Search engines and AI systems decide which sources they trust — and which information they classify as reliable. Anyone who wants to be found correctly must ensure that their own information is structured, verifiable and consistently available.
Anyone who wants to be found online today is no longer competing only with other websites in classic search results. AI-based systems — including Perplexity, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT with web search and Google AI Overviews — answer search queries by reading content from the web, summarising it and presenting it directly as an answer.
These systems decide which sources to trust — and which information to classify as reliable. Anyone who wants to appear correctly and positively in these answers must ensure that their own information is available in a structured, verifiable and consistent way.
A Grounding Page is the answer to this development.
A Grounding Page is a page on your website that provides structured, verifiable information about an entity. An entity is the term search engines and AI systems use to describe clearly identifiable things: a person, a company, a brand, a place, a product.
The difference from a classic About page:
| Classic About page | Grounding Page |
|---|---|
| Written for humans | For humans and machines |
| Tells a story | Delivers verifiable facts |
| Emotionally convincing | Structured and machine-readable |
| No technical markup needed | Schema.org markup in the background |
The two are not mutually exclusive — quite the opposite. The most efficient solution for most businesses is a combined page that does both: convinces humans and informs machines.
LLM stands for Large Language Model — AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. These systems were trained on vast amounts of text from the internet. What appears on your website — and how it is phrased — can be part of this training data or actively drawn upon when answering search queries.
For an LLM to correctly cite or mention you, it needs three things:
1. A clear entity. The model must understand that you are a clearly identifiable person or company — with a name, an area of activity and a location. Vague or contradictory information means you will either not be mentioned or be misrepresented.
2. Consistency across multiple sources. LLMs do not rely on a single source. They cross-reference information from different places — your website, LinkedIn, industry directories, press mentions. The more consistent your information across all sources, the more reliable the picture an LLM builds of you.
3. Clear, citable statements. LLMs preferentially draw on sentences that contain an unambiguous claim. “Annette Schneider-Desgranges is a marketing expert with over 25 years of experience and founder of AI Marketing LearnAgency in Karlsruhe” is citable. “We do marketing differently” is not.
A well-built Grounding Page delivers exactly these three prerequisites — in structured, verifiable form.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is a quality framework from Google’s publicly available Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines — the document that describes the criteria by which Google classifies content as high quality.
Each letter describes a signal:
A Grounding Page systematically delivers all four signals — on a single, well-structured page.
The Google Knowledge Graph is an internal database in which Google stores structured information about people, companies, places, works and other entities. When you search for a well-known name or company on Google and an information panel appears next to the search results — that is the Knowledge Graph.
For a Grounding Page, the Knowledge Graph is relevant for two reasons:
A Grounding Page is not a direct ticket into the Knowledge Graph — but it delivers the signals Google needs to safely classify an entity.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is a term from research that describes how content must be structured for AI-based search systems to cite it and reproduce it correctly. Unlike classic SEO, which targets positions in search result lists, GEO is about how and whether AI systems incorporate certain content into their generated answers.
For Grounding Pages this means:
Schema.org is a public standard for structured data on websites. It was developed jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex and is free to use. With Schema.org markup you tell search engines and AI systems in your website’s source code what the information on your page means — not just that there is text there, but that this text is a person’s name, or a qualification, or a contact address.
Person — for individuals, solopreneurs, founders: Captures name, role, location, qualifications, areas of activity and links to other profiles.
Organization — for companies, agencies, associations: Captures name, legal form, founding year, location, contact details and links.
ProfilePage — for profile pages of individuals on a website: A newer schema type that explicitly describes that a page is the official profile of a person.
LocalBusiness — for companies with a local presence: Extends Organization with opening hours, address, geo-coordinates and industry categories.
One of the most important properties in Schema.org is sameAs. It connects an entity on your website with public profiles and entries outside your website — for example:
These links help search engines and AI systems bring together all information about an entity into a unified picture. The more reliable sameAs connections exist, the more stably the entity is anchored in the Knowledge Graph.
