AI for product descriptions: what helps and what damages a store
- Generating descriptions is fine — the problem is when every one of them reads the same.
- A model does not know your specifications: with no input data it will invent them.
- An invented specification is a returned order, not merely a wording mistake.
- What works: a strict template plus real data from your product feed.
A thousand products with no descriptions is a common situation. Writing by hand takes months; leaving them empty means the pages never rank. The temptation is obvious.
The main mistake
Asking for “a description of chair X” with no data. The model will answer beautifully and invent the upholstery, the country of manufacture and the warranty. A customer reads it, orders, receives something else and sends it back. You pay shipping twice and collect a bad review.
This is not hypothetical. We have seen a catalogue where forty products listed a warranty that did not exist — purely because that is what came out of the generation.
How to do it properly
Data first, text second. The model receives real attributes from your feed — dimensions, material, weight, contents — and rewrites them into readable prose. There is nothing left to invent: everything needed is already in the prompt.
A strict template. First paragraph: who the product is for. Second: key specifications in words. Third: what to consider when choosing. Without a template the texts drift in style and the catalogue reads like a patchwork.
Spot checks. You do not need to read all thousand, but thirty at random is mandatory. Generation errors are systematic: if they exist, you will see them in the first five.
What about SEO
Google does not penalise text for being generated. It penalises pages that add nothing. So: a generated description containing real specifications works fine. A generated description full of “modern design and high quality” does not work, no matter who wrote it.
Where generation will not help
- Category pages — those need structure and an understanding of demand, not paraphrase.
- Technical products where a wrong figure is expensive.
- Copy about your company: it is obvious from the first line and it costs you trust.
We will set up the product feed and description generation on your real data — with no invented specifications in the catalogue.