The Hidden Friction Between Sales and Content, And Why It’s Costing You the Digital Shelf in 2026
Dan Flood
Talkoot Head of Sales
Sales teams at dominant consumer brands are still doing what made them successful: Winning distribution. Winning placement. Winning promo.
That still earns shelf space. But it no longer guarantees selection.
According to Adobe, nearly half of shoppers (and growing) use GenAI tools to research products before buying them. This effectively means that increasingly, algorithms and AI — not reps or buyers — decide what gets shown, summarized, and recommended. And that shift is exposing a hidden growth leak inside many organizations — even those with strong sales teams.
The reality of today’s B2C environment is that distribution wins presence, but content wins choice . In other words, great content guides the shopper toward specific products, regardless of shelf space or brand awareness. And sales teams are ignoring the latter.
Why sales rationally ignores PDP optimization
From a sales perspective, great product content can understandably be viewed as a nice-to-have, but not something that is critical to conversion. Do any of these sound familiar?
- “We win on trade and promo — not copy.”
- “Buyers don’t choose because of PDPs.”
- “We already have descriptions.”
- “AEO feels theoretical.”
- “Content only slows product launches.”
All of this was (mostly) true on the physical shelf. It’s increasingly wrong on the digital one. The reality is that with brands growing their SKU counts to massive volumes across a variety of retail channels, scale has flipped from advantage to potential liability. Large assortments create:
- More variants
- More claims
- More attributes
- More inconsistency
And GenAI Algorithms punish inconsistency more severely than they reward brand awarenes or equity. This means that, ironically, smaller brands with narrower product lines are (in some cases) telling better stories about their products. Big brands relying on recognition now have the potential to lose visibility. Scale magnifies content errors the same way it magnifies manufacturing defects. The upshot is that sales leaders simply cannot choose to ignore product content. Doing so creates a leaking revenue bucket – one that’s leaking faster as AI chat becomes first-nature to shoppers everywhere.
PDPs are no longer descriptions — they are decision engines
AI doesn’t browse; it answers. If a PDP can’t clearly explain:
- What the product is
- Why it’s different
- Who it’s for
- What its uses are
…the algorithm doesn’t wait. It recommends someone else – even a smaller competitor with less physical shelf space. Your PDP now trumps the aisle sign, store associate, and packaging callouts. All at once.
The hidden friction sales doesn’t see
Sales teams have historically been focused on speed to market and securing shelf space, which can unintentionally lead to:
- Late specs
- Rushed or placeholder PDPs
- “Launch and forget” behavior
- Copy-paste seasonal updates
- Channel-level inconsistency
Unfortunately, rather than increasing sales, this urgency ends up creating collateral damage:
- Lower conversion
- Higher returns
- Suppressed visibility
The brand keeps selling — just below its real potential. We estimate this dynamic is costing brands at least 7% of annual sales (likely more). This is compounded by the fact that most sales dashboards aren’t great at identifying real reasons for sales decline or underperformance. There just aren’t great metrics (yet) like, “Lost because the product wasn’t clearly explained”, or “Skipped by AI recommendations”. The loss hides in a slow decline. Why isn’t time-to-shelf working? Why isn’t shelf space dominating? Why is SEO effectiveness continuing to decline?
The reality is that brands that win in 2026 will win on product clarity. How well does my product content describe who uses my product and how they use it? How well can the shopper see themselves in the story of the product? Call it what you want – AEO, GEO, “winning in the world of AI”. Today’s ecommerce landscape isn’t just about traffic, it’s about conversion certainty at scale.
The question sales leaders must now answer: Do we keep optimizing for distribution alone? Or do we take ownership of how algorithms explain and choose our products? Because in 2026, sales doesn’t lose because it lacked distribution.
It loses because its products weren’t chosen.