You designed your product page for human eyes: a bold price, a clean comparison chart, an icon row that says “fast, secure, simple” at a glance. To a visitor it’s instantly legible. To an AI assistant, a lot of it simply isn’t there, and the gap between what you see and what it reads is where citations quietly disappear.
It reads words, not layout
Strip your page to its raw text and that’s roughly what an agent works with. The 72-point hero number, the careful spacing, the column that visually pairs a feature with a checkmark: none of that structure comes through. If the meaning depended on the design, the meaning is lost.
Survives: a sentence, like “The Pro plan is $39/month and includes SSO.”
Vanishes: a pricing table image, a “$39” rendered inside a graphic, an icon that implies “secure” with no words.
Facts trapped in images are invisible
The most common loss is a fact that lives only in a picture: a price in a hero graphic, a spec inside a product screenshot, a comparison that exists solely as a chart. Image text is read unreliably at best. Every fact that matters needs to also exist as real text, whether in the copy, a caption, or an alt attribute, and never in an image alone.
Visual emphasis doesn’t translate
Humans read importance from size, weight, and position. An agent reads it from structure: headings, clear sentences, and markup. A number being big and centered means nothing to it; the same number in an <h2> or labeled with Product schema means everything. Express importance in the words and the markup, not just the design.
The one-minute test
Select all the text on your product page, copy it, and paste it into a plain document. Read what’s there. If a fact you care about (the price, the key differentiator, what’s included) isn’t in that plain text, an agent probably can’t see it either. That stripped-down view is the page AI actually reads.
See your page the way an agent does
Agent Speak reads the text of your page and shows you what an assistant can and can’t answer from it: the gaps between your design and what survives.
Common questions
Often not reliably. A price in a graphic, a spec in a screenshot, or a comparison shown only as a chart may not be read at all. Put any fact that matters into real text or alt attributes too, never into an image alone.
Not the way it helps humans. An agent doesn’t see that a number is big and bold. It reads the underlying text and markup, so importance must live in headings, clear sentences, and structured data. See marking up your content with schema.
No, keep them for humans. Just make sure every fact they carry also exists in text. Design for people; back it with words for machines.
Written by Michelle Savage, creator of Agent Speak. Related: How to optimize product pages for AI search.