somebody else whose story is consistent.

What is the most common mistake on an About page? The page talks about values and passion instead of facts. Delete every sentence you cannot pull a checkable piece of information out of, then see how much is left. On most pages it is under half, and that missing half is what both a buyer and an AI engine came for.