The About Us Page: Building Trust Without Praising Yourself

Why do visitors open the about us page?

Hardly anyone lands on the about us page by chance. Whoever opens it has usually already read a service page and is considering whether to inquire. They want to know who is behind the business, whether it has existed for a long time, who will get in touch and whether these people can be entrusted with a task. The about us page is therefore not a mandatory menu item but a checkpoint shortly before the decision.

Many pages do not answer these questions. They string together words such as “passion”, “competence” and “customer focus”, show a picture of a handshake and close with the sentence that they look forward to working together. The question this article sets out to answer: How do you build an about us page that creates trust without the business praising itself? To answer it, we first clarify why self-praise works worse than one thinks and present a model from which the structure of the page follows. Then we turn to people, history, ways of working and evidence.

Whoever writes on the about us page how trustworthy they are has not understood the page. It is supposed to show it.

Why self-praise works worse than you think

Self-promotion refers to everything with which someone highlights their strengths and successes so that others have a good image of them. It involves a trade-off: whoever names their strengths can inform or brag, and the line is drawn by the reader, not the sender.

Scopelliti, Loewenstein and Vosgerau (2015) examined this trade-off in three experiments. Their finding: people misjudge how their self-promotion is received. They project their own feelings onto the other person, overestimate how much the other is happy for them and proud of them, and underestimate how annoyed the other is. Because they misjudge the effect, they praise themselves too much when they want to make a good impression. In the third experiment, exactly this led observers to see the self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts.

For companies, a more recent study by Vorobeva, Costa Pinto, González-Jiménez and colleagues (2025) points in a related direction, with an important difference. In four studies, including an analysis of 1,406 company posts on X and several experiments, they compared how customers reacted to self-promotion about artificial intelligence and about employees. When companies praised their AI services, this tended to seem exaggerated and lowered willingness to engage with the service. When they highlighted the skills of their employees, by contrast, the effect was positive. The authors also refer to earlier studies according to which an open approach to minor weaknesses can improve a company’s image.

Both studies have limits. The first examines self-praise between individuals, not on websites; the second mainly large technology providers and consumer services. Together, however, they yield a rule that fits the about us page well: praise of oneself is received worse than the sender expects; showing people and their skills is received well.

The thinking model: ability, benevolence, integrity

Where does trust come from if self-praise does not help? The article Trust as an economic factor presents the best-known model. It comes from Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (1995). According to it, the willingness to trust someone depends on how one assesses three characteristics of that person or organization: ability, whether someone can deliver what they promise; benevolence, whether they want what is best for the other; and integrity, whether they keep to shared principles.

For the about us page, the model is useful because it shows what is missing. Many pages claim all three characteristics; none backs them up. From this I derive the three-proofs rule: for each of the three characteristics, the page contains at least one statement a visitor can check. Claims without evidence are deleted.

Showing people: the strongest content on the page

Business customers buy from people. The first question on the about us page is therefore almost always: who am I dealing with? A small business has an advantage over large providers here. It can show the people who actually come, plan or call, and it can say who is responsible for what.

• Real photos. People of the business at work or in a calm setting, no stock images. What a real photo achieves and what to consider when using images is described in the article Images on the website.
• Name and responsibility. Under every photo it says who this is and what they are responsible for, not just a job title.
• One sentence on expertise. Training, years of experience, specialty. Plain, without superlatives.
• One sentence about the person, if they wish. What someone values about the work says more than a hobby.
• The way to contact. Phone or email for people with customer contact, so the page does not end with looking.

A special trade-off applies to the owner. The article The owner as the face of the company describes the stage rule: the owner uses their visibility to bring the team, customers and ways of working onto the stage. On the about us page this means: the owner may stand in front, but not alone. A page on which only the owner can be seen tells the visitor that everything depends on one person.

