ExplainerAnswer engine optimization
The About Page Is Where AI Engines Learn Who You Are
by the AEO GEO Labs team3 min read
When an AI engine is asked about your company, it first has to decide what your company is. Not what you sell, but what entity the name refers to: which industry, which country, founded when, run by whom, related to what. Engines assemble that picture from a few pages, and the About page is the one they expect to answer it directly.
Most About pages do not. They open with a founding story, a mission statement, and a photo of the team at an offsite. Pleasant for a human, nearly useless for an engine filling in a fact sheet.
What the engine is trying to fill in
Think of the engine as completing a form. Legal name and common name. What the company does, in one sentence. Who it serves. Where it is based. When it was founded. Who leads it. How big it is. Parent company, former names, acquisitions. Where else it exists on the web.
Every blank field gets filled from somewhere else, or guessed. Entity confusion, where you get merged with a company that shares your name, usually starts with blanks on this form.
The first paragraph
The opening paragraph of the About page should read like the first paragraph of an encyclopedia entry, because that is the shape engines are most practiced at extracting from.
"Acme Software is a Toronto-based company that makes invoicing and payment software for independent contractors and small agencies. Founded in 2019 by Jane Doe and Alex Lee, it serves customers in Canada and the United States and employs around 40 people."
That is five fields answered in two sentences. It is not exciting. It is what gets quoted when someone asks "what is Acme Software," and what stops the engine describing you as a construction company because another Acme exists.
Put the mission and the story after it, not before.
The facts block
Beneath the opening, a short labeled list works well. Founded, headquarters, leadership, employee range, funding stage if relevant, and former names if any. Plain text, not an infographic. If your company has had a name change or a merger, say so explicitly: "Formerly known as Acme Billing; renamed in 2023." Engines tend to treat old names as separate entities unless something tells them otherwise.
Organization schema and sameAs
Mark the page up with Organization schema and make sure it matches the visible text exactly: same name, same founding date, same address. Then add sameAs links to every profile that represents the same entity: LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikidata if you have an entry, G2, the Apple or Google app store listing, GitHub for developer companies, and major social accounts.
The sameAs list is how you tell an engine which pages across the web are you. It is the most useful entity signal a site can send, and it is a few lines of JSON-LD. A schema markup generator produces it; the work is collecting the correct URLs.
Keep the facts identical everywhere
The About page, the Organization schema, llms.txt, the LinkedIn company page, and Crunchbase should all state the same founding year, the same city, and the same one-sentence description. When they disagree, the engine has to choose, and it does not always choose your site.
This is tedious and it matters. We regularly find three different founding years across a company's own properties.
Leadership pages
If your founders or executives are public, give each a short page with a plain first sentence: name, role, company, and one prior affiliation. Add Person schema with worksFor pointing to your Organization. Leadership is one of the fields engines use to disambiguate companies with similar names, and it is also what gets quoted when a prompt asks "who runs Acme."
What to leave out
Vague superlatives: "leading," "innovative," "trusted by thousands." They carry no information and engines tend to skip them. Timeline graphics with the dates only in an image. Anything that requires a script to render the core facts.
A quick check
Fetch your About page as plain text, or run it through a JavaScript visibility checker, and read only the first 150 words. Can you fill in the form above from them? If not, that is the rewrite.
At AEO GEO Labs the About page and its schema are the first stop in the entity consistency pass of every audit, because fixing them tends to clear up several wrong answers at once. To see how engines currently describe your company before you touch anything, AEO GEO Labs will show you. The comparison with what your About page says is usually instructive.