Your About Us page is the one page where an AI system tries to learn who your business is, and most are written as mood copy that states nothing an answer engine can quote. AI answers are assembled from retrieved passages, not ranked pages: the system pulls specific facts from a page and composes a response with links back to the source. So a paragraph that says "family-focused, patient-first care" is invisible to that process, because it carries no fact to lift. Below we take four vague, real-shaped About paragraphs and rewrite each into an extractable one that names the business, the exact service, the location, who it serves, and one checkable proof. It is the same information a human skims past; the difference decides whether an AI cites you or your competitor.
Your About Us page has a new reader, and it is not a person. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI answer, or Perplexity "who does dental implants in Edmonton" or "which contractor handles roof replacement near me," the AI system goes looking for a page that tells it, in plain words, what your business is and what it does. Your About page is the page it reaches for. Most About pages fail that reader completely.
We showed in You Can Rank #4 on Google and Be Invisible to ChatGPT that ranking and citation are separate outcomes, measured separately, on our own site the same day. This piece is about the copy underneath that split. The About page is where an answer engine goes to settle who you are, and it is usually the page written with the least regard for stating a fact.
An AI answer engine cannot quote a sentence that has no facts in it
AI answers are built from passages, not pages. Google describes its generative results as retrieval-augmented: the system retrieves pages from its index, then uses specific information from those pages to compose a response, with links back to the sources. That is the whole mechanism. It does not read your page for tone or design. It reads it for extractable statements, lifts the ones that answer the question, and attributes them.
That reframes what an About page is for. The old job was to make a human feel something on the way to the contact form. The new job runs alongside it: be the page that tells a machine, in one self-contained passage, exactly what this business is, what it does, where, for whom, and with what proof. When those facts are on the page as plain statements, an AI system can quote them. When the page is a wall of adjectives, there is nothing to quote, and the answer gets built from a competitor who wrote it down.
The four rewrites below are constructed examples across the kinds of local businesses AI answers get asked about. Each starts from the kind of About paragraph we see constantly and ends with a version an answer engine can actually use.
The dentist: "family-focused, patient-first care" becomes a named clinic with named services
Naming the clinic, the exact procedures, and the location turns a mood line into a passage an AI can cite. Here is the version that appears on most dental sites:
"We are committed to family-focused, patient-first care in a comfortable, modern environment where your smile comes first."
A person skims that and moves on. An AI system asked "who does Invisalign in southwest Edmonton" finds nothing in it to lift: no business name, no procedure, no place. It is not that the sentence is bad writing. It is that the sentence contains zero retrievable facts. Now the rewrite:
"Riverbend Dental is a family and cosmetic dental clinic in southwest Edmonton offering routine checkups, Invisalign clear aligners, dental implants, and same-day crowns, with evening and Saturday appointments for working families."
Every clause in the second version is quotable. Asked about implants in that neighbourhood, an answer engine can now cite a named clinic that says it does implants in that neighbourhood. The human impression is nearly identical; the machine-readable content went from nothing to a full entity record.
The contractor: "quality workmanship you can trust" becomes checkable proof
Swapping adjectives for verifiable facts is what lets a contractor's passage survive being lifted out of context. Adjectives do not survive extraction, because every competitor claims the same ones. The typical line:
"We deliver quality workmanship you can trust, on time and on budget, with customer satisfaction guaranteed on every project."
"Quality," "trust," and "guaranteed" are not facts; they are the default vocabulary of the entire trade, and an AI system weighting one source against another gets no signal from words every source uses. Replace them with things that can be checked:
"Summit Exteriors is a licensed and insured roofing and siding contractor serving Edmonton and Sherwood Park, installing asphalt and metal roofs with a written 10-year workmanship warranty and a typical two-day install on residential homes."
License status, a named warranty term, a defined service area, and a concrete timeline all survive being pulled out of the page and dropped into an answer. Microsoft's search team makes the same point from the grounding side: in AI systems, factual fidelity and how content breaks into retrievable chunks matter in ways that never appear in a ranking signal.
The optometrist: "your vision is our priority" becomes conditions treated and who it serves
Converting a benefit slogan into concrete conditions and use cases is the layer that lets an AI match you to a specific buyer question. Buyers do not ask AI systems for priorities; they ask for a problem solved. The slogan version:
"At our clinic, your vision is our priority, and we treat every patient like family."
