How to make your About page machine-readable

Ask an AI engine who runs your company and watch what comes back. For a lot of businesses it comes back thin, or wrong, or attached to a different company with a similar name.

The About page is usually where the answer should live. It is also the page most often written as a mood: a founding story, a photo of the team laughing, three values in a serif font. A person reads that and gets a feeling. A machine reads it and still cannot say what the company is called, what it does, or who works there.

What the engine is trying to do on this page

An engine reading your site is trying to build an entity: a named thing it can hold facts about and describe later. The About page is where you either hand it that entity cleanly or leave it guessing.

Guessing is where the errors come from. Two companies with similar names get merged. A former co-founder stays attached to you for years. The city in your footer wins over the city in your prose. None of that is malice, it is an engine resolving ambiguity you left on the page.

So the job here is narrow: remove the ambiguity.

Do the task

1. Lead with a plain entity statement

The first readable sentence should say the company name, what it does, who it serves, and where it operates. Literally.

Story version: "It started in a garage in 2011, with one idea and a lot of coffee."

Entity version: "Northline Freight is a regional less-than-truckload carrier serving manufacturers across the upper Midwest, headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota, and operating since 2011."

Keep the garage. Put it second. The engine reads the first version as prose about coffee and the second as a set of facts, and you lose nothing by leading with the facts.

2. Add Organization schema, with sameAs links you actually control

Organization schema is the identity card: legal or trading name, url, logo, address, and a contactPoint. The add Organization schema guide covers the mechanics.

The part people get wrong is sameAs. It is a list of other places on the web that are the same entity as you: your LinkedIn company page, your verified profiles, your listing in an industry body. It is how an engine connects your site to the corroborating record elsewhere.

Two rules. Only list profiles that are genuinely yours, and only list ones that are alive. A sameAs pointing at an abandoned account or a page for a similarly named company does the opposite of what you wanted: it teaches the engine a wrong association, confidently.

3. Name the people, in text, with roles

"Our leadership team" over four headshots is a design decision that costs you the whole payload. Write the names and the roles as real text. Then mark them up as Person entities connected to the Organization, so the engine reads a named human with a title rather than an image file.

If those people write for the site, connect them to their bylines too. The author markup approach is in add author schema for E-E-A-T, and the same names should be used in both places.

4. Make the identity details agree with themselves

Pick one exact company name and use it. Not "Northline Freight" in the header, "Northline Freight LLC" in the schema, and "Northline" in the footer, unless you also declare the legal name and the alternate name explicitly.

Same for the address and the phone number. Same format, same suite line, same everything, across the About page, the contact page, the footer, and your external listings. Consistency is not aesthetic here. It is the mechanism by which an engine decides two mentions are the same company.

5. Validate, then re-check after changes

Run the page through a structured data validator and confirm the Organization and Person objects parse. Then put a note somewhere: re-check this page after a rebrand, an address change, a leadership change, or a redesign.

Identity markup rots quietly. Nothing breaks. The page just keeps confidently telling engines about a CFO who left in 2024.

Old way versus new way

The old way wrote the About page for a prospect who already landed on your site and wanted to feel good about buying. Warmth, story, values, a team photo.

The new way keeps that and adds a readable identity layer underneath: literal statements, labeled facts, real names, consistent details. The visitor still gets the story. The machine now gets an entity it can name without inference.

The damaging admission

Machine-readable identity does not make a company notable. If nothing else on the web corroborates who you are, a clean Organization block is a well-formed claim with nothing behind it, and engines weigh corroboration you do not control.

And this work does not get you recommended. It removes the reason an engine cannot describe you correctly. That is a floor, not a result. Anyone selling the result is guessing.

One more: sameAs cannot manufacture authority. Linking to a Wikipedia page you do not have is not an option, and linking to five thin directory listings is not a substitute for one real one.

Where Citedon fits

The free scan reads your About page the way ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude do, and reports what they can and cannot state about your company: the name, the location, the people, the missing structured pieces.

Applying the missing layer automatically is WordPress only, through the connected plugin, additively, with per-fix approval, and it works alongside Yoast and Rank Math. On any other platform the scan still diagnoses the page and you add the markup yourself.

Run a free scan on your About page and read the gap between the company you describe and the company a machine can actually name.