What should an About page include?

Facts a stranger could verify: who runs this, where they are, when it started, what it does, and how to reach someone. Names and photographs of real people carry more weight than any amount of description, because a name can be looked up and a claim about culture cannot.

Does an About page affect rankings?

Not directly, and treating it as a ranking lever produces a bad page. It affects how the site is assessed for trust, which is the input to several things that do affect rankings, and it is one of the pages a human quality rater is specifically instructed to look for. It also affects whether an AI assistant can say who published a claim.

Is a company About page different from a personal one?

The requirements are the same and the material differs. A personal site should say who you are, what you have actually done, and how to reach you. A company page needs the same specificity about the organisation, and the failure mode is identical: replacing checkable facts with claims about values.

The About page is the page that says who is liable

An About page is where a site says who is behind it and who is accountable if it is wrong. Almost every one is a paragraph of mission statement, which answers neither question and is the reason this check exists.

The short answer

An About page earns trust through specificity, and nothing else. Named people, a real location, a founding date, what the organisation actually does, and how to reach a human. Every one of those is checkable, which is the point: a page of adjectives about passion and innovation contains no verifiable fact and therefore no signal.

ImportantAudit check · About page quality

Specificity is the only signal here

There is a version of this page that every site has and nobody reads. It says the company was founded on a belief that customers deserve better, that the team is passionate about the craft, and that quality is at the heart of everything. It is four hundred words long and contains no facts, which means it could be about any company in any industry.

The useful version contains things that could be false. A founding year. A city. Named people. A registered company number. What you actually do and, more usefully, what you do not do. Every one of those is checkable, and checkable is the property that separates a claim from a sentiment.

That is the test to apply to your own page: go through it line by line and ask whether each sentence could be wrong. A sentence that cannot be wrong is not telling anyone anything. "We have been sharpening knives in Leeds since 2011" can be wrong. "We are passionate about sharpness" cannot.

Five facts, and why each one is checkable

Not a template. These are the five things a reader deciding whether to trust you is actually trying to establish, in the order they usually try.

Who the people are. Names, roles, and enough background to explain why they know this. Not a wall of headshots with job titles. If your advice about carbon steel comes from somebody who spent nine years making knives, that sentence is worth more than the rest of the page.
What the organisation is, legally. The registered name, the company number where you have one, the country of registration. This is the difference between a business and a website, and it is the single most commonly omitted fact.
Where you are. A real address, or at least a city. A site with no geography is a site that could be anywhere, which is a problem for anything local and a trust question everywhere else.
How to reach a person. An email address that reaches somebody, ideally a phone number. A contact form alone is a way of accepting messages without publishing a way to be contacted, and readers know the difference.
How you make money. Uncomfortable and worth stating. If you sell the things you review, take affiliate commission, or are funded by the manufacturers, saying so is a stronger trust signal than any assurance of independence. The omission is what damages you when somebody works it out.

Two things not on the list. A history section going back to a founding anecdote is optional and usually padding. And a values statement is not a fact about you, it is a statement of intent, so if you keep it, keep it to two sentences and put it after the things a reader can verify.

Three readers, arriving for three reasons

It helps to know who actually opens this page, because it is not the audience most About pages are written for.

The first is somebody about to spend money or take advice, who has decided you might be right and wants to know who you are. They are looking for the five facts above and they leave as soon as they have them, or as soon as it is clear they will not get them.

The second is a journalist, a partner or a potential hire, who needs names and a way to make contact. They are the reason a real email address matters more than the form.

The third is a quality assessment, human or automated, trying to establish whether this site is what it claims to be. Search quality guidelines have asked human raters for years to look for who is responsible for a site and whether that is easy to find, and an About page with no accountability on it is a direct answer to that question. Not a good one.

One page cannot do this alone, and the linking is part of the check.

An About page nobody can reach is worth nothing, so it belongs in your footer on every URL, and in your header if you sell anything. Then link outward from it: to your author pages, your contact page, your terms, and to the outside profiles that corroborate the claims. The Organization markup is where those corroborating links become machine-readable, and this page is where they get written for people first.

