How to write a personal About page that explains your expertise

“I help businesses grow” leaves a prospective client with most of their questions unanswered. What kind of business? What work would you do? Where could they see an example?

Your About page is a good place to answer those questions. Someone who arrives through a referral or an AI answer should be able to work out whether to contact you without piecing your career together from six different profiles.

Start with the work you actually do

Open with a plain description of your area of practice. A reader should quickly understand what help you provide and for whom. Use language you would be comfortable saying in a first conversation. Avoid turning every capability you have ever used into a list of specialties.

A tax adviser might say they help independent designers plan quarterly taxes and set up simple bookkeeping routines. A researcher might say they conduct user interviews for teams deciding whether to change a product. Neither sentence needs a superlative to be useful.

Follow the opening with the boundaries of your work. Say what types of engagements you take on, the setting in which you work, or the questions you are best placed to answer. If there are areas you do not cover, a short, matter-of-fact note can prevent an unsuitable inquiry.

Turn claims into checkable context

Readers need a reason to trust a description of expertise. Add details that can stand on their own: a relevant role, a published talk, a method you use, a professional qualification, a body of work, or a source you helped create. Link to the original work when it is public and the link will remain useful.

Use only facts you can substantiate. Do not imply an outcome from a project when the outcome was not measured, and do not name a client, quote private feedback, or share a deliverable without permission. A sentence such as “I led research for a product team in 2023” is clearer than “I transformed product strategy.” If an engagement is confidential, describe the type of work at a level your agreement allows, or leave it out.

Google's guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content asks creators to consider clear sourcing, background about the author or site, and demonstrable expertise. That is a useful editorial standard because it serves a reader directly. It does not establish a ranking outcome.

Give the page a usable shape

Make the facts easy to find. You can give the page a personal voice while keeping a straightforward structure:

• A short opening that names your focus and the people or situations you support.
• A section on how you work, including a method, format, or typical scope where that is useful.
• Selected evidence, linked to public work or described in permissioned, factual terms.
• A concise background that explains why you have this focus.
• A clear next step, such as an appropriate contact route, speaking inquiry, or link to services.

A link to a talk, article, project description, or professional profile lets readers decide what matters.

If your site has technical support, you can also discuss accurate profile markup with the person who maintains it. Schema.org's ProfilePage type describes a web page about a profile. Markup should reflect public, visible facts on the page. It is descriptive metadata, not proof that a search engine or AI system will use the page in a particular way.

A fictional example

The following example is fictional. It is a shape to adapt, not evidence about a real person.

Mina Patel helps independent architecture studios make their first client onboarding process easier to run. She maps the steps between an inquiry and a signed project, then works with the studio to write the emails, forms, and handoffs needed for that process. Mina's approach draws on her previous operations roles in small design practices. Her public work includes a workshop on intake design and a short guide to project handovers. She takes on remote projects for studios that want a documented process, rather than a new sales system. For inquiries, contact Mina through the form below.

For this fictional page to be ready to publish, Mina would need links to the workshop and handover guide. Without those links, the paragraph asks readers to take her word for it. On your own page, choose one piece of work you can show and explain your contribution.

Fill-in template

Use this as a starting point, then remove every phrase that is not true for you. You can also download the personal About page template to work on it away from your editor:

[Name] helps [specific people or organizations] with [specific problem or work]. [They] work through [relevant method, format, or scope]. [Name]'s background includes [verifiable role, experience, qualification, or published work]. [They] have contributed [linkable public work or permissioned factual example]. [Name] is a fit for [clear engagement or context] and does not offer [optional boundary, if useful]. Learn more through [relevant link or contact route].

Before publishing, read the page as someone who has never met you. Can they tell what you do? Does each factual claim have evidence you can share, if asked? Have you removed private client information and anything that overstates your role? Have you checked that every link works and that the page has a straightforward title and heading?

Use the page as one measured improvement

An About page is only one piece of public evidence. Start with your Gistful profile, then save questions that reflect the expertise you want people to find. Review the returned answers and cited sources as evidence of what those checks showed, while keeping missing answers marked as unmeasured. Improve the public page with facts you can stand behind, publish it when it is ready, and run an explicit rescan using the same saved questions and scope.

That sequence can help you document a change. It cannot prove that an About page caused a later result, or that a public page will change how an AI system responds. Keep the earlier scan, the published page, and the rescan together so the comparison remains honest.

Use the guide to measuring your AI visibility to compare the answers after an update. For help choosing questions before you measure, read the Gistful question guide.