---
title: "Why my site has a Now page"
date: "2026-07-03"
summary: "A Now page is a dated, machine-readable answer to 'what is this person working on right now?' — a question bios never answer and AI assistants get asked."
tags: [aeo, personal-brand]
faq:
  - q: "What is a Now page?"
    a: "A Now page is a single page on a personal site describing what its owner is focused on right now — a convention started by Derek Sivers. Unlike a bio, it carries a visible updated date and changes as the work changes."
  - q: "Why does a Now page matter for AI search?"
    a: "When someone asks an AI assistant what a person is working on, the engine assembles an answer from available evidence. Most personal sites only offer a static bio. A dated, structured Now page gives the engine a current, citable answer — with freshness signals like dateModified in the page's structured data."
---

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](/now). 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 `dateModified` in 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.