The check has to find the page before judging it

There is no field that says "this is the About page". Finding it means following your navigation, and judging it means reading what is on it, which is why this runs across a crawl rather than against a URL you already know.

This one needs the full crawl

The check has to locate your About page before it can judge it, which means following your navigation rather than being handed the URL.

The instant search on this site audits a single page, so rather than show you a verdict it cannot support, this guide sends you to the place the check actually runs.

Run the full audit, free

You can do the useful half now without any tooling. Open your own About page and count how many of the five facts are on it.

Does this affect AI search?

More than any other single page on your site, and for a reason that has nothing to do with the page ranking for anything. When something needs to establish who publishes a source, this is where it looks. The About page is the canonical location for the identity of a site, and identity is what gets attached to every claim you make anywhere else.

The practical version: a model asked to summarise or evaluate a source needs to resolve your brand name to an actual organisation. A page with a legal name, a city, named people and outbound links to profiles makes that resolution possible. A page of values statements gives it a string and nothing to attach the string to, which is the same problem entity markup exists to solve from the structured side.

There is a second use worth knowing about. Assistants answering questions about a company, what it does, where it is, whether it is legitimate, draw on the pages where a company describes itself. If your About page does not contain the answer, the answer comes from a directory listing, a review aggregator or a competitor's comparison page. Those exist for every business, and they are less accurate than the version you could have written.

Why one page carries this much weight

It is unusual for a single URL to be Important in its own right, and the justification is that this page is read as evidence about every other page. Trust is assessed at the site level, and this is where a site puts its accountability. An anonymous About page does not weaken one URL, it weakens the standing of everything published under the same domain.

It stays below Critical because nothing depends on it mechanically. No crawl fails, no page is excluded, no result format is lost. A site with a bad About page ranks on the strength of its content, and plenty of them rank well.

The rating is also a reflection of how uneven the stakes are. On a page giving medical, legal or financial advice, anonymity is close to disqualifying, and the assessment frameworks say so explicitly. On a blog about houseplants it is a missed opportunity. Rating this Important is the honest average of a check that is nearly Critical for some sites and nearly cosmetic for others, and the guide is where that distinction gets made rather than the chip.

Reading your own page as a stranger

Two mechanical checks and one that requires honesty.

about-audit.sh

URL=https://example.com/about

# is the page reachable from the home page at all?
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o 'href="[^"]*about[^"]*"' | sort -u

# which of the checkable facts are present?
text=$(curl -s "$URL" | sed 's/<[^>]*>/ /g' | tr -s ' \n' ' ')

for pattern in "Ltd\|LLC\|GmbH\|Inc" "compan\(y\|ies\) number\|VAT" \
               "@" "+[0-9]\|tel:" "founded\|since [12][0-9]\{3\}"; do
  printf '%s: ' "$pattern"
  printf '%s' "$text" | grep -qi "$pattern" && echo present || echo MISSING
done

Then the part no script does. Give the page to somebody who does not work with you and ask them two questions afterwards: who runs this, and how do they make money. If they cannot answer either, the page is decorative, whatever its word count.

A useful last step is to search for your own company name and read what comes back. Whatever third-party page ranks above your About page is currently the source of record on who you are, and this is the page that has to compete with it.

Questions this check raises

What should an About page include?: Facts a stranger could verify: who runs this, where they are, when it started, what it does, and how to reach someone. Names and photographs of real people carry more weight than any amount of description, because a name can be looked up and a claim about culture cannot.
Does an About page affect rankings?: Not directly, and treating it as a ranking lever produces a bad page. It affects how the site is assessed for trust, which is the input to several things that do affect rankings, and it is one of the pages a human quality rater is specifically instructed to look for. It also affects whether an AI assistant can say who published a claim.
Is a company About page different from a personal one?: The requirements are the same and the material differs. A personal site should say who you are, what you have actually done, and how to reach you. A company page needs the same specificity about the organisation, and the failure mode is identical: replacing checkable facts with claims about values.