Why these pages matter for search and AI
About, contact and policy pages answer one question for Google and for AI assistants: is there a real business behind this store? They rarely rank for anything on their own. They matter because they decide how much a system trusts everything else on the site.
Google's guidance for human quality reviewers has long asked them to look for who is responsible for a site, how to contact them, and whether the site is open about it. That fits a wider idea Google calls E-E-A-T, short for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, with trust described as the most important part. Stores that sell things people spend money on are the kind of site where this scrutiny is highest.
AI assistants face the same problem more sharply. Asked to recommend a place to buy, they want to avoid pointing someone to a store that might not exist. A store with a clear, checkable identity is a safer thing to name. If you are deciding whether to hire help with the whole picture, our overview of getting help with the whole picture is the place to start.
Write these pages so a stranger could verify them. Name people, give a real address and contact route, tell the real story, and keep every fact identical wherever you appear.
What a strong About page contains
Most About pages are the weakest on the site. They say "we are passionate about quality" and nothing else. The fix is specifics.
Who you are. Name the founder or the team, with real photos. A name and a face is the quickest way to move from faceless to real.
What you do and for whom. One plain sentence at the top. "We make hand-poured soy candles for people who dislike heavy fragrance."
How it started. The year, the place, the actual reason. A short, true story is more persuasive than a mission statement.
How the product is made or sourced. The workshop, the supplier, the process. Photos from the real operation, not stock images.
Where you are. City and country at least. A physical address if you have one that is appropriate to share.
Proof. Link to press coverage, awards, certifications, a few reviews. Only real ones.
How to reach you. A link to the contact page, with the same facts.
That is a page of 300 to 600 words with photos. It does not need to be long. It needs to be checkable. See the diagram above for the contrast.
Keep claims modest and true. "Family owned since 2011" is a statement. "The best in the world" is a flag.
The contact page
A contact page that is only a form signals less accountability than one with several ways to reach you.
Include an email address that is on your own domain, a phone number if you take calls, a mailing or business address if you can share one, and your hours and typical response time.
Keep the form too. It reduces spam and organizes requests. But offer more than the form.
For a local business add a map and the same name, address and phone number you use on your Google Business Profile. Differences between the two are a common, silent problem.
Link to it from the footer of every page. In Shopify you add it to the footer menu under Online Store, then Navigation.
If you ever run a pop-up shop or sell through a marketplace, mention those too. They are extra places someone can verify you exist. See how off-store reviews support this.
Policy pages: shipping, returns, privacy, terms
Shopify has a policies section in the admin settings with templates you can generate and then edit. They publish at addresses under /policies/ on your store. Most stores leave the generic default text in place, which wastes a chance to build trust.
Shipping. Carriers, costs, timing, where you ship, and what happens with delays. Concrete numbers.
Returns and refunds. The window in days, the condition required, who pays, how long a refund takes. A generous and clear policy lowers a buyer's risk.
Privacy. What you collect and why, written in plain terms. Check that it matches how your store actually works and the rules that apply where you sell. If you are unsure, have a qualified professional review it.
Terms of service. Required in practice, so customers know the rules.
Two checks. First, make sure the details in your policies match your FAQ, product pages and checkout. A contradiction is a trust problem for people and for systems comparing sources. Second, link the policies from the footer, and from product pages where relevant, so they are easy to find. Our guide to Shopify FAQ pages shows how to keep these in sync.
Making your identity machine-readable
Humans read an About page. Machines also read the code under it. A small amount of structured data makes your identity explicit.
Organization markup. This labels your business name, logo, website address, contact details and links to your official profiles on other sites, such as social accounts. It tells a system "these accounts are the same entity". Many Shopify themes output some of this already. Check yours in the free Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator and see what appears. Our entry on schema markup for Shopify explains what to look for.
Consistent naming. Use the same business name everywhere. "Acme Candle Co." on the site and "Acme Candles LLC" on a profile makes it harder to connect them.
Profiles that link back. Your social profiles and any directory listings should link to your store, and your store to them.
Do not expect a ranking jump from markup alone. Its job is to remove ambiguity about who you are, which makes every other signal easier to credit.
Authors, experts and the people behind your content
If your store publishes advice, such as buying guides, care instructions or how-to articles, say who wrote or reviewed them. This matters most for topics where bad advice has real consequences: health, safety, children, money.
