If machines can’t read your product content, consumers won’t see it

Imagine half of your customers never see the content you’ve painstakingly produced. No, really. Half of your customers.

In a world where voice-activated devices, AI chatbots and LLM-powered search experiences shop right alongside humans, this scenario is real.

Today, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies (and all companies, for that matter) must cater to two very different audiences: humans and machines. These machine audiences now stand between your brand and many human consumers.

If product information on a site isn’t structured for machine readability, brands risk being invisible to AI chatbots, search engines, Alexa queries and IoT appliance ordering, giving away market share to competitors.

Here is how to design your product content once and deliver it in ways humans and machines understand.

Key takeaways

• New reality. Voice assistants, search crawlers and smart devices now “shop” alongside people, often making the first product recommendation a consumer hears.
• Hidden risk. Most CPG sites still speak only to humans, so machines skip or misread their product content.
• Business cost. When bots can’t read your info, you disappear from AI chatbot results, voice answers and IoT orders — handing sales over to better-tagged rivals.
• Core fix. Treat every product page as data. Break it into labeled chunks, store it once, and serve it everywhere (web, app, Alexa, retailer APIs) so both humans and machines get the right facts.

Meet the hidden half of your audience

According to research from Capital One Shopping, over half of U.S. shoppers use voice search for shopping. That’s just more than 128 million Americans.

Meanwhile, Accenture has found that half of GenAI users have already used tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to inform a purchase decision.

To express this opportunity monetarily, have a look at the market sizes the machine-shopping audiences represent:

If your product content isn’t structured so algorithms and assistants can understand it, you risk invisibility on the digital shelf. A shopper asking their smart speaker for the “best low-sugar cereal” will only hear brands the assistant can interpret and deem relevant.

If your content is only written for the human and not for the algorithm, it might as well not exist to that bot.

Failing to speak the language of machines means you’re potentially reaching only half your audience — the human half. You’re invisible to the other half, the algorithms that recommend products, answer questions and guide purchases.

Winning with the shopper and the algorithm

CPG brands have historically relied on physical retail and mass advertising to reach consumers. However, the landscape has shifted.

As more CPG companies pursue direct-to-consumer models, their owned digital properties must now win the attention of both people and algorithms. In practical terms, that means ensuring your content can be easily discovered and processed by search engines, voice AIs and other autonomous agents. It means treating those algorithms as important customer segments of their own.

Suppose a busy parent asks, “Which batteries last longest in a smoke detector?” to ChatGPT or Alexa. If the battery brand hasn’t provided that answer in machine-readable form, another brand will.

As a Modern Retail report put it, consumers are far more likely to convert when they get an authoritative answer directly from the source. One brand doing this is Kendra Scott, whose on-site AI assistant now answers about 93% of shopper questions, with revenue from assistant-engaged sessions up 160%.

The stakes are even higher with voice and AI assistants, which often present only one top recommendation. Brands that pass the test of the machines first get suggested; others are filtered out. Soon, your smart fridge will order products automatically, and it will choose the brand of juice or soda whose content gives the machine the best answer.

Imagine your site transformed into an always-on answer engine, where every product page instantly delivers on-brand answers to shoppers and AI assistants alike. This site would instantly boost sales conversion and reduce customer support requests.

Or, imagine every new SKU becoming auto-discoverable from launch day, showing up in Google, Copilot, Alexa, retailer search and even smart appliances.

This is made possible when the product launch pack ships with clean, structured metadata that machines can read and act on immediately.

Designing content for humans and machines

There’s a myth out there that brands need separate systems to engage with humans and bots, but they don’t. They need one smart, structured content layer delivered everywhere. Here’s what that looks like:

1. Treat content as data. Break product information into discrete, labeled chunks — name, description, ingredients, FAQs — and tag them with structured metadata (e.g., GS1 Digital Link or Schema.org). Google reports that when Nestlé adopted structured data, pages with rich results saw an 82% higher click-through rate.
2. Adopt a headless approach. Store content once in a headless CMS and syndicate it to web, mobile, voice and retailer APIs. The same product description can power a webpage, populate a mobile view and answer a voice query without duplicate effort.
3. Answer questions and match consumer intent. Anticipate real questions (“Is this snack vegan?”) and answer them directly. Tide, for example, repurposed its stain-removal guide into an Alexa skill that walks users through more than 200 stain types.
4. Optimize for digital middlemen. Audit how algorithms see you. Check rich snippets, voice-query results and site-search logs. Fix gaps as they arise.

Succeeding on the dual digital shelf

We’ve all experienced how quickly we buy from a brand that answers our question the moment we ask.

By investing in content that machines can read, you give the algorithm clear, up-to-date product information it can share in search results, AI-chat answers and recommendation engines.

The flip side is also true: Neglecting this is like printing all your store signs in French when most of your customers speak English. If your content only works for human eyes, you’re ignoring half your audience, the algorithms, who in turn won’t recommend you to the human on the other side.

The clear mandate for CPG companies is to write for your human customer with clarity and relevance, and structure that same content for Google’s crawlers, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Siri and whatever comes next.

This will ensure you’re not just talking to half your audience; you’re engaging all of it.

Next steps

Our CPG team can help you engage your machine audience and unlock growth. Reach out to CPG@Valtech.com when you are ready.