Writing a listing description that works for people and machines

Your listing pages now have two readers. One is a person on a phone with about eight seconds of patience. The other is a machine lifting a sentence to answer somebody who never visits at all.

Most advice treats these as competing audiences and tells you to write twice. You don’t. They want the same thing — the specifics, early, in plain sentences — and writing properly for the hurried human gets you the machine for nothing.

Here is what that actually looks like.

Six things that make a description usable

1. Say what it is in the first sentence. In the words a buyer would use, not your internal name for it. “A three-bedroom end-of-terrace in Cathays with a south-facing garden” beats “An exciting opportunity to acquire this deceptively spacious property.” The second sentence has told the reader nothing, and there is nothing in it for a machine to quote.

2. Every fact needs to exist as a sentence somewhere. By all means keep the spec table — people scan them. But if a fact only appears in a table rendered as an image, or in a photograph, it may as well not be published. The test: could you copy this page as plain text and still know the price, the size and the condition?

3. Give every number its unit. “1,200” is not a fact. 1,200 sq ft, 1,200 miles, £1,200 and 1,200mm are four different listings, and a machine will guess wrong at least once.

4. Answer the questions you actually get asked. Not the ones you wish people asked. If three people a week ring to ask about parking, parking belongs in the description. Your inbox is the keyword research; it is more accurate than any tool and you already own it.

5. State the condition honestly and in words. “Chip to the rim, pictured” is worth more than a photograph of a chip, because it is searchable, quotable and unarguable later. This is the same rule we hold to in auction photography: describe what is there.

6. Put the atmosphere after the facts. Not never — a good description sells. Just afterwards. Anyone still reading by then actually wants it.

Three things to stop doing

Stuffing keywords. This now costs you twice. Google’s spam policies judge a page on whether it is of value to a reader however it was produced, and separately, an answer engine needs a clean sentence to lift. Stuffed copy offers nothing quotable. It also reads badly to the one human who did turn up.

Pasting the portal’s blurb onto your own site. If the identical paragraph exists on three portals and your website, you have given every one of those pages the same thin content and yourself no reason to be the one quoted. Write yours once, properly, and let the portals have the short version.

Burying it behind a search widget. A listing that only exists inside a JavaScript filter is invisible to the thing doing the quoting. If it matters, it needs a real page with its own address.

Why this is worth the effort now

Because the odds of the click have got worse. Pew tracked 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025 and found people clicked a result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it didn’t — and 26% of those visits ended the browsing session outright. We went through that in when Google answers instead of linking.

Read pessimistically, that says the visit is dying. Read practically, it says something more useful: the sentence you write is now doing the work the visit used to do. If it is a good sentence, it gets quoted, and your name goes with it. If your specifics live in a photograph, nothing gets quoted and you are simply absent from the answer.

What argues against overdoing it

Don’t write for the machine. Descriptions optimised to be extracted read like a form filled in by a solicitor, and the human who does arrive can tell. The reason this advice works is that it is ordinary good writing — clear, specific, front-loaded — not a trick.

And structured data is not a substitute. Schema markup helps a machine understand a page that already says something. It cannot supply a fact the page never stated, and no amount of markup rescues a description that opens with “nestled in the heart of”.

One honest caveat on the numbers above: that Pew study is US data from March 2025, which is over a year old now. It is the best-methodology public figure I can find on click behaviour, not a current UK measurement.

The short version

Write the first sentence so that somebody who reads only that sentence knows what you are selling. Make sure every fact exists as text. Then say the nice things. That is the whole method, and it happens to be exactly what a machine needs too.