Add a byline. A real name, with a short description of why they know the subject.
Give authors a page. A short profile with their background and links to other work. It turns "someone wrote this" into a person with a record.
Use real experience. "I have fitted over a thousand saddles" is a better credential on a saddle guide than a generic claim. Do not invent credentials. If nobody on your team has the expertise for a topic, bring in a qualified reviewer and name them honestly.
This ties to the larger framework in E-E-A-T for Shopify, which goes through each of the four elements for a store.
A consistency check you can do in an hour
Trust is partly about agreement. Systems cross-check. Do the same.
Write down your canonical facts. Legal name, trading name, address, phone, email, founding year, one-sentence description, return window, shipping times.
Search for yourself. Open your About page, contact page, footer, Google profile if any, social bios, directory listings and marketplace profiles. Compare each to the canonical list.
Fix the mismatches. The common ones are old addresses, a former business name, and different return windows between the policy and the product page.
Ask an assistant. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini "What do you know about" your store by name. Read what it says. Errors there often trace to old or conflicting sources, and the answer shows you which ones to fix. Our page on getting a Shopify store named in ChatGPT explains the method.
Then write the date in a file and repeat in six months. Pair it with your usual Shopify SEO checklist review.
What to avoid
Fake reviews, fake awards, fake press logos. They are detectable and they poison the real signals.
Stock photos of "the team". Reverse image search makes these easy to spot.
Hiding behind a form. No address, no phone, no named person. It reads as evasive.
Over-promising. "Guaranteed best price" is a claim you may not be able to support.
Treating it as set and forget. Moves, new policies and new products all need an update here.
None of these pages will rank on their own, and that is fine. They are the foundation. A store with strong content and weak trust pages looks like a gamble. The same content with strong trust pages looks like a business.
A worked example: rewriting a thin About page
Here is an invented but typical About page for a candle store, and what a rewrite looks like.
Before. "Welcome to Ember and Oak. We are passionate about creating high quality candles that bring warmth to your home. Our mission is to deliver exceptional products and outstanding service. Thank you for choosing us." Four sentences. No name, no place, no date, no photograph, and nothing a reader could check.
After. A heading that says what the business is: "Hand-poured soy candles, made in Asheville, North Carolina." A photograph of the founder at the pouring table, with her name. A paragraph on how it began: she started pouring in her kitchen in 2019 after failing to find a candle without a headache-inducing scent, and moved into a rented studio in 2022. A short list of what goes in the candles, naming the wax type and the wick material, with a note on where the wax is sourced. Three photographs from the studio. A line linking to a local magazine feature, with its real title. A closing paragraph with the studio address, the contact page link and the typical reply time.
What changed for a reader or a system. The first version could describe thousands of stores. The second can only describe one. It names a person, a place and a year. It makes claims about materials that can be compared with the product pages. It points to an outside source that can be checked.
None of that took a designer. It took an afternoon and a willingness to be specific about a real business.
How AI assistants use trust pages
It helps to picture what an assistant does when asked something like "Is this store legit?" or "Where should I buy a handmade candle online?"
It looks for evidence that the business exists and behaves well. That evidence comes from several places: your own About and contact pages, your policies, and what other sources say about you, such as reviews, press and directory entries. When those sources agree, the system has an easy, safe thing to say. When they conflict, or when only your own site speaks for you, it hedges or leaves you out.
The practical consequences are modest and worth knowing. A store with a clear identity is easier to name. A store whose address differs between its site and its profile creates a conflict. A store with no named person, no address and a generic policy leaves a system with nothing to verify.
None of this guarantees a recommendation, and nobody outside the AI companies can say exactly how it is weighted. But the direction is consistent, and the cost of getting it right is small. For the outside half of the evidence, read our page on reviews and AI recommendations.
How RunOctopus handles this
Trust pages need your real facts, which only you hold. The pages that build on them are another matter.
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix.
There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. You do not approve each page. Pages go live on their own. In the first week you get 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. You also get reports on where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.
There is a 90-day promise: more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. For scale, an agency doing this work charges about $3,209 a month (2026 average, 439 providers) and publishes 4 to 12 pieces.
You can see what Ollie would do for your store before you decide anything. Paste your address into the free site read. Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.