Insights · Pet Supplies
We read pet listings with one question in mind: could an AI shopping assistant confidently tell an owner whether a product suits their animal?
A pet owner is a proxy buyer. They know their animal's weight, age and history, and they are matching those against a product they cannot ask the animal to test. When the listing leaves out the fact that would settle it, there is nobody left in the transaction to ask — not the buyer, not the assistant, and certainly not the dog.
“Suitable for all dogs” answers nothing. Size, life stage and ingredients are three separate questions, and each one can rule a product out on its own.
Size is a measurement, not a label: “Medium” means a different chest girth at every brand, so a collar or harness needs its actual range in centimetres. Life stage is a formulation fact — puppy, adult and senior foods are built differently, and a product that doesn't say which it is cannot be matched to an animal's age. Ingredients decide the whole purchase for an owner managing an intolerance: “premium quality” is not an ingredient list, and a named single protein is the difference between a confident recommendation and a refusal.
The limit is worth stating plainly. Squiggle does not assess whether a product is good for an animal, and nothing here is veterinary guidance. What we assess is whether the published listing gives an AI assistant enough evidence to answer the owner's question. Where it doesn't, the assistant hedges — and for anything an animal eats or wears, hedging usually means recommending someone else's listing.
Why this happens
Pet catalogues are unusually variant-heavy: one product, sold in four sizes, three flavours and two life stages. That structure is good merchandising, and it quietly moves the deciding facts out of the description and into a dropdown. An assistant reading the product text sees a general description of what the product is, while the fact that answers “is this the right one for my dog?” sits in a variant name it may never reach.
The same thing happens with ingredient panels. Where one lives only on the pack photo, a photo of a label is not a label an assistant can read — and for an owner avoiding a specific protein, an unreadable panel is indistinguishable from no panel at all.
What to do about it
Put the animal's weight range in the description text — “for dogs 5–25kg,” not “medium breeds.” It's the fact an owner already knows and can match immediately.
State the life stage the product is formulated for. Puppy, adult, senior, all life stages — one word that decides whether the product is a match at all.
Name the protein source, and transcribe the ingredient list into text. An owner managing an intolerance is filtering on a single word, and a pack photo can't be filtered.
Give collar, harness and bedding sizes in centimetres. Neck and chest girth ranges, not just S/M/L — sizing letters aren't comparable between brands.
Include the feeding or usage guide as text. Grams per day at a given body weight tells an owner how long a bag lasts — which is how they compare price between products.
Repeat the deciding variant fact in the description. If size and flavour are the choice, say so in words — a dropdown is navigation, not description.
Squiggle reads your entire Shopify catalogue and shows you which products leave size, life stage and ingredients for the buyer to guess — and what to add first.
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Squiggle's category guidance is informed by ongoing analysis of publicly available ecommerce product information. Illustrative examples explain common product-understanding principles and do not represent findings from any one merchant or the entire category. No individual store is named. This is guidance on product information, not veterinary or nutritional advice — always follow the product's own labelling and your vet's direction. Public catalogue data only — no account access, sales data, or private information was used.