Bios are archaeology. Mine tells you I've spent two decades in pharma and biotech, that I founded PharmaForward, that I won an award in 2024. All true. None of it answers the question people actually ask: what are you working on now?
That question gets asked more than it used to — and increasingly, it gets asked to a machine. Someone types my name into ChatGPT or Perplexity before a call. The engine assembles an answer from whatever evidence it can find. If the freshest thing on my site is a bio that reads the same as it did last year, that's the answer: a man frozen in his own press release.
So I added a Now page. It's an old idea — Derek Sivers started the convention years ago — and the concept is almost embarrassingly simple: one page, a visible updated date, and a short list of what I'm actually focused on this month. Right now that's AI-charged dashboards and pulse reports for pharma marketing teams.
The AEO case
I spend my working hours helping pharma brands stay visible and accurately represented in AI-generated answers. The core discipline is always the same: you can't control what the engine says, so you control what it reads. Make the correct answer the easiest one to extract.
A Now page is the smallest possible version of that practice, applied to a person instead of a brand:
- It answers a discrete, high-intent question — "what is Ben Zipkin working on?" — in one extractable block.
- It carries a date, both visible on the page and as
dateModifiedin the structured data, tied to the same Person entity the rest of my site declares. Freshness is a signal; an undated page is evidence of nothing. - It's listed in my llms.txt, so a crawler assembling a profile of me finds the current-state answer without digging.
None of this is exotic. It's one page and about forty lines of code. That's rather the point: the highest-leverage AEO work is usually structural and boring.
The human case
There's a second reason, and it has nothing to do with machines. A Now page is a forcing function. Writing "here is what I'm focused on" in public means deciding what I'm focused on — and noticing when the list no longer matches the calendar. If updating the page feels embarrassing, the focus drifted. That's useful information at a price of zero.
Go look at your own site — or your company's — and ask what it says you're doing now. If the honest answer is "nothing since 2023," remember: that's what the machines think too.