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. The concept of NAP consistency states: these details must be exactly identical on all platforms and directories.
This sounds trivial but is in practice one of the most common mistakes. If the company name on your own website reads “Marketing Learnagency Ltd”, in Google Business Profile it says “Marketing-Learnagency” and in the industry directory “ML Agency” — search engines and AI systems face ambiguity about whether these are the same entity.
NAP consistency is one of the simplest and most effective measures for grounding and local visibility.
Alongside the classic files of a website — robots.txt (instructions for search engine crawlers) and sitemap.xml (overview of all pages) — there is a new convention: llms.txt.
llms.txt is a simple text file in the root directory of a website, built specifically for AI language models. It explains in structured form:
This is still a young but growing convention. It is not an official standard, but has already been recognised by several leading AI providers as a useful signal. Those who set up a llms.txt give AI systems an explicit orientation guide — and reduce the risk of incorrect pages being used as the main source.
A Grounding Page is the starting point — but it works more powerfully when information also appears outside your own website. This is called Digital PR (public relations in the digital space):
These unlinked brand mentions and linked citations strengthen the authority signal — and increase the likelihood of being correctly captured in the Knowledge Graph.
A combined About and Grounding Page is the most efficient solution here. It delivers all essential signals on a single page: full name, role, location, verifiable qualifications and sameAs links.
Example: The About page of AI Marketing LearnAgency combines exactly this: personal introduction, verifiable qualifications with year and issuing institution, Schema.org markup in the background and consistent information.
Maintenance effort: Low — update when significant changes occur.
A combination of About and Grounding Page works well here too. Important: describe not just the company as such, but also the people behind it — because E-E-A-T evaluates primarily people, not logos.
Maintenance effort: Low to moderate.
Here a dedicated Grounding Page in addition to the classic About page is often recommended — especially when several people appear publicly (e.g. management, experts, spokespersons) or when the company is active in multiple areas.
For each publicly visible person, a short profile page with Schema.org Person markup is sensible and manageable.
Maintenance effort: Moderate — regular review when personnel changes occur.
Above a certain size, multiple entities emerge — independently recognisable units: the company itself, individual brands, key people, locations, products. For each of these entities, a separate structured page may make sense — with clear editorial responsibility and defined maintenance cycles.
Maintenance effort: High — requires systematic organisation.
Vague formulations instead of verifiable facts. “Many years of marketing experience” is worthless to a machine. “Marketing consultant since 2001, specialising in digital marketing, based in Karlsruhe” is parseable.
Inconsistent information. If the name on the website is written differently from LinkedIn, contradictory signals arise for search engines.
Missing Schema.org markup. Well-written text alone is not enough. Only the structured markup enables machine classification.
No sameAs links. Anyone who is only visible on their own website is missing from the bigger picture — and is harder to classify as a trustworthy entity.
Outdated information. A Grounding Page that has not been updated for years can cause AI systems to pass on outdated information.
A Grounding Page is the foundation for being recognised online as what you are — by humans and by machines. The initial effort is manageable. The benefit grows over time: with each new mention, each new entry, each updated qualification.
Those who now provide structured, verifiable and consistent information lay the groundwork for visibility in a search environment where AI systems increasingly deliver the first answer — before a human ever clicks on a website.
Want to understand how GEO and AI visibility connect in your marketing? In our course AI Competency for Marketing we show you how to build your digital presence for AI-powered search — practical and without technical prior knowledge.
Author
Annette Schneider-Desgranges
Marketing expert with over 25 years of experience · Founder of AI Marketing LearnAgency in Karlsruhe · Lecturer · Certified KI Architect – AI Agents Expert · Certified AI Marketing Innovation Leader · Certified AI Prompt Engineer.
View LinkedIn ProfileThis article was created with AI assistance and editorially revised.
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