Key Takeaways
- Open with the facts, not the origin story. The first two sentences should state who you are, what you fix, and who for. Everything an assistant repeats about you comes from that opening.
- Name the buyer, not the market. "Operations consultant for multi-site dental practices" is a fact. "Trusted partner to growing businesses" is a mood, and no assistant can act on a mood.
- Put the credential in a sentence with a year. A logo strip is a picture. A sentence naming the certifying body and when you earned it is a claim, and a claim is the thing that gets quoted.
- State how you work, not just what you believe. Remote or on site, how long a project runs, what you need from the team. This is unusual enough on an about page that it becomes what gets repeated.
- Give every claim somewhere it can be checked. A fact that appears only on your own site is weaker than the same fact appearing on your site and one place you do not control.
Your about page is probably the second page anyone reads and the first one a machine looks at when it needs to say something about you. It is also, on most consulting sites, the page that says the least.
Not because it is short. Because it is written in the register of a handshake: a career told as a journey, a philosophy, a line about partnership. All of it true, none of it checkable.
An assistant asked to recommend a consultant in your field has to say something specific about a person or move on to the next one. Here is what it needs from that page, and what to write instead of the story.
What should a consultant's about page say?
It should state six facts in plain sentences: who you are and what you do, the city you work from, who you work with, the problem you fix, how an engagement actually runs, and at least one credential or result stated in full. That is the whole answer. Everything below is why each one earns its place.
This is not an AI trick. It is what Google's guidance on creating helpful content has asked for since long before assistants existed, and it is what schema.org's Person type was built to carry: a name, a role, a place, an affiliation, a qualification. The vocabulary exists because these are the facts that identify a professional.
The trouble is that a page can read beautifully to a client and still contain none of them.
The six facts an assistant is looking for
They stack. An assistant cannot say anything useful about your capability until it knows who and where you are, and it cannot vouch for your proof until it can attach that proof to a named person doing named work.
The two dashed bricks are the ones most consulting about pages leave out, and they are the two a buyer asks about first. A wall with holes in it still stands. It just cannot carry anything.
Read your own page against those nine bricks. The common result is four solid, two vague, and three missing, and the missing ones are almost always cost, a result stated in full, and the city.
Why the story-first page states none of them
Because a story is about change over time, and facts are about the present. "After fifteen years in corporate finance I struck out on my own" tells a reader where you came from and tells a machine nothing it can use to answer a question asked today.
Try it on your own page. Take each sentence and ask what a stranger could verify from it. Most consulting about pages survive that test with two or three sentences intact, and the survivors are usually the boring ones: the degree, the city, the last employer.
The same problem shows up on service businesses of every kind, which is why the fix looks similar for a personal trainer's website and for a twenty-person consultancy. Both are being read by something that cannot infer.
| What the page usually says | What a reader takes from it | What an assistant takes from it | The version that works |
|---|---|---|---|
| "I help businesses reach their potential" | A warm feeling | Nothing | "I rebuild order handling for wholesale distributors doing $5M to $40M" |
| "Two decades of experience" | Reassurance | A number with nothing attached | "Two decades in medical device manufacturing, the last eight independent" |
| "Certified and accredited" | Credibility | No certifying body, no date | "Certified by the Institute of Management Consultants, renewed in 2025" |
| "We work with clients nationwide" | Scale | No place to attach you to | "Based in Denver, on site within a day's drive, remote everywhere else" |
| "Every engagement is bespoke" | Flexibility | No shape, no cost, no commitment | "Most projects run six to ten weeks and start with a two-week assessment" |
What makes a fact checkable, not just written
A fact becomes checkable when it appears somewhere you do not control. Your own page is where a claim starts. A professional body's member listing, a conference program, a client's press release, a trade publication's contributor page: those are where it becomes something an assistant will repeat without hedging.
This is the part consultants find unfair, and it is worth stating plainly: the machine is not judging whether you are good. Google's own documentation on AI features describes answers assembled from pages its systems have already read, and an unsupported sentence on a personal site is the weakest kind of page there is.
So write the credential on your about page, then spend an hour making sure the same words exist in one other place. Which credentials are worth that hour is covered in what credentials AI assistants actually mention.
How to rewrite the page in one sitting
Put the facts at the top and the story underneath. Write the first paragraph as four flat sentences: what you do, who for, where, and one thing that proves it. Then keep whatever story you like, because a human still has to want to hire you.
Next, add the two bricks almost everyone leaves out. Cost can be a range or a starting point, and it does more work than any other sentence on the page. A result stated in full means the situation, the change, and the measure, in three sentences, with permission from the client or with the name removed and the industry kept.
Last, check that the page names the category you want to be found in, in the words a buyer would use rather than the ones you use with peers. Getting that wording right is its own job, and it is the difference between being filed under the work you do and being filed under nothing, which is what describing what you do so AI categorizes you correctly is about.
None of this takes a rebuild. It takes an afternoon and a willingness to sound plainer than you would like. If you want to see what is being said about you before you start, the free check runs 25 real buyer questions from your niche through ChatGPT at $0 and emails a plain-English readout within the hour. It runs as soon as you ask for it.
Questions we hear the most
What should a consultant's about page say for AI to trust it?
It should state your name and role, the city you work from, who you work with, the problem you fix, how an engagement runs, and at least one credential or result in a full sentence. Trust comes from checkable facts, not tone.
How long should an about page be?
Long enough to state the facts and no longer, which is usually four to six short paragraphs. Length is not the problem on most about pages. Density is: a thousand words can contain nothing an assistant is able to repeat.
Should I write my about page in the first person or the third person?
Either works. First person reads better to a buyer and third person reads better in a directory, and neither changes what an assistant can extract, because it is reading for facts rather than for voice.
Do I need to put my city on my about page?
Yes, if you want to be named in questions that mention a place. A consultant in Denver who never writes Denver anywhere is invisible to every question a buyer asks about consultants in Denver, however good the rest of the page is.
Does an about page need schema markup to be trusted?
No. Markup helps a machine read what is already written, and it cannot supply facts the page does not state. Write the sentences first, then add markup if you want to. The order matters more than the markup does.
Should I list every service on my about page?
No. The about page answers who you are and who you are for. A services page answers what you sell and what it costs. Splitting them gives an assistant two clean pages to quote instead of one crowded one.
How do I find out whether AI mentions me when someone asks about consultants like me?
Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask, several times each, in a logged out session, and write down who gets named. A dozen questions repeated three times gives you an honest baseline in an afternoon.
What does the free 25-question check include?
It asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions from your niche at $0, then emails a plain-English readout within the hour: how often you were named, who was named in your place, and the first thing to fix. It runs as soon as you ask for it.
Your buyers are already asking. Find out what AI tells them.
The free check asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions about your niche and sends you the report within the hour, at $0. If it shows you are already getting named everywhere, we will say so in plain words.
Get my free check →