- Ann Smarty
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
LLMs drive buying decisions based on what they can find on a brand’s website, and “about us” or "about me" pages are one of the most important—and easily optimized—pages on your site.
Yet many businesses neglect their “about” pages in favor of commercial landing pages that are supposed to bring in new visitors. Here’s why that should change as part of your generative engine optimization strategy.
The benefits of an “about us” page for GEO
"About us" and "about me" pages have always been important for SEO (and beyond), and I’ve talked about this for years. This article of mine goes back to 2020, for example. "About" pages rank for branded searches (usually as a sitelink), and they’re often part of on-site buying journeys. Meaning, it's logical that many users check out a company's “about us” page before converting.
We don’t quite know how much these pages influence buying decisions, though. One of the most cited studies claims that 52% of people say that when they land on a website, they want to see the “about” page first. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the initial source of this data, only listicles republishing it again and again.
My Google Analytics tends to draw a less impressive figure (about 10%). But if you look at the screenshot, you’ll notice that it's the second most popular page on my site, and site visitors go to it right from a key landing page describing my services.
Think about it: 10% of people visiting one of the most important pages of my site choose to read my “about me” page before deciding if I’m worth contacting. Pretty huge.
Another test shows that the average order value doubles when an eCommerce store makes the “about” page easy to find. In other words, people buy more if they can locate and check a business’s “about” page.
Essentially, your “about us” page is prime real estate—for both humans and LLMs.
“About us” pages and LLM optimization
As more people rely on AI answers for their buying decisions, “about us” pages have become key to proper brand positioning and AI visibility. For many branded queries, LLMs choose to source information from official “about” pages.
I noticed that for my own personal branded search a while ago. If you prompt AI Mode or ChatGPT for something like “who is Ann Smarty,” you will notice both citing my “about” pages.
When I noticed this about six months ago, my “about me” pages were quite abandoned and outdated, so AI answers were citing incorrect information. It took them just a few days to update the answers once I fixed my neglected pages.
My personal observations align with Waikay’s findings. They asked LLMs the following question: “what do you know about brand X, Y, or Z?” and sought to analyze the data AI was using to answer it. The result:
1,274 were homepages
966 were “about” pages
864 were review pages
707 were product pages
500 were “how to” pages
208 were contact pages
This is quite logical. LLMs are trained to behave like human beings. They check “about” pages for first-hand information on brands, as well as trust signals to report back to users. What you state on your “about” page will likely become part of training data, positioning your brand as a solution to relevant problems.
How to optimize your "about" page for LLMs
LLM optimization principles are not fundamentally different from on-page SEO. The only difference is that LLMs need even more clarity and guidelines than more mature search crawlers.
01. Make sure your “about” page is visible and cross-linked throughout your site
Making your “about” page easier to find is the first step to helping it influence AI answers.
LLMs are very resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational power. They usually tend to follow the path of least resistance. If your “about” page is hard to find, they're unlikely to spend resources locating it, and use information from easier to find sources, like Reddit, Trust Pilot, or BBB, which you have less control over.
Elevating your “about” page in the site structure is key. A good place to include your “about” page is your site’s main navigation or the sitewide footer (or both). A sign that you’re doing a good job is seeing your “about” page in the sitelinks for your main branded search. (Google picks sitelinks from most visible URLs in the site architecture.)
02. Clearly state your value proposition
This goes back to my previous article on building topical authority. The key to AI visibility is showing how you stand out. How can you state your unique value proposition in one sentence? This is a great main heading for your “about” page.
Start with your business differentiators. If I were to formulate these for my personal brand, for example, that would be:
20+ years in SEO
Diverse SEO experience that includes community building, reputation management, and content marketing
Now that SEO for AI is very cross-channel (it’s in the overlap between all other digital marketing channels, except for, probably, PPC), my value proposition would have been that I’ve been in that overlap for years.
Your value proposition needs to be easy to understand, factual, and memorable. Don’t treat it as a marketing slogan, as those tend to be fluffy. LLMs don’t pick up on vague language. You need to clearly state what you are doing well, for who, and why you are good at it.
Note: It’s a good idea to put this in your footer too, so LLMs “see” it no matter which page they land on. Text in the footer has been found to influence AI answers in a big way.
03. Structure information for easy retrieval
Make your content well structured and scannable. In other words, make AI’s job easier to retrieve key information from your page. LLMs may not “read” the whole page. They seek passages that matter for a good answer. Easy to find, easy to understand, easy to summarize. Once they locate the passage, they neglect the rest of the page.
