TL;DR
A “Grounding Page” is basically an About or Facts page with stricter formatting and stronger machine readability. If your About page is already clear, factual, well-structured, and maintained (plus decent schema and trust signals), it can do the same job for most businesses. The sensible order is simple: improve the About page first. A separate Grounding Page only adds value when you need a dedicated facts layer that marketing cannot constantly “improve”. Either way, it only matters if it gets indexed, retrieved, and corroborated elsewhere.
Grounding Pages: a new name for an old job (and a few new problems)
The pitch is simple: AI chatbots hallucinate, so you publish a Grounding Page and the machine stops guessing.
That pitch will sell. It also deserves a raised eyebrow.
Because the underlying idea is fine, even sensible. The packaging is what worries me. It nudges people towards technical theatre, as if a new page type is the fix for a messy footprint.
What a Grounding Page actually is
The Grounding Page Standard describes a dedicated page that encodes facts in a predictable HTML structure (they push definition lists), mirrors those facts in JSON-LD, and signals authority by linking it prominently, often via the footer or imprint.
So: a factual entity page with disciplined structure.
That is not new. It is what a good About page should already be, once you stop treating it like brand poetry.
A good About page can do the same job
If your About page is fact-led, unambiguous, and maintained, it can do essentially the same work as a Grounding Page for most organisations.
The Grounding Page concept is mostly an enforcement mechanism. It encourages you to commit to contractable statements, keep them in a predictable structure, and separate facts from narrative.
If your About page already does that, adding a “Grounding Page” is usually relabelling and reformatting, not a new capability.
Start with the About page
This is the bit I want people to do before they rush off to create a new page type.
If your About page is weak because it is fluffy, vague, out of date, or inconsistent, the first fix is to make it a better About page. That gets you most of the benefit with less overhead and fewer moving parts.
A separate Grounding Page becomes sensible when you have a governance problem, not a content problem. In plain English, it is useful when you cannot keep the About page factual and stable because it keeps getting rewritten for tone, campaigns, or “brand messaging”.
The bit that is genuinely useful
Most About pages are mush. Vague claims, shifting wording, zero governance. A structured facts format pushes you toward what matters: who you are, what you do, where you operate, what you do not do, and what can be verified.
Even if no model ever reads it, that discipline is still useful internally.
The critical bit: it is not an accepted standard, and it is not magic
The Grounding Page Standard is a published spec from a project. That is not the same thing as broad ecosystem convergence.
Even if the format is technically tidy, nothing guarantees that:
Search engines will index it quickly.
AI systems will retrieve it.
The model will prefer it over other sources.
It will be cited.
The spec is really about improving the odds of being understood and reused, not guaranteeing outcomes.
So if someone is selling Grounding Pages as “the fix for hallucinations”, they are selling comfort, not reality.
Entity panels are real, but do not over-interpret them
ChatGPT has introduced entity highlighting that opens a side panel with “key facts and trusted sources.” That is straight from OpenAI’s release notes.
That matters, because it confirms the interface is moving towards entity-led retrieval and presentation, not just conversational text.
But notice what it does not say. It does not say “your Grounding Page becomes the trusted source.” It says “trusted sources.”
So the strategy stays boring: build credibility across the ecosystem, not just on your own site.
AI systems do not adjudicate truth
Machines do not decide the truth. They decide which signals look most credible, most consistent, and most retrievable. Your website is one signal. Directories, partners, industry bodies, press coverage, and long-lived references are also signals.
If your Grounding Page disagrees with everything else, it will not “correct the web.” More likely it will be ignored, or used inconsistently.
The “single point of wrong” risk
A facts-only page has a nasty failure mode: it becomes a high-authority error amplifier.
If it contains outdated pricing or specs, simplified legal claims, or aspirational positioning dressed up as facts, you have created a clean source for spreading the wrong answer.
A fluffy About page can be vague and harmless. A “facts page” that is wrong is not harmless.
The ontology trap: where clarity turns into admin
The Grounding Page approach can also pull you into an ontology mindset: not just defining the company and founders, but services, products, tools, features, and concepts.
For organisations with real knowledge management maturity, that might be fine. For everyone else, it risks becoming a semantic admin for its own sake. It adds complexity and generates more arguments than answers, while quietly stealing time from the thing that actually moves the needle: consistency and corroboration across the wider web.
My view
If your About page is weak, improve the About page first. Make it factual, unambiguous, and maintained. In most cases, that does the job.
If you cannot keep the About page stable because of internal politics, constant rewrites, or competing agendas, then a separate Grounding Page can be a useful forcing function. It creates a facts-only URL that is easier to govern and harder to “brand up”.
Either way, do not build a Grounding Page because you think it stops hallucinations. Build it only if it improves governance and reduces contradictions. Then spend at least as much effort making sure the rest of the web tells the same story.
AI answers do not reward your formatting ambition. They reward your credibility.