Someone wrote your About page when the site launched.

They probably wrote it in an afternoon. It says something about your founding story, something about your values, something about your passion for your work. It has been sitting there since, updated occasionally when someone noticed it was embarrassingly out of date.

This is the document Google uses to evaluate whether your organization is a credible source.

Not the document you’d choose, necessarily. But the About page is where Google looks to verify that you are who you claim to be — that the expertise signals across your content attach to a real organization with a real history and a transparent identity. Most About pages fail this evaluation not because they’re badly written but because they were written for a different audience entirely. They were written for humans who are already considering doing business with you. They were not written for an algorithm evaluating whether to cite you as an authority.

These are different documents. Most companies only have one.

What Google Is Actually Looking for on Your About Page

The About page, in E-E-A-T terms, is primarily a trustworthiness document. Trust — the T in E-E-A-T — is built through structural signals that confirm your content is produced by a real organization with verifiable credentials and a transparent identity. The About page is where most of those signals should live.

What that looks like in practice:

Named individuals with verifiable credentials. Not “our team of experienced professionals.” Named people, with specific backgrounds, linked to verifiable external profiles. A person whose name appears on your About page, whose LinkedIn profile exists and matches, and whose name also appears on the content they write is an entity Google can model. An unnamed team is not an entity. It is an abstraction that carries no authority signals.

Specific organizational history. When were you founded, by whom, with what background? “We’ve been helping businesses grow since 2015” is a generic claim. “Founded in 2015 by Jacob Clifton, following fourteen years as a staff writer at Television Without Pity” is a specific claim that can be verified. The specificity is not vanity — it is a trust signal. Vague history suggests there’s something vague about the history.

A clear, specific expertise claim. What do you do, for whom, and with what demonstrated background? “We help businesses with content” describes approximately sixty thousand companies. “Fractional editorial leadership for B2B companies that publish — built on a fourteen-year career helping Television Without Pity become one of the most-read sites on the internet” describes one. The second is a credibility claim. The first is an aspiration.

Transparent contact and organizational information. Physical location if relevant, direct email, named leadership. Opacity on the About page is a trust negative. If you wouldn’t tell someone who runs the company, why would Google trust the company’s content?

The Schema Layer Your About Page Is Probably Missing

The structural version of About page authority is Organization schema — the structured data that declares to Google, in explicit machine-readable terms, exactly who you are and how you connect to other recognized entities.

Organization schema on your About page should include your name, URL, description, and logo — the basics most sites have. What most sites don’t have are the sameAs attributes: links to your LinkedIn company page, your Crunchbase profile, your industry association listings, your Wikipedia or Wikidata entry if one exists. These are the connective tissue that ties your schema entity to other entities in the Knowledge Graph. Without them, Google is inferring your identity from content signals. With them, you’re declaring it directly.

Person schema for named individuals — your founder, your named authors, your named experts — works the same way. The sameAs attributes should point to LinkedIn profiles, professional association pages, bylines at major publications. Each connection increases Google’s confidence that this person is who they claim to be in the topic they’re writing about.

Author page E-E-A-T and the byline’s return as a search signal are both downstream of this infrastructure. The schema on your About page is where named author entities get their organizational context — the connection between a person and the organization that gives their expertise a home.

The Organizational Failure That Produces the Generic About Page

About pages are usually assigned to marketing writers at site launch and to no one thereafter. The result is a document that reflects what the company wanted to say about itself the day it launched, optimized for the reader who was already interested, frozen at a moment that is no longer current.

Nobody’s job is to treat the About page as a credibility document that requires the same editorial rigor as a published article. Nobody is responsible for ensuring the structured data is correct, the named individuals have current profiles, and the expertise claims are specific enough to be verifiable.

This is the organizational pattern across E-E-A-T — the signals that build credibility require ongoing editorial judgment and ongoing editorial ownership. The About page is no different. It needs someone who is responsible for keeping it credible, not just current. Those are different standards.

Your About page is probably fine as a marketing document. Check whether it’s credible as a trust document. Those are different questions, and right now only one of them is affecting your search visibility.

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