Make good use of the following page elements:
Bulleted lists. These are perfect for listing raw facts about your business, like years in business, team size and experience, awards and recognition, key partners, and other entities you’d like to be associated with. We don’t quite know how major LLMs prioritize scanning a page to find satisfying information, but it seems that including bullet point lists at the top of the page helps retrieval.
FAQs. Make it easy to find answers about your brand. Think about what your customers usually ask on sales calls or in customer support emails, and research UGC (Reddit) to find where your customers are usually confused. Then, give quick answers in an FAQ format.
Headings make your content easier to scan, for both people and AI agents, so they always make sense on any page, including the "about" page. Use headings to break your page into meaningful sections, like “personal story,” “team,” “what our users are saying,” and so on.
04. Choose facts and clarity over self-promotion
Clear sentence structure, consistent terminology, and well-defined formatting help LLMs accurately identify and extract key information. Avoid flashy self-promotion and vague language.
You need to be factual and clear. Include numbers wherever you can. For example:
Pricing
Years in business
Growth rate
Inventory size
Apart from numbers, here are other facts you can list:
Your target audience
Specific problems and needs you cater to
Other companies you partner with (manufacturers you work with, charities you support, conferences you’ve spoken at, and so on)
Publications that featured you
Ingredients you use (for products)
Patents you filed (or are mentioned in)
Research you conducted
05. Establish entity associations
A good “about” page can also help establish entity associations. LLMs operate on existing training data that includes recognized entities (brand names) that are associated with a well-defined context. The easiest way to become one of those recognized entities is to appear in the same context as them. Your “about” page is a great starting point where you can include:
Other companies you’re partnering with (manufacturers you are working with, charities you support, conferences you’ve spoken at, and so on)
Publications that featured your business
Industry awards your brand has been nominated for or won. Awards are essentially named entities with topic correlation. For example, the Academy Awards are related to film. If you have one, LLMs know that you’re related to films.
Events your brand hosted, sponsored, or sent speakers for, etc.
All of these connections should be showcased with words, not just photos. Even still, a very well-optimized “about” page isn’t enough to establish entity associations. You need many external signals for that (being mentioned in the same context as recognized entities). But updating your "about" page is a solid first step that's 100% under your control, unlike winning that Academy Award.
06. Make content easy to access
LLMs may struggle with JavaScript-heavy pages. Make sure your key information is not hidden behind tabs or collapsible elements. There are handy tools for that. I often use the Rendering Difference Engine, which is a free extension that clearly shows you which elements of your page may be invisible to crawlers. Just install the extension, go to the “about” page, and click the extension icon to load the analysis. The extension will load a separate window highlighting:
Headings that are hidden behind JavaScript elements (tabs or toggles) and are not readable
Invisible or unclickable links
Text that will not be readable because it needs JavaScript to be rendered to be visible
You can also disable JavaScript in your browser and try using your site to ensure all content is visible.
07. Showcase your reviews and testimonials
LLMs are trained to prioritize user-generated content from places like Reddit. That’s also why they often fan out to “reviews” queries, according to studies, like this recent one.
Your “about” page is a great way to curate reviews that detail which problems your products solved, in which situations they helped, and how it was a different experience than using other brands. Don’t include “empty” reviews (“this was great!”). Curate reviews that showcase your value proposition in a natural way. Don't forget reviews from niche sources in your industry, which may help emphasize the topic correlation.
08. Give schema a try
There’s an ongoing debate in the SEO community about whether schema may be helpful for AI retrieval. It can vary. Structured data for search can be helpful (especially if an LLM relies on a third-party search engine that indexes schema). For browsing, it may not help because LLMs “mark down” when visiting pages and only go through text content.
In either case, it won’t hurt. I recommend adding these two types of schema, which are easy to generate with free tools:
You can also add structured data to your site's pages on Wix.
For personal “about me” pages, I always recommend “person” schema with the embedded “organization” schema.
Whether it helps organic visibility or LLM citability (or both), schema will likely help make your page easier to understand for at least some types of bots.
It’s hard to put a price on a well-optimized “about us” page
“About us” and "about me" pages can be silent conversion and brand awareness boosters for your clients. While it’s hard to attribute metrics to “about” page success, LLMs seem to prioritize these pages.
Plus, there are simple optimizations you can make today. By making small changes (structuring the page well, making it easier to access, and creating clearer and more factual copy), you can help make brands more discoverable and citable in AI answers. This is a small effort, given the potential benefit.
