US ChatGPT ignores descriptions past about 40 words, Peec AI finds

Your store is on ChatGPT. Paragraph three may not be

Picture a hiking boot page that opens with the founder's story and mentions "waterproof" in paragraph three. @juan-fco-rojas argued on LinkedIn that an AI shopping agent may never find a fact placed like that, because "wide fit" in a paragraph of HTML can't be confirmed. He splits the misses into two kinds: not found, or found but not verifiable.

Getting listed is the easy part.

Shopify says merchant products become discoverable in ChatGPT by default through Agentic Storefronts, and that AI surfaces "favor structured data, with clean attributes and real-time accuracy."

So the question is what the agent reads. Peec AI, a company that sells AI visibility tracking, studied ChatGPT's product retrieval through a debug API. In the US, ChatGPT Shopping pulls products from OpenAI's own index, built from product feeds, and selling on Shopify is one way in. Every product description in that data was cut at exactly 50 tokens, roughly 40 English words or 250 characters.

By Peec AI's reading, anything after that point is ignored when ChatGPT scores products.

Does this hit your store?

Stores that sell spec-driven products to US buyers have the most at stake. Think fit, material, waterproofing or compatibility. Stores that sell in Europe have less to do for now: Peec AI found that ChatGPT there still pulls products from Google Shopping, with no scoring of its own.

A simple product with little to compare probably has less to fix.

Shopify may also rewrite part of what agents see. Its developer docs list the Catalog description as a field Shopify can generate or enrich, and say these fields "might vary in accuracy depending on available product data." Clearer copy gives Shopify better input.

Cutting the description short does not help either. A Reddit user who scripted a check of 150 Shopify food and drink stores found that 70% had descriptions under 30 words, too thin for AI to answer "is it gluten-free" or "where is it made."

Keep the length and change the order.

Rewrite the first 40 words, leave the story below

Peec AI's advice is to put your most important terms first. On a product page, open with one sentence holding the 3 to 5 facts shoppers ask about, in their words. A spec list follows, then a short FAQ, then the brand story.

Here is the opening of a fictional boot, written as an illustrative example:

The story still belongs on the page, lower down.

What to check on your three best sellers

1. Read only the first 40 words of each description. Would a shopper learn the material, the fit and the feature they search for?
2. Ask an AI assistant the questions your customers ask, and note which answers miss the product and which get a detail wrong.
3. Rewrite only those openings, then ask the same questions again.

None of the sources above counted orders, so treat this as a test with no promised lift.

Frequently asked questions

Does the 40-word cutoff apply to Google AI Mode and Copilot?

Peec AI's finding covers ChatGPT Shopping in the US only. In the same March announcement, Shopify described other channels at different stages: thousands of merchants selling in Microsoft Copilot, and select brands starting in AI Mode in Google Search and the Gemini app. The study does not say how those read descriptions.

Do I need to rewrite every product description for ChatGPT?

No. Start with the openings of your best sellers. The rest of the page, including the brand story, can stay below the facts.

Sources

• @juan-fco-rojas argued on LinkedIn · linkedin.com
• Shopify says · shopify.com
• Peec AI · peec.ai
• who scripted a check of 150 Shopify food and drink stores · reddit.com