Models don't read your About page. They lift a sentence from it.
So the most important copy on your site might be 25 words long.

There's a wave of advice telling founders to write long, "comprehensive" pages so AI assistants understand them. I think that's mostly backwards. Long pages are great for humans who want depth. For an assistant building a two-line answer, length is something to dig through, not something to quote.

How extraction actually works (roughly)

When an assistant answers a question with web sources, the flow is usually some version of: retrieve a handful of pages, pick passages that match the question, compress them into an answer, cite where they came from.

The passage that wins is the one that answers the question on its own. A sentence that starts with "It" or "This" depends on the sentence before it. A sentence buried in paragraph nine competes with eight paragraphs of preamble. A sentence that says "Ledgerly is an invoicing tool for freelance designers" just... answers.

You don't need to know the exact retrieval pipeline of any vendor to act on this. You only need to write for extraction.

The anatomy of a liftable sentence

I use a four-part template:

[Name] is a [category] that [does one concrete thing] for [specific audience].

Rules that make it work:

  • Starts with the name. Never a pronoun.
  • Uses a category people already search for. "Invoicing tool", not "financial workflow companion".
  • One verb, one job. If you need "and" three times, you have three products or no positioning.
  • Names the audience. "For freelance designers" is quotable when someone asks about freelance designers.
  • Under 30 words. Long enough to be specific, short enough to paste.

Before and after

All fictional, but you've seen every one of these:

Before: "We're on a mission to reimagine how modern teams collaborate on what matters."
After: "Threadline is a meeting-notes app that turns calls into task lists for remote engineering teams."

Before: "The smarter way to learn, every single day."
After: "Quizly is a daily quiz app that helps language learners review vocabulary in five minutes."

Before: "Your data, finally under control."
After: "Vaultbox is a backup tool that copies Postgres databases to your own storage every hour."

The "after" versions are less poetic. They're also the only ones an assistant can use as an answer.

The paste test

Here's the whole method in one step: copy your sentence, paste it into a blank document, and ask someone who's never heard of you, "What is this and who is it for?"

If they can answer, the sentence works. If they say "some kind of... platform?", rewrite it.

Where the sentence should live

One sentence, many places, word for word or very close:

  1. The first line of your homepage
  2. Your <title> and meta description
  3. The first paragraph of your About page
  4. The first answer in your FAQ ("What is [Name]?")
  5. Your social bios and app store listings
  6. Your llms.txt summary, if you keep one

Repetition feels redundant to you because you see it every day. To a system stitching together a picture of you from scattered pages, consistency is the signal.

"But long content ranks"

Sure. Long, genuinely useful content is great: guides, docs, case studies, honest comparisons. I'm not arguing against depth. I'm arguing against padding the description of what you are.

Keep the deep content. Just make sure every long page also contains one sentence that summarizes it, placed near the top, that can be lifted without the rest.

Common ways the sentence goes wrong

  • The pronoun opener. "It helps you..." is unquotable.
  • The vague category. "Platform", "solution", "ecosystem".
  • The feature dump. Ten features in one sentence means nobody remembers one.
  • The inside joke. Your team name for the product isn't the category users search for.
  • The moving target. A different description on every page.

A five-minute exercise

If you want to try this right now, here's the exercise I run with anyone who asks:

  1. Write the sentence in under a minute. Speed forces you to use the words you actually think in.
  2. Write three alternatives, each changing only one part: a different category, a different audience, a different verb.
  3. Search each category word the way a user would ("invoicing tool for designers") and see which phrasing real people and competitors use.
  4. Pick the one a stranger understands fastest. Not the one you like most.
  5. Ship it everywhere the same day. Homepage, title, meta, About, FAQ, bios. A half-updated web presence is worse than either version.

Most people find that their favourite version is the clever one, and the winning version is the boring one. That's normal. Clever lines belong in the hero headline under the sentence, where humans enjoy them and machines can ignore them.

One more check: read the sentence out loud. If it sounds like something you would say to a friend who asked "so what do you do?", you're close. If it sounds like a pitch deck, keep cutting.

Takeaways

  1. Assistants extract passages; they don't reward length for its own sake.
  2. Write one sentence: name, category, one job, specific audience, under 30 words.
  3. Run the paste test with someone who doesn't know you.
  4. Repeat the sentence across homepage, title, meta, About, FAQ and bios.
  5. Keep long content for humans, but give every long page its own liftable summary.

Your turn

Paste the one-sentence description of your project in the comments. I'll tell you honestly whether it passes the paste test, and you can do the same for mine.

I write about practice, feedback and the AI-readable web while building NEXO, a daily learning game.