Are you ignoring a key brand ambassador that never sleeps?
“About” is one of the most viewed pages on a company’s website, yet marketers typically fail to prioritize and update it. They miss a critical opportunity for meaning and sometimes even dilute brand performance.
A website is a 24/7 storefront, often the only one a company has. Externally, it organizes the messy insides: the crazy architectures we need to simplify for customers. The About page can bring the brand story and personality forward coherently. It’s the place where you can control the narrative and put forth precisely what you need to say, show, and project to support every purpose from rebranding to ongoing public relations.
Storied automaker General Motors (GM), for example, doesn’t sit on its legacy but instead talks about its portfolio and scale with just a brief mention of its history. GM’s About page has a distinct voice and even a few car-related puns.
As AI agents shift search to answers, About takes on a new essential role. A high percentage of questions that customers ask AI focus on brands and products they’re using. While organic site traffic is challenged by answer engine optimization (AEO) and performance numbers are expected to go even further down, websites still generate the content fuel that shows up in large language models (LLMs).
A clear statement in the About page sets your brand up for the right inclusion in agentic search.
The world keeps changing faster, and who you are at the moment matters. That’s especially true for agentic search, which rewards recency. Companies evolve continuously on the inside, yet most enterprises update primarily the newsroom and career sections. But your brand’s About page also needs to keep pace. During a strong financial quarter, for example, you might highlight more strengths; during challenging times, reinforce core expertise or values instead.
For senior marketers, updating their brand’s bio should be even more important on social channels, which are also leveraged by agentic search to understand who the brand is and what it does. You can literally change content on all of these pages (website and social profiles alike) anytime you want, and it will (a) better support human visitors and (b) be rewarded by search engines—including LLMs—which recognize recency.
The only question is, how?
How you can upskill your brand’s About page
To start, I recommend doing what Sitelogic’s Peter Bender suggests: think about how the About page is used in your customer’s journey. Understand if it’s primarily for discovery, consideration, preference, or all of the above. The answer is critical to your content strategy.
Then, consider following these steps, which have proven to be useful each time an About page is revamped.
1. Choose an editorial archetype (or multiple of them) for your brand’s About page.
In my research over the last 10 years, I’ve come to identify five editorial archetypes for About pages:
- Principles articulates mission, purpose, and values.
- People shines a spotlight on founders, employees, or company culture.
- Product emphasizes what the company makes or sells.
- Pedigree showcases heritage, legacy, or accolades.
- Performance highlights size, metrics, or market dominance.
Your brand and business goals should shape your choice. You can certainly choose more than one for your About page if multiple meet your objectives, and order the content from top to bottom as one scrolls. GE Vernova, a recent spin-off in early stages as a brand, starts its About Us page with its mission and then highlights its purpose and uses data to point to its global scale. Spotify, on the other hand, asserts its pedigree with how it has revolutionized music since 2008. Zappos, an online retailer, shares its purpose but quickly gets into product, which is important as it seeks to broaden its perception beyond the core of footwear.
2. Use your brand’s About page to respond to your customers’ most pressing questions.
While product questions will be better tackled on other website pages, today’s customers want to know more about the companies they do business with. Not just their purpose and values, but also how they make them real. Proof matters to any answer engine, whether it’s listing current accolades, explaining policies, or sharing recent company news.
How do you know which questions to answer? One research technique we use is the creation of synthetic twins based on our top priority audiences. We ask them what they want to know about our company, and then enlist their help in deciding how to best communicate our answers. Bonus: they’re available to us 24/7.
3. Make your About page special compared to others in and outside your category.
This may seem simple, but let me make the difference clear.
Adobe, inherently a creative company, opens its About page with a fast-moving, graphics-oriented video and a message of “Empowering Everyone to Create.” Visuals about its product suite pop with color and personality, and I keep scrolling to learn more. That’s making it special.
At the other end of the spectrum is American Express, a brand rich in story, confidence, and expertise. The company, surprisingly enough, does virtually nothing with its corporate about page. It simply shares the generic headline “Welcome to American Express” and links to its newsroom. Even if you keep clicking on Who We Are, you get another bland, lazy headline: “About American Express.” It may not hurt iconic AmEx, but it certainly doesn’t help them.
4. Integrate brand reinforcement within your website’s current focus on products.
Corporate sites, especially business-to-business ones, have a natural place in their website navigation for “About Us” or “The Company.” Business-to-consumer (B2C) sites, on the other hand—especially ecommerce ones—focus on products and underuse their About section. They don’t realize what a prime opportunity for brand reinforcement that page is.
They could learn a thing or two from sneaker brands. Nike, for example, doesn’t have “About” in their website navigation, but they offer a link to “About Nike” in the footer. Similarly, shoe rival On nests an About link within “Explore.”
In other words, be creative. Just because there isn’t an obvious place for an About section on your website doesn’t mean you can’t come up with something suitable. It might even contribute to your efforts from the previous step to make the user experience a bit more memorable.
5. Turn your About page into a brand ambassador that keeps pace with business.
The standard approach of “set and forget” makes your brand’s About page a wallpaper when it could be an ambassador. Use the page opportunistically to match your business needs. For example, if you have a principles-led editorial approach on your About page, but are currently facing some financial headwinds this quarter, try surfacing more performance facts to address shareholder concerns and curtail negative media attention. If you’re a new brand with low awareness but a strong bench of executives who moved over from established companies, lead with pedigree for a few months and then shift to product as demand increases.
Either way, your brand’s About page can become an unsung hero in its digital marketing, especially at a time when we’re all expected to do more with less. It takes sweat, not cash, to maintain this piece of digital real estate—a piece that we know people go to for a succinct expression of why your brand is dynamic, relevant, and timely. So, if you love your brand, then make sure you’re looking after the digital representation of its growth.
Cover image: BUCSA