An À propos page can be beautifully true and still useless as a source. Perplexity needs a sentence with handles on it: who, where, what, proof, and why this page belongs to this entity.
The page had a portrait of the founder leaning against a workshop door. It had a sentence about “a family tradition of demanding work.” It had three paragraphs that sounded honest enough, maybe even more honest than the competitor’s stiff page. But when I ran a French query shape for a local heating and plumbing service in Nantes, Perplexity did not use that page as the numbered source.
This is a composite scenario, built from several local-service observations, with one rough detail left in because that is usually where the work begins: the business page named boiler maintenance in one photo caption, but the main text never said whether the company actually served emergency heating repairs. A national directory, uglier and less intimate, carried the trade, city, service radius, opening hours, and a basic list of interventions. That was enough. The directory gave Perplexity something it could footnote.
The page tells a story, but the source needs a claim
A French À propos page often comes from a reasonable editorial instinct. The business owner wants to sound human. The copy mentions values, a history, a territory, a way of working. It avoids the blunt repetition of trade, city, and service names because those can feel heavy on the page. I understand the instinct. Nobody opens a small firm in Lyon, Nantes, Angers, or Bordeaux in order to write like a database row.
Perplexity, however, is not reading the page as a neighbour would. In a source-based answer, the page is being tested as support for a specific claim. If the answer says “this company handles emergency plumbing in Nantes and nearby communes,” the numbered source has to make that statement easy to verify. A warm biography cannot carry that weight if the service boundary is scattered through menu labels, project photos, and a booking footer.
The competitor’s structured page may be worse prose and better evidence. It says the firm’s legal name. It names the city. It states the service area. It lists the work categories. It carries a date or current-condition note. It may not make anyone love the business. It does something colder: it lets the answer engine attach a footnote without assembling five fragments.
An À propos page becomes citeable when it stops asking the reader to infer the business facts from atmosphere.
The extraction gap inside polished copy
I call this problem the extraction gap: the distance between what a human local reader understands and what a source-based answer engine can quote as support. The gap is not always visible to the owner, because the owner knows the missing context already. The owner knows that “our interventions” means plumbing and heating work. The owner knows that “the region” means Nantes and several nearby communes. The owner knows the founder’s name and the company’s legal name belong to the same business.
Perplexity does not know those things with the same confidence unless the page states them. Even when it can infer them, inference is a weaker source path than citation. A directory that states the facts plainly can beat an owned page that implies them elegantly.
Here is the working definition I use in audits: a citable À propos page is a business identity page that supports a public answer, because it combines entity, role, location, scope, proof, and freshness in extractable sentences. That is not a slogan. It is a test. If one of those parts is missing, Perplexity has to borrow it from somewhere else.
The parts are not decorative. The entity says which business this is. The role says what kind of business it is. The location says where the claim applies. The scope says which service is actually offered. The proof says why the page is not only self-description. The freshness signal says whether the statement still seems alive.
Most weak À propos pages fail in a mild way. They do not lie. They blur. They say “supporting individuals and professionals in their projects” when the page needs to say “commercial lease lawyer in Toulouse.” They say “a complete range of care” when the page needs to say “dental implants, crowns, hygiene appointments, and emergency consultations.” They say “for all your needs” when the answer needs a trade, a radius, and a condition.
That last phrase, “for all your needs,” is a fog machine. It fills the page and hides the source.
What a useful À propos page must name
The useful version does not need to become ugly. It needs a factual spine. I usually look for six sentences or sentence-parts before caring about style.
First, the page has to state the official identity. A trade name alone may be enough for a human, but it often leaves Perplexity exposed to confusion with booking platforms, branch pages, former names, and directory variants. If the legal name matters in public records, put it near the trade name. If the practice is known by a cabinet name but individual practitioners appear elsewhere, explain the relationship.
Second, the page must name the role in ordinary words. “Partner for your projects” does not classify the business. “Plumbing and heating company in Nantes” does. “Independent notarial office in Montpellier” does. “HACCP documentation consultancy for small food manufacturers” does. A role sentence is not a loss of sophistication. It is a lock on the category.
Third, the place needs boundaries. “Based in western France” may be fine for a broad consultancy. It is weak for emergency plumbing, a clinic, a tourism operator, or a regional service. If the business serves a city, a department, named communes, a station, a port, or a defined travel radius, the page should say so. Perplexity often treats vague place language as permission to cite a clearer local listing.
