The About Page Is Not About You

Look at the analytics for almost any small business website and the About page is second or third from the top. People go there deliberately.

Then look at what is on it. A founding date. A sentence about passion. A stock photograph of people in a meeting who have never met each other.

What the visitor is actually doing

Nobody arrives at an About page out of curiosity. They arrive because they are close to enquiring and they want to know who they would be dealing with.

The questions in their head are unglamorous. Is this one person or a company? Have they done this for someone like me? What happens if it goes wrong? Are they going to be around in a year? Do I want to spend the next six months talking to this person?

A company history answers none of those. It is the page equivalent of being asked what you do and replying with where you went to school.

The four things it has to do

Say what you do and who for, in the first sentence. Not the mission. The work. Somebody who landed here from a search should not have to reverse-engineer your service from an anecdote about your childhood.

Say why you. Not why the service is good — why you are the person doing it. This is the part people quote back at you later, and it is almost always the specific thing: fifteen years in the industry you now consult to, the problem you kept hitting until you built the solution, the time you got it wrong and changed how you work.

Show evidence. Named clients, real results, actual credentials. Anything a stranger can check. "Trusted by businesses across the UK" is not evidence, it is decoration, and readers have long since learned to skip it.

Give them somewhere to go. They came to this page mid-decision. Ending on a paragraph about your values leaves them exactly where they were.

Why this is the page AI is worst at

Ask a model to write your About page and it will produce something fluent that could belong to any of four thousand businesses. That is not a failing of the model. You asked for an About page and it has no way of knowing which about.

Worse, it will fill the gaps. It will supply years of experience you did not mention, a team you do not have, a founding story that reads well and never happened. Every one of those is a false statement published in your name, and on an About page — the page whose entire function is trust — it is the worst possible place to have one.

Which is not an argument for writing it without help. It is an argument for a different order:

Write the specifics yourself, badly if necessary. The years, the reason, the client names you have permission to use, the thing that went wrong. Then hand that to AI and ask it to tighten it, cut it by a third, and offer three openings — with an explicit instruction not to add a single fact you did not give it.

That is a genuinely useful hour. What it is not is a page produced by describing your business in a sentence and accepting what comes back.

The test

Show the page to someone who does not know your business and ask them one question: would you email these people?

If the answer needs a follow-up question, the page has not done its job — and no amount of rewriting the first paragraph will fix a page that is missing the evidence.

Our course Strategic Website Content works through each key page in turn — the home page, the About page, the one that tells newcomers where to start, and the supporting pages people go looking for when they are close to buying. The first two chapters are free and need no card.