The history of the business: two views

Almost every about us page tells a story: founded in such-and-such a year, first workshop in the garage, a move, handover to the next generation. Whether this helps is seen differently. The first view says that stories make a business human and distinguishable. A founding story is the one thing a competitor cannot copy. The second view says that visitors are interested in their own situation, not in the provider’s past. A long chronicle is a form of self-promotion nobody ordered.

I consider both objections justified and draw a rule from them: the history belongs on the page when it explains how the business works today. “Since 1987” is a number. “We started in 1987 as an emergency service, which is why we still have weekend on-call service today” is evidence of benevolence. The history then explains why the business works the way it does. Everything else can stay short.

The structure of the page in six sections

From the model and the visitors’ questions follows a structure that suits most small and mid-sized businesses. It begins with what the visitor wants to know first and ends with the next step.

1. One sentence on who you are

   What the business does for whom, in one sentence, derived from the customer sentence on the homepage. Add size, location and region.

2. The people

   Photos, names, responsibilities. Who gets in touch after an inquiry, who comes to the appointment?

3. How you work

   Three to five principles, each with an example from everyday work, such as a fixed price before work starts or named contact persons.

4. What you do not do

   An honest paragraph about orders the business declines or passes on to others. This proves integrity more strongly than any statement of values.

5. Where you come from

   The history, insofar as it explains the way of working. A few sentences.

6. Evidence and next step

   Memberships, certifications, two named testimonials, then a link to the inquiry or to the services.

The fourth section is the most unusual and often the most effective. A business that writes that it does not accept orders below a certain size or passes certain work on to a partner shows that it knows its limits and states them openly. How principles apply in everyday work rather than hanging on posters is described in the article Company values that hold in everyday work.

Evidence: what makes the page credible

The article Using customer testimonials and references orders evidence on the evidence ladder in five steps, from the anonymous quote to the reference call. Evidence that says something about the business as a whole, rather than about a single service, fits the about us page best.

• Memberships with rules: guild, trade association, quality association. A link to the place where this can be checked.
• Certifications with scope: what exactly is certified, by whom, until when?
• Testimonials about the collaboration: with full name, position and company, and about what the page claims, such as reachability or keeping appointments.
• Figures from your own data: projects, customers, employees, apprenticeships, only if they are correct and current.
• Company details: legal form, registered office, commercial register, a complete legal notice. What these details do for trust is described in the article Trust signals on the website.

How the page should sound follows the same rules as all website copy. The article B2B website copy recommends using the customers’ terms and cutting in-house jargon. On the about us page, the temptation to use in-house jargon is particularly great because the business is writing about itself.

The bigger picture

The about us page shows on a small scale a principle that applies to all of a business’s communication: transparency beats staging. A business that shows its people, backs its principles with examples and says openly what it does not do makes it easy for a visitor to trust it. A business that praises itself, by contrast, asks the visitor to believe it without being able to check. Research on self-promotion suggests that this is received worse than the sender thinks.

The limits are clear. The experiments cited concern conversations between individuals and corporate posts on social networks, not about us pages of small businesses. The model by Mayer, Davis and Schoorman describes trust in organizations in general. How many inquiries a better about us page brings cannot be derived from it. It will rarely be the reason for an inquiry, but often the reason why one does not come.

What remains and how to start

We set out to ask
an about us page can create trust without the business praising itself. The answer: by not claiming ability, benevolence and integrity but backing them with verifiable statements, by showing people with names and responsibilities, by telling the history only where it explains the way of working and by saying openly what the business does not do. Research explains why: self-praise is received worse than one thinks, and trust arises from what a visitor can check.

• Mark all praising adjectives on the about us page.
• Replace each with a verifiable statement or delete it.
• Write down one concrete piece of evidence each for ability, benevolence and integrity.
• Add photos, names and responsibilities of people with customer contact, with consent.
• Write a paragraph on which orders the business does not accept.
• Shorten the history to the parts that explain how the business works today.
• Read the page to a long-standing customer.

A good about us page praises no one. It gives the visitor enough material to do that themselves.