The About Page Framework That Sounds Human, Not AI

About pages have become exhausting to keep up with all the AI slop flying around. After writing them for hundreds of clients over the past decade, I can spot a generated one in about four seconds. It’s always the same document wearing different logos — same phrases, same structure, same hollow warmth that somehow makes you trust a company less the more you read it. If you’ve ever landed on an about page and felt nothing — not skepticism, not connection, just nothing — you’ve read one. The good news? AI can absolutely help you write a better about page than you’d produce alone. The catch is that you have to use it completely differently than most people do.

Why AI About Pages All Sound the Same

Here’s what happens when someone opens ChatGPT and types “write an about page for my accounting firm.” The model does exactly what it was trained to do — produce text that resembles the average of thousands of about pages it has already seen. And the average about page is terrible. So you get confident, polished, terrible.

I pulled three real examples last month. Company names changed, but every word is verbatim from live websites.

Example One — a boutique marketing agency: “At Brightwave Creative, we are a passionate team of innovative thinkers dedicated to delivering customer-first solutions that drive real results. With years of experience across industries, we combine creativity with strategy to help businesses like yours reach their full potential.”

Example Two — a regional HVAC company: “At Summit Air Solutions, we are a passionate team of dedicated professionals committed to delivering innovative, customer-first service. With years of experience serving homeowners and businesses, we bring expertise and integrity to every job.”

Example Three — a solo career coach: “I am a passionate, results-driven coach with years of experience helping professionals unlock their full potential. My innovative, client-first approach combines proven frameworks with personalized support.”

Read those three times, slowly. A marketing agency, a heating and cooling company, and a one-person coaching practice. Interchangeable. Swap the names and you wouldn’t need to change another syllable. Passionate. Innovative. Customer-first. Years of experience. These phrases have been laundered of all meaning through sheer repetition — they’ve become verbal wallpaper.

But what is the actual problem here? In essence, it’s the prompt. When you ask AI to write your about page, it writes a generic about page. But it’s much more than that — it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI is good at. When you feed AI specific, raw, human material and ask it to organize and sharpen that material, you get something else entirely. That’s the whole method.

The Interview Method

Frustrated by a SaaS founder’s about page — 94% bounce rate, completely unsalvageable — I stopped trying to rewrite what was there and started over with a voice memo recorded during a 40-minute phone call. She talked. I asked questions. I fed the transcript to the AI. What came out was an about page her customers actually read and, more importantly, shared.

The interview is the framework. Not the writing. The writing is almost the easy part.

Before you touch AI, answer these questions — in writing or by voice memo. Don’t edit yourself. Go long. Be specific. Ramble if you need to.

• What problem made you start this? Not the polished LinkedIn version. The real version — the moment, the frustration, the thing that made you think “someone should fix this and I guess it’s me.”
• What did you do before? Previous careers, jobs, even the weird ones — that’s where specificity lives. “I spent six years as a middle school science teacher before I started this company” makes people lean in. “I have a diverse professional background” makes them leave.
• What would you be doing if this failed? The answer reveals what you actually care about versus what you do for money. Those aren’t always the same thing, and the gap between them is often where your most human copy lives.
• What do you do that your competitors would call unprofessional? This one always produces gold. Things like “I answer my own email,” or “I tell clients when I think they’re making a mistake even if it costs me the project,” or “I close every December no matter what because burnout almost ended this whole thing in 2021.”
• What’s a belief you hold that most people in your industry would argue with? Opinions create trust. Neutrality creates nothing.

Take those answers — unfiltered, unpolished, the actual words you used — and paste them into your AI prompt. Then say: “Using only the material above, draft an about page. Do not add claims, adjectives, or phrases that aren’t supported by what I’ve given you. Use my voice, not professional marketing language.”

That constraint is everything. You’re not asking AI to invent. You’re asking it to organize and clarify what already exists.

First Person vs Third Person

Real talk: this is the important bit., because I see people get this wrong before they’ve written a single word — and it poisons everything that follows.

The rule is simple. Exceptions are few.

Solo founder or sole proprietor — first person, always. If you are the company, referring to yourself in third person (“John brings 15 years of experience to every engagement”) reads as either pretentious or delusional. It signals you think you’re bigger than you are, and visitors notice immediately. Write as yourself. Say “I.” Own it.