A parent searching "who does myopia control for kids near me" or a patient asking "where can I get dry eye treatment in central Edmonton" gets no match from that sentence, because it names no condition and no place. The rewrite names both:
"Glenora Eye Care is an optometry clinic in central Edmonton providing comprehensive eye exams, dry eye treatment, myopia control for children, and diabetic eye screening, and is set up for families, seniors, and patients managing chronic conditions."
Now the page states the conditions it handles and the people it is right for. When an answer engine matches a buyer's specific question to a source, this is the raw material it matches on: named conditions, a named place, and stated use cases. The slogan matched nothing; the rewrite matches a dozen real queries.
The law firm: "trusted advocates on your side" becomes practice areas and jurisdiction
Naming practice areas, jurisdiction, and credentials is how authority and attribution work in practice, rather than as a claim about themselves. Law firm About copy is often the most abstract of all:
"We are trusted advocates who fight for you and stand on your side when it matters most."
An AI system asked "who handles child custody cases in Alberta" or "family lawyer for a divorce near me" cannot use one word of that. It names no practice area, no jurisdiction, no credential. The evidence version does all three:
"Bearspaw Law is a family and personal injury law firm practising in Alberta, handling divorce, child custody, and motor vehicle injury claims, with lawyers called to the Alberta bar and free initial consultations for injury cases."
The rewrite gives an answer engine what it needs to trust and attribute the passage: the specific practice areas, the jurisdiction the firm is licensed in, and a credential it can point to. That matters because AI systems actively decide which passage to attribute. OpenAI's own help docs confirm ChatGPT search responses can include inline citations and a Sources panel, which means the system is choosing, per answer, whose sentence to quote and link.
What the four rewrites changed, side by side
Every rewrite made the same trade: it dropped the adjectives and stated the facts. Here is what each vague version omitted and what the evidence version put in its place.
| Business | Vague version | What the evidence version added |
|---|---|---|
| Dentist | "family-focused, patient-first care" | Named clinic, exact procedures (implants, Invisalign, same-day crowns), southwest Edmonton, evening and Saturday hours |
| Contractor | "quality workmanship you can trust" | License and insurance, 10-year written warranty, Edmonton and Sherwood Park service area, two-day install timeline |
| Optometrist | "your vision is our priority" | Eye exams, dry eye treatment, myopia control, diabetic screening, central Edmonton, who the clinic is right for |
| Law firm | "trusted advocates on your side" | Named practice areas, Alberta jurisdiction, bar credentials, free injury consultation |
The shared pattern is easy to see once the versions sit next to each other. Every rewrite did the same five things: it named the business, said exactly what the business does, pinned it to a place, showed who it is for, and gave one checkable fact. The vague version did none of those; the evidence version did all of them, and that is the entire difference between a passage an AI can cite and one it skips.
This is the pattern in action, not the method. Turning it into a repeatable set of questions you run against every paragraph on your site, so you can catch mood copy before it ships, is its own piece in this series on writing evidence instead of marketing copy. Here the point is narrower and worth sitting with: your About page is the page an answer engine reads to learn who you are, and right now it is probably the page you wrote with the least regard for stating a single fact.
Bing Webmaster Tools makes the stakes measurable. Its AI Performance report, launched February 10, 2026, shows only what got cited, and per Microsoft it does not measure rankings, authority, performance, or importance. If your About page carries no quotable facts, that report has nothing from it to show, no matter how well the page ranks.
Rewrite one paragraph on your About page this week
Fix one sentence and you can watch the rest follow. Open your About page and look for a single self-contained sentence that names your business, says exactly what it does, states where, and gives one checkable fact. If that sentence is not there, write it and put it near the top. That one passage is what an AI system reaches for when someone asks who does what you do in your city.
You do not have to rewrite the whole page today. You have to give an answer engine one passage worth quoting, then a second, then a third, until the page reads like a record instead of a mood board. We are an Edmonton agency that has done this across dental, optometry, and home-services sites since 2010, now for 33 active clients, and the rewrite is almost always faster than owners expect, because the facts already exist. They were just never written down.
If you want the honest version of what an answer engine currently pulls from your site, ask us or start with the flagship's ten-minute check and read your own About page as an extractor would. Rewriting pages into passages that stand alone as evidence is exactly what our SEO practice does now, on every client, on the pages an AI reads first.