A personal website is usually built as a brochure: a hero image, a tagline, three sentences of bio, a contact form. It looks fine. It tells Google and the AI assistants almost nothing, because it states few facts, carries no structured data, and often describes the person in two places that disagree. The version that works for search is less glamorous and more disciplined: a small set of pages, each with one job, all pointing at one description of you. This is that structure.
The one rule
The home page owns every fact about you. Every other page owns a job (booking, press, speaking, writing) and links back to the home page for who you are. Two pages that both read as biographies are two candidates for "the page about this person", and the machine, unable to pick, weakens both. Everything below follows from this rule.
Page one: the home page, which is the bio
This is the canonical statement. It carries, in plain sentences: your one exact name form in the title and the heading; what you do and for whom; your current role and company; your career in a short timeline that says what you did rather than what you were called; where you were born, studied and live; how your name is said; what you have written or built; and a list of every profile you control. An "at a glance" block with the biographical facts as a list is worth having because it is the format both people and machines read fastest.
Underneath it sits the Person node: one identifier, typed relationships to your organizations and works, a sameAs list of the profiles. The page should be readable in two minutes and citable in every sentence. It is not the place for a manifesto.
Page two: the media kit, which is for booking
Everything a producer needs to press record without emailing you: a one line intro and a link to the bio, pronunciation, an approved intro script, topics, suggested questions, headshots at full resolution, the full table of appearances, and contact details. No career history, no second bio. The page carries a WebPage node whose main entity is the home page's Person. The media kit a podcast host actually wants covers it section by section.
Page three: press
Where you have been quoted, featured and announced: outlet, headline, date, link, newest first. Press releases you have issued belong here too, linked to the hosted version. A logo strip is fine if the logos link to the pieces; a logo strip with no links is decoration the machine ignores. This page is the evidence for the authority letter of EEAT, and it is the one most people never build because they assume the coverage speaks for itself. It does not, unless it is collected.
Page four: speaking
Talks given, with event, date and a recording where one exists; topics you speak on; a short paragraph on what organizers can expect; the booking contact. If you have fewer than three talks, fold this into the media kit as a section and add the page when you have the material. An empty speaking page says something you do not want said.
Page five: writing
Books, with cover, year and retailer links; newsletters with their addresses; bylines on other sites; a few selected posts. Each book is a node in the hidden layer with you as author, which is how the machine learns the book is yours even if it was published under a variant of your name. If you write a lot, this page is an index, not an archive; link out to where the writing lives.
A worked example of the five pages
Common objections, answered
It looks sparse. Yes. The record is a reference page, not a keynote. The personality lives in the interviews it links to and the writing it points at.
My designer wants a different layout. Fine. Layout is free. The constraints are one bio, supporting pages that point at it, and the hidden layer underneath, and a good designer can work inside those.
I already have a site I like. Keep the design and fix the structure: move the facts to the home page in plain sentences, add the Person node, strip the bio from every other page, and make the profiles match. Most existing sites can be brought into line in a weekend without a redesign.
What goes nowhere
A "latest from the blog" widget that pulls posts by script: the machine cannot read it and it dilutes the Person signal with article noise. Static links to your latest two or three pieces, updated by hand, do the job. Testimonials about you, unless they are quotes from named people with links to where they said it. A contact form with no email address beside it; some machines and most journalists want the address. Anything that restates the bio.
How this differs from a company site
Your company's site is about the company. It can mention you, list you on a team page, and link to your record, and it should. It should not be where your biography lives, because the machine will attach the facts to the company's entity rather than yours, and because the day you leave, the page goes with it. The link runs the other way too: your record names the company and points at its site, and if you own the company, its structured data names you as founder and points at your record. Two entities, each on its own domain, each vouching for the other. One entity trying to live on the other's domain is how a founder ends up as a line item in a knowledge panel for a business and nothing on their own.
Design is secondary, structure is not
None of this dictates a look. Your pages can match your brand kit, your company's colours, or a plain default. What they cannot do is deviate from the structure: one bio, supporting pages that point at it, the hidden layer underneath, one name form everywhere, one headshot everywhere. Two sites built to this structure can look entirely different and work identically. Two sites that look identical can work entirely differently depending on whether one of them repeated the bio on the media kit.
Building it in order
- Write the home page first, facts before prose. List the at a glance facts, the career lines and the profiles before you write a single paragraph of bio. The bio is the last thing you write and the least important.
- Add the Person node and validate it. One identifier. Test it before you build anything else, because every other page will point at it.
- Build the media kit from the host's point of view. If a producer could not press record from it, it is not finished.
- Add press, speaking and writing only when you have the material. Three items is the floor for a page; below that it is a section.
- Make every profile match. Name form, headshot, website field pointing at the home page. Then request indexing.