By Carson Cobb. Data checked November 2026.
When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s a good magnesium that won’t upset my stomach,” the answer is built from facts: the form of magnesium, the dose, what people say about it. If those facts aren’t written down anywhere a machine can read, the product can’t be part of the answer.
So I measured how much a typical Shopify product page actually says.
The short version
- The typical product description is about 60 words. The median across 121,519 products was 372 characters of text.
- 39% of products have under 300 characters. That’s two or three sentences. 8% have no description at all.
- A third of stores are thin across the board. In 35% of stores, the typical product has under 300 characters.
- The facts shoppers ask about are often missing. Among food, beauty, pet and supplement products, only 24% mention ingredients in the description and 7% say how to use the product.
- FAQ content exists but isn’t marked up. 79% of product pages show FAQ content, but only 17% mark it up as FAQ structured data.
How deep descriptions go, by category
| Category | Products | Median description | Under 300 characters | Under 150 characters | 1,000 characters or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pet | 5,116 | 676 | 22% | 11% | 22% |
| Home | 24,567 | 493 | 29% | 12% | 19% |
| Beauty and skincare | 16,215 | 424 | 35% | 18% | 17% |
| Supplements | 12,297 | 399 | 39% | 22% | 25% |
| Food and beverage | 13,607 | 389 | 36% | 14% | 11% |
| Apparel | 49,717 | 311 | 48% | 19% | 3% |
| All | 121,519 | 372 | 39% | 17% | 12% |
Supplements are the most uneven. A quarter of supplement products have long descriptions, often full of claims and ingredient lists, while more than a fifth have almost nothing. Apparel is thin almost everywhere, which makes sense for a product shoppers judge by photos, but it leaves AI with little to say beyond the product name.
Length isn’t the point. Answers are.
A long description full of brand voice can still fail every question a shopper asks. What matters is whether the page states the facts an assistant needs. In a closer look at 10,772 products from 94 stores, I checked how often descriptions included a few of those facts:
| Fact in the description | Food, beauty, pet and supplement products |
|---|---|
| Mentions ingredients | 24% |
| Mentions a certification or standard (organic, vegan, third party tested and similar) | 20% |
| Says how to use it | 7% |
Some of these facts live elsewhere on the page, in tabs, images or accordions loaded by an app. That’s fine for a shopper. It’s a problem if the text is inside an image, or only appears after a script runs, because many AI crawlers won’t see it.
FAQ content: written, but not labeled
- 75% of 606 stores have an FAQ page.
- 79% of product pages in the 94 store sample showed FAQ style content.
- Only 17% of those product pages marked it up as FAQ structured data.
Most brands have already done the hard part, writing the answers. Labeling them is the cheap part, and it’s the part that’s usually missing.
What product copy should lead with
Product copy that leads with the facts buyers ask about states each fact first, then supports it. On a product page that usually means five short statements, in plain text, near the top of the description:
- Who it’s for. “For dogs over 7 with stiff joints.”
- What it does. One sentence, no adjectives doing the work.
- What’s in it, or what it’s made of. The specific ingredients, materials or specs that matter.
- How to use it. Dose, fit, care or setup.
- How it compares. What makes it different from the obvious alternative.
Then the story, the brand voice and the lifestyle copy. Nothing is lost for the shopper. The page simply answers the questions an assistant is trying to answer.
What to do with this
- Find your thin products. Sort your catalog by description length and start with best sellers under 300 characters.
- Write from real questions. Pull them from support tickets, reviews and post purchase surveys, not from keyword tools.
- Put facts in text, not images. Ingredient panels and size charts as images are invisible to most crawlers.
- Mark up the FAQs you already have. One structured data block per product page, matching the questions shown on the page.
- Check what AI says now. The AI Visibility Check shows how AI currently describes your products.
How this was done
- Description depth: 606 US Shopify stores priced in US dollars and 121,519 products, the same dataset as my other reports, from each store’s public product data in November 2026. Length is the number of text characters in the product description, with formatting removed. Gift cards were excluded.
- Facts in descriptions: 94 stores and 10,772 products, up to 250 products per store, checked for ingredient mentions, usage directions (how to use, directions, suggested use) and common certification terms. Text matching, so a mention counts whether it’s detailed or brief.
- FAQ markup: from the 94 store structured data scan described in the AI Readiness Index. FAQ page share is from the 606 store dataset.
No store is named in this report.