Teams of two to five people — first person plural with individual bios below. “We started this because we were tired of…” works fine when there are actually two people saying it. But don’t let the “we” swallow the individuals. Add a short paragraph — three to five sentences — for each person underneath. Not a resume. A person. Where they grew up, what they did before, one weird specific thing about them. My standing rule for client bios: if the detail could appear on a LinkedIn profile, replace it with something that couldn’t.

Larger companies — third person is fine. Once you’re past roughly fifteen people, a first-person about page starts to feel like it’s claiming more intimacy than the organization can actually deliver. “At Meridian, we believe…” becomes a lie of scale when “we” means two hundred employees across four time zones who’ve never met each other. Third person lets you tell the company’s story without pretending it’s one person’s story.

Match the scale. That’s the whole rule.

The Anti-Template

Here’s the single editing move that has improved every about page I’ve ever touched. Read every sentence and ask one question: could my closest competitor put their name on this and have it still be true?

If yes — delete it.

Not revise. Delete. The instinct when you read a weak sentence is to strengthen it with more adjectives, and that always makes things worse. “We are dedicated to excellence” becomes “We are relentlessly dedicated to uncompromising excellence” and now you have two bad sentences instead of one. Don’t make my mistake — I spent years trying to salvage these lines before I realized cutting them entirely was faster and always better.

Replace the deleted sentence with a specific fact. Not “we care about quality” but “every piece that leaves our studio goes through three separate inspections, and we’ve re-done work at our own cost 23 times in the past four years rather than ship something we weren’t proud of.” That second sentence cannot go on your competitor’s website. That’s what you’re aiming for.

Run every sentence through this test:

• Does this sentence have a specific number, date, name, or place in it?
• Does this sentence describe a behavior or decision — not just a value?
• Is there anything in this sentence that would embarrass a competitor because it’s true about us and not about them?

Answer no to all three and the sentence is earning its spot through vagueness. It’s placeholder text that feels like content. Delete it or replace it with something that passes at least one of those tests.

I ran one client’s about page through this process last spring — she started with 380 words. We cut to 140. Then we replaced what we’d deleted with specific, earned details and landed at 290 words. Shorter, more informative, more honest. She emailed me two weeks later to say three clients had mentioned the about page specifically as the reason they reached out. That had apparently never happened with the old version. Ever.

Revision Prompts That Add Humanity

You’ve done the interview. You’ve generated a draft. You’ve run the anti-template filter. Now you’re going to ask AI to do three specific things to the draft — in order, as separate prompts.

Prompt One — Add One Specific Mistake or Imperfection

The exact prompt I use: “Read this about page draft. Add one sentence that describes a real mistake we made or a real limitation we have. Not a humblebrag. An actual thing we got wrong or can’t do. Place it where it fits naturally.”

What this does is break the promotional register. Every about page in existence is selling — even the ones that claim not to be. One sentence of genuine imperfection signals that the rest of the page might also be telling the truth. Readers feel this without being able to name it. A plumbing company that says “we don’t do commercial jobs — tried it twice, and we’re just not built for it” is easier to trust than one that claims to handle everything. That’s what makes honest limitations endearing to us as readers.

Prompt Two — Remove Corporate Sentences

The exact prompt: “Read this draft. Identify and remove every sentence that sounds like it was written for a corporate brochure. Replace each removed sentence with a line that uses plain, direct language and says the same thing in fewer words.”

AI is genuinely good at this. It recognizes corporate language because it has processed an enormous amount of it — so this prompt uses that pattern recognition against itself. You’re asking the model to flag the bad habits it was also tempted to use in the first draft. Works surprisingly well.

Prompt Three — Add an Inside Detail

The exact prompt: “Add one detail to this page that only someone who actually works here would know. It can be small — the name of a tool we use, a specific habit we have, something about the physical space we work in, a recurring conversation we have with clients. Do not invent it. Leave a placeholder in brackets if needed, and I will fill it in.”

That last instruction matters. AI cannot invent true inside details — it will try, and they’ll be plausible-sounding fictions. The placeholder approach is honest. It tells you exactly where to add something real and leaves the content to you. A detail like “we still take handwritten notes at every kickoff meeting because we tried going fully digital in 2022 and lost something we couldn’t name” costs nothing to write and does more for trust than two paragraphs of values statements.

Specificity might be the best tool you have here, as an about page requires actual evidence that a human wrote it. That is because the reader’s brain is actively scanning — looking for proof that real decisions were made by real people with actual limitations, preferences, and histories. Give it that evidence and it stops looking for reasons not to trust you.

The about pages that work aren’t the ones that sound the most professional. They’re the ones that sound like someone was actually there.