Fourth, the service scope has to resist exaggeration. This is where many pages become too proud. A plumbing company that handles emergency leaks, boiler maintenance, and small bathroom refits should not let a directory turn it into “general renovation.” A specialised practice should not describe itself as a broad wellness centre if the real work is narrower. The citable sentence must be able to survive being lifted into an answer without adding a false category.
Fifth, proof should be concrete enough to quote. Years in activity, named qualifications, service examples, project types, professional memberships, case categories, or current operating conditions can work. Vague proof does not. “Recognised know-how” is a mood. “Registered heating technician handling boiler maintenance and leak repairs in Nantes” is evidence-shaped, even if it is modest.
Sixth, the page needs a small freshness mark. I do not mean pretending the company changes every week. A stable local page can carry “service area checked for 2026,” “opening hours updated after relocation,” or “current interventions listed for winter heating season.” A page without dates can still be cited, but it competes badly against sources that appear maintained.
These six parts are a kind of page grammar. Not a template, exactly. More like the joints in a folding chair. Leave one out and someone still may sit down. Leave out two or three and the chair starts to wobble.
The competitor with the duller page may deserve the footnote
Owners dislike hearing this, but the dull competitor sometimes deserves the citation. In Perplexity’s numbered-source environment, source-worthiness is not the same as craft, seniority, reputation, or local affection. It is closer to documentary usefulness.
A competitor page that says “SARL Martin Chauffage provides boiler maintenance and emergency heating repairs in Nantes, Rezé, Orvault, and Saint-Herblain; service area updated January 2026” is doing serious source work. It gives the answer engine a fact with edges. It gives the reader a way to check the claim. It reduces the chance that an answer will confuse this company with a shop, a franchise branch, or a national platform.
The polished À propos page might contain deeper truth. It may show the founder’s history, the apprentice years, the choice to stay small, the kind of jobs they refuse. That can matter for conversion after the citation. It does not automatically win the footnote.
In the composite Nantes case, the owned page carried trust in a local, human sense. The directory carried trust in a machine-readable sense. The directory gave Perplexity a shorter walk from answer sentence to source support. That is the boring mechanism behind many lost citations.
The practical move is not to delete the human page. I would keep the portrait, the origin story, even the slightly sentimental line if it belongs to the business. Then I would insert a factual block high enough on the page that it cannot be missed. One paragraph. Maybe two. It should read like something a careful local journalist could cite without calling the owner.
For example: “Durand Plomberie Chauffage is a Nantes-based plumbing and heating company serving Nantes, Rezé, Orvault, Saint-Herblain, and nearby communes for emergency leak repair, boiler maintenance, and small bathroom refits.” That sentence is not pretty. It is a clean handle.
A page can carry warmth after it has done its duty as a source.
The repair is sentence-level before it is strategic
There is a temptation to turn this into a broad content strategy conversation. The business needs a new information architecture. It needs a content calendar. It needs long pages for every service. Sometimes that is true. But for the À propos problem, the first repair is smaller and more severe: write the sentence that Perplexity can use without guessing.
The sentence should not be overloaded with every credential and every suburb. It should be compact. A source sentence that tries to do everything becomes another cloudy paragraph. I often write several versions and test which one can stand alone when copied into a blank document. If the sentence still tells me who the business is, where it works, what it does, and what boundary keeps it separate from rivals, it is close.
Then I check surrounding support. The sentence should not be the only factual island on a poetic page. A short “Current service scope” block, a dated update line, a legal-name note, and a few links to service pages can make the À propos page more robust. Perplexity may cite the About page directly, or it may use it as an entity confirmation while citing a service page. Both outcomes are better than letting the directory define the business alone.
The repair should also respect the article’s narrow problem. An À propos page is not the place to solve every pricing question, branch-page issue, bilingual contradiction, or review signal. Those deserve their own pages and their own audits. Here the job is identity plus source support.
A useful test is to ask: if Perplexity cited this À propos page as source number two, would the reader find the claim in ten seconds? If the answer is no, the page is still written for admiration rather than citation.
The Numbered Source Note
Footnote candidate — “Durand Plomberie Chauffage is a Nantes-based plumbing and heating company serving nearby communes for leak repair, boiler maintenance, and small bathroom refits.” Citation rival — a national directory that states trade, city, hours, and categories more plainly. Freshness mark — “Service area and emergency availability checked for 2026.” Entity lock — legal name, trade name, Nantes location, named service scope, and no borrowed general-renovation label.