Assistants are multimodal now. They look at your product photos and video, not just your words. Blurry stock images and empty alt text leave them guessing.
By Margareta Petrovic, founder of Visibility Mesh. We measure how legible ecommerce stores are to AI, and publish what we find. Updated September 2026.
Key takeaways
- AI reads images and video, not only text.
- Real photos, descriptive alt text and image schema help.
- Caption and transcribe video so AI can use it.
Make visuals legible
- Use real, high quality photos from several angles.
- Write descriptive, specific alt text, more than screen-reader basics.
- Add ImageObject and video schema.
- Caption and transcribe your video.
FAQ
Is alt text enough?
It is the start. Image schema and quality visuals do the rest.
Does video matter?
Increasingly, if it is captioned and transcribed so AI can read it.
See how AI reads your store.
Run a free scan and get a 0 to 100 score with a fix list in priority order. Run the free scan.
Run a free scan and get a 0 to 100 score with a fix list in priority order. Run the free scan.
Your buyers are already asking AI. This is how you make your website readable to the assistants they ask.
Everything in this article is measurable on a live storefront. The Catalog Assessment reads every product in your Shopify or Matrixify export, up to the plan limit, and returns catalog wide figures on what AI systems can read, with a fix list in priority order.