An About page tells search engines and visitors who stands behind your site. Google's quality raters are told to find out who is responsible for a website, and a thin or missing About page makes that hard. Add a real one with the people, the mission, and a clear way to reach you. It is one of the cheapest trust wins you can make.
What this check flags
This audit looks for a dedicated About page and could not find one, or found a page so thin it does not count. An About page is where a reader, or a search quality rater, learns who runs the site, why it exists, and how to reach a human. When it is missing, your site reads as anonymous, and anonymous sites have a harder time earning trust. Trust is the part of E-E-A-T that Google weighs most heavily.
The fix is not complicated. You are not writing a brochure. You are answering a question every honest site should answer without flinching: who are you?
Why an About page is a core trust signal
Google publishes a document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Real people, contracted by Google, use it to judge whether pages deserve to rank. They do not set rankings directly, but their judgments train the systems that do. The guidelines tell raters to figure out who is responsible for a site and its content. If they cannot find that out, the page gets marked down. The guidelines state plainly that trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family: a page that cannot be trusted has low quality no matter how expert it looks.
An About page is where raters and readers go to answer the responsibility question. It is also the natural home for your Organization schema, the structured data that names your business, links your social profiles, and ties your brand together as an entity Google can recognize. The guidelines also flag visible contact information as a trust factor, and an About page is the obvious place to point people toward it. One page does a lot of work.
There is a search visibility angle too. As of early 2026, Google expanded its own documentation on authors and authorship transparency. The direction is steady: search engines reward sites that are open about who is behind them, and grow wary of sites that hide.
What a strong About page has
A strong About page covers a short list of things and skips the filler:
Who. The real people or company behind the site. Names, roles, and a sentence of background that shows why these are the right people to be writing about your subject. If a single person runs it, say so plainly.
Mission. Why the site exists and who it serves. One honest paragraph beats three pages of slogans.
Real proof. Years in the field, credentials, a photo of an actual person, a founding date. Specifics that a stranger could check carry far more weight than adjectives.
A contact path. A clear route to reach you, whether that is a contact form, an email, or a link to your contact page. A reachable site feels accountable.
Leave out the stock photos of handshakes and the line about being passionate. Nobody believes it and it adds nothing a rater can verify.
How to write one that is honest, not corporate
Write the way you would explain your work to a new neighbor who asked what you do. Use the names of actual people. Say when you started and why. Show the experience rather than asserting it: instead of writing that you are a leading authority, describe the work that earned that standing.
Plain language wins here. The goal is for a reader to finish the page and think, these are real people who know their subject and I can reach them if I need to. That feeling is the trust signal, and no amount of corporate gloss manufactures it.
How to fix it
Create a page titled About or About Us. Write 300 to 600 words covering the who, the mission, the proof, and the contact path described above. Link to it from your main navigation and your footer so it is easy to find from anywhere on the site. Add Organization schema to your home page or About page naming your business, logo, and social profiles. Include a photo of a real person if you can. Then make sure the page is indexable and submit it for indexing so search engines pick it up.
Common mistakes
A few traps catch people who mean well. Writing the whole page in vague third person so no actual name ever appears. Filling it with mission-statement language that says nothing checkable. Hiding the page deep in the site where neither readers nor crawlers stumble onto it. Listing a generic info@ address and calling that a contact path. And the quiet one: faking credentials or claims the guidelines specifically tell raters to catch. An honest thin page beats an impressive fake one.
FAQ
A: Not as a single switch. It strengthens the trust signals that quality raters assess and that feed Google's ranking systems. Think of it as removing a reason to distrust you rather than a magic lever.
A: Yes, and a solo About page can be the most convincing kind. Say it is just you, share your background, and put your name on it. One credible person beats a faceless brand.
A: Long enough to answer who you are, why the site exists, and how to reach you. Roughly 300 to 600 words is plenty. Length is not the point. Substance is.
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Claude Vincent is a technical SEO consultant focused on crawlability, rendering, and AI-search visibility. He writes the field guides and case studies at SEO ProCheck, with a bias toward the durable, unglamorous work that decides whether search engines and AI answer engines can actually read and cite a site.
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Technical SEO consulting and GEO strategy with 20 years of enterprise experience. Case studies, resources, and tools for search and AI visibility.
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