The questions shoppers put to an assistant are not the keywords they type into a search box. They are longer, more specific and more honest, because there is no cost to being awkward with a machine. They sound like the questions people used to ask a knowledgeable person in a shop.
That matters commercially for one reason. An assistant answers from what it can find and what it can trust, and it names sources when it has them. If the answer to the real question exists in plain language on your site, you can be part of that answer. If your pages only contain marketing language and a specification table, you cannot be, because there is nothing to quote.
So we do not treat this as a new channel to be gamed. We treat it as a reading of what buyers want to know, and a very direct brief for what your pages should say. The questions below are the shapes we see over and over, and every one of them is a page you probably do not have yet.
Which one should I get for my situation
The most common shape is a recommendation request with constraints attached. Something for a small flat with two cats. Something for a beginner who is not sure they will stick with it. Something that will survive a dishwasher. Something under a budget for a gift.
Answering this well means writing the constraint into your pages, in the buyer's words rather than in your product taxonomy. A collection page organised by use case, not by product type, is doing this. A short guide that says which of your own options suits which situation is doing this. A product page that names who the product is not for is doing this, and it earns more trust than one that claims to suit everyone.
The practical test is whether a paragraph on your site could be lifted whole as the answer to one of those constraints. If the best you offer is a filter interface, there is nothing to lift. Filters are for people already on your site. Sentences are for everyone else.
Filters are for people already on your site. Sentences are for everyone else.
Will this actually work with the thing I own
Compatibility questions are asked constantly and they are the easiest ones for a store to win, because the answer is factual and most stores have it somewhere already.
What stops the win is format. The answer usually lives in a downloadable chart, an image, or a table that came from the supplier. None of those are readable as prose. Rewriting the important cases as sentences on the page fixes it, and the same sentences reduce your returns.
This extends further than machine parts. Whether a paint suits a bathroom, whether a shampoo suits colour-treated hair, whether a mattress suits a slatted base, whether a lens fits a body, whether a charger delivers enough power for a particular laptop. Each is a compatibility question wearing different clothes.
The rule we work to is that any question a customer has ever emailed you about compatibility should appear, answered, in text, on the relevant product page. Not in a FAQ tab on a different page. On the page for the product they were asking about.
Is it worth the money, honestly
The value question is asked in a form no store would ever write itself. Is this brand worth the extra. Is the cheap version fine. What is the catch.
You cannot answer that with a claim about quality, because every store makes that claim and a claim is not evidence. What answers it is specifics that can be checked. What the thing is made of, how long the warranty runs, what the replacement part costs, how many times it can be washed, what happens at the end of its life, what it weighs.
This is where stores selling a genuinely better product routinely lose to stores that simply explain themselves. If your reason for costing more is real, put it in text, with numbers and conditions, in a place a reader reaches without clicking.
And answer the catch honestly. Saying that a product needs seasoning, or takes a week to break in, or is not suitable for daily use, reads as credible rather than negative. It is also the sort of sentence that gets quoted, because it is the sort of sentence nobody else is writing.
What is different about buying from you
The last shape is about the store rather than the product. How long delivery takes, what returns cost, whether there is a real person to talk to, whether they ship to a particular country, whether the price includes duty.
These are answerable in one sentence each and most stores bury all of them in policy pages written by somebody worried about liability. The result is that an assistant summarising your store has nothing concrete to say about it, so it says nothing, and a shopper hears silence.
Write the operational facts plainly and keep them in one obvious place as well as on the product page. Delivery times by region, in days. Return window, who pays, and the refund timeline. Where you ship from. Whether duties are collected at checkout. What hours a human is available and how to reach them.
These sentences do three jobs at once. They close the questions that stop a checkout, they give a summary something factual to repeat, and they cut the support volume that comes from people asking anyway.
How to work out your own list
Do not use somebody else's list of questions, including this one, as the plan. Build yours from four sources and it will take an afternoon.
Your support inbox and chat logs, filtered to messages sent before an order rather than after. Those are the questions that cost you sales.
Your on-site search queries. People type their real question into that box, and the ones that return nothing are the clearest brief you will ever get.
Your reviews, especially the ones that begin by saying what the buyer was worried about.
And the assistants themselves. Ask them the buying questions for your category, note what they say and who they cite, and repeat it monthly so you have a record rather than an impression.
Then write the answers where the buying happens. One page per real question, each one linking to the products that satisfy it, each one written so any single paragraph could stand on its own. That is the whole method, and it is the same work that makes the pages convert for humans.