Grocery sites are the hardest for AI to read. Here's what to fix first.

If you sell food, drink or anything else that ends up in a grocery cart, there's an uncomfortable chart in Adobe's August 2026 AI Traffic Trends Report. Adobe scored seven retail sub-industries on what it calls AI citation readability: how readily AI systems can interpret and cite their pages. Grocery came last.

This guide covers what the numbers say, where grocery loses the most ground, and a practical list of fixes for a food or beverage brand, ordered by how much effort they take.

The scoreboard

Show the data

Sub-industry	Readability score
Apparel	76%
Electronics	70%
Cosmetics	68%
Sporting goods	67%
Furniture and home	64%
General merchandise	63%
Grocery	59%

Source: Adobe Digital Insights, AI Traffic Trends Report, August 2026

Adobe calls the 17-point gap between apparel and grocery "the widest sub-industry spread in this analysis." It also notes grocery trails the rest of the field "despite broad site coverage," which suggests the problem isn't a lack of pages. It's what's on them.

A word of caution on the metric itself. The report doesn't publish the formula behind the score, so treat it as a relative index for comparing categories and page types, not as an absolute grade. What Adobe does say, consistently, is what high scorers have in common: "rich, structured content," including detailed specifications, guides, FAQs and support documentation.

Where grocery loses points

Adobe breaks the scores out by page type. Here's grocery's profile.

Show the data

Page type	Readability score
Customer service	66%
Blog and news	57%
Category pages	57%
Product pages	57%
Homepage	47%

Source: Adobe Digital Insights, August 2026

The comparison with the leader on each page type shows where the gap is widest.

Page type	Grocery	Leader	Leader's score	Gap (points)
Blog and news articles	57%	Electronics	85%	28
Homepage	47%	Cosmetics	74%	27
Category pages	57%	Electronics	76%	19
Customer service and help	66%	Electronics	81%	15
Product detail pages	57%	Sporting goods	70%	13

The gaps are our arithmetic from Adobe's figures. Two things stand out.

The homepage is grocery's worst page. Adobe's explanation for low homepage scores in general is that "navigation-heavy, promotional homepages offer limited context for AI citation." Cosmetics, the leader, gets its score from "brand storytelling, ingredient-focused messaging, and educational content." Food brands have just as much to say about ingredients as beauty brands do. Most just don't say it on the homepage.

Content is the biggest gap. Grocery's blog and news pages scored 57%, against 85% for electronics. Electronics brands publish setup guides, explainers and comparisons. Food brands tend to publish recipes as images, seasonal promos and press releases.

Why food is harder than it looks

It's tempting to think grocery scores low because food is simple and there's not much to say. The opposite is true. The questions people ask about food are some of the most specific questions in retail: Is it gluten free? Does it contain sesame? How much protein per serving? Is it made in a facility with tree nuts? Is it kosher?

Those are exactly the questions that get answered by an AI summary instead of a click. In Pew Research Center's 2025 study of Google searches, 60% of searches phrased as questions produced an AI summary, against 8% of one- or two-word searches.

The answers to those questions usually exist. They're printed on the package. But on many food sites they live in a photo of the back of the box, a PDF spec sheet, or a tab that only loads when clicked. A person can squint at the photo. A machine reading the page's text may not see the information at all.

The fixes, in order of effort

This week: get the facts out of the pictures

1. Nutrition facts as text. Put the full panel in HTML on every product page, ideally as a table with serving size, calories and each nutrient. Keep the photo too. Tip 14 covers the details, and tip 22 explains why tables work better than paragraphs for this.
2. Ingredients as a text list, in label order. Copy it from the current label, not an old spec sheet.
3. Allergens in a sentence of their own. "Contains: milk, soy. Made in a facility that also processes tree nuts." This is the most-asked category of food question, and the one where getting it wrong does real harm.
4. Certifications as text with the certifier named. "Certified gluten-free by GFCO" says more than a badge image.

This month: give the homepage something to say

Your homepage doesn't need to become a wall of text. It needs a few sentences in plain words that say who you are, what you make and what makes it different, close to the top. Compare these two openings:

Promotional	Readable
"Snack happy. Shop the summer drop!"	"We make high-protein crackers from chickpeas and seeds. No seed oils, gluten free, 9 g protein per serving."
"Real food. Real good."	"Small-batch fermented hot sauces made in Austin, Texas. Six flavors, all vegan, no added sugar."

Add a short section linking to your main products with one factual line each, and a link to your FAQ. That alone gives an assistant what it needs to describe your brand accurately.

This quarter: build the pages grocery is missing

A real help and FAQ section. Help pages were grocery's best page type at 66%, so this is the most proven route. Answer the questions your customer service team actually gets: storage, shelf life, allergens, where to buy, shipping in hot weather, subscription changes. Write each answer in plain HTML (tip 7).

Guides instead of promos. The blog gap (57% vs. 85%) is the largest. Electronics brands win with educational content. A food brand's version is a guide that answers a real question in depth: "How much protein do kids need in a lunchbox snack?" or "What 'no added sugar' actually means on a label." Each guide should answer one question well.

Recipes as text. If you publish recipes, make sure the ingredient list and steps are text, not baked into an image or a video only.

Structured data on product pages. Add Product markup with name, brand, GTIN, price and availability, following Google's product structured data documentation. It helps machines confirm what the page is about (tip 2).

Your product's most important facts are already written. They're on the back of the package. The job is to put them where a machine can read them.

Don't forget the other places your product lives

Your own site is only one source. Amazon says its shopping assistant was trained on its product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As and information from across the web. Retailer pages at Walmart, Target, Instacart and Kroger are read too. If your site says "9 g protein" and a retailer page still shows last year's 8 g formula, an assistant has to pick one, or it hedges.

After you update your own pages, check your top three retailer listings for the same facts. Our Alexa for Shopping playbook covers the Amazon side in more detail.

How to check your progress

Adobe's score isn't something you can run on your own site, but you can test the same thing directly.

• Paste test. Open a product page, select all, copy, and paste into a plain text editor. If the nutrition facts, ingredients and allergens aren't in what you pasted, a text-reading crawler may not see them either.
• Ask the assistants. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Alexa for Shopping three factual questions about your best seller. Note which ones they get right and where they say they're not sure. Tools such as SearchPanel, from XENA Intelligence, do this product by product across several assistants, but a spreadsheet is fine for a first pass.
• Re-check in a month. Assistants don't update instantly. Give it a few weeks after changes before judging.

Grocery being last on Adobe's chart isn't a fixed fact about food. It reflects how most food brands have built their sites so far: for shoppers who look at pictures. The categories at the top got there by writing things down. A food brand can do the same, and the information it needs is already on the label.