In short
They ask longer, more conditional questions than they would type into a search box, usually stacking several constraints at once: a budget, a use case, a size or fit, a delivery window, a returns requirement. The recurring shapes are which option suits my situation, how do these two compare, will this work with what I already own, is the price reasonable, and can I trust this seller. Each of those needs an attribute or a policy that exists as data on your side, not only as a sentence in a paragraph.
The question is a brief, not a keyword
A search box trains people to strip a request down to two or three words and then filter the results themselves. A conversation does not. People describe the situation instead: the room, the bike, the skin, the dog, the trip, the budget, and what went wrong with the last thing they bought.
That changes what a store has to be able to satisfy. A single question can carry five conditions, and a product is only a good answer if all five hold. If your catalogue data covers four of them and the fifth exists only inside a paragraph nobody parsed, your product is a weaker candidate than one with all five in structured fields.
It also changes the follow-up. Assistants get asked to narrow, to swap a constraint, to justify a recommendation and to compare the shortlist it just produced. The conversation continues past the first answer, which means the underlying data has to hold up to several rounds of interrogation rather than one match.
The useful reframing is to stop thinking about queries and start thinking about briefs. What does a shopper in your category actually need to specify before a recommendation could be right? Those are your required attributes.
Five shapes that come up in nearly every category
The first is suitability: which of these is right for my situation. The shopper supplies context and expects the field to be narrowed. This is answered by attributes such as size, capacity, skill level, skin type, breed size, room dimensions, climate.
The second is comparison between named options. Two products, or two of your products against each other, with the difference explained. It is answered by specification detail and by any honest comparison content you publish.
The third is compatibility: will this fit, work with, connect to or replace the thing I already have. Parts, accessories, consumables, filters, cartridges, cases and adapters live entirely in this question, and it is answered by explicit fitment data rather than by a family name.
The fourth is value: is this a reasonable price, and is there a cheaper equivalent. Price is visible to any system that can read your page, so the differentiator is what justifies it, such as materials, warranty, included items and service.
The fifth is trust: can I buy from this store, how long will it take, and what happens if it is wrong. Shipping times, returns windows, restocking terms and contact routes are part of the buying question now, which is why they need to be stated clearly and consistently everywhere, including in your merchant settings.
Finding the ones specific to your category
You already hold most of this. Support conversations and pre-sale messages are the richest source, because every one of them is a shopper telling you which fact was missing from the page. Internal site search shows the words people use when navigation fails. Reviews show the questions that were answered too late.
The search terms report in Google Ads adds the long conditional queries people already type, and they tend to be the closest written form of what gets asked conversationally. Community forums and subreddits in your category show the full question with all its context attached.
Then do the direct version: ask the assistants yourself, from the market you sell in, using the phrasing your shoppers use. Record what comes back, which stores are named, and what is said about your products. Repeat it on a schedule so you can see change rather than a snapshot.
Turn the result into a list of required attributes and required pages. If a question keeps mentioning something your catalogue does not record, that is a data gap, and it is usually also a missing filter on your own category pages.
What to change on the store once you know
Move constraints out of prose and into fields. Anything a shopper conditions on should be a structured attribute in your product data and in your feed: fitment lists, dimensions with units, materials, certifications, capacity, weight limits, power requirements, ingredients. Custom attributes and product highlights exist for the ones with no standard field.
Write the comparison content you would otherwise leave to somebody else. Two or three honest comparisons within your own range, with a best-for on each side, serve the second question shape and are among the most quotable pages a store can publish.
Make policies machine-readable as well as human-readable. Shipping times by region, returns window, restocking conditions and warranty terms should appear on the page, in structured data where a type exists, and in your merchant account settings, saying the same thing in each place.
And write with specifics. Adjectives do not survive summarisation, but numbers, materials, measurements and named compatibilities do. A page that says a jacket is warm gives an assistant nothing; a page that gives the fill weight, the rating and what a reviewer wore it in gives it something to say.
Related questions
Are these questions different from what people type into Google?
They are longer and carry more conditions, but the underlying intent is familiar. The same shopper who asks a two-word query and then applies four filters is expressing the same brief. What changes is that the conditions arrive together, so a product only qualifies if the data supports all of them at once.
Should product pages carry a questions and answers section?
Yes, when it is built from real questions rather than invented ones. It answers shoppers at the point of doubt, it gives systems that summarise your page something specific to draw on, and it creates a maintainable place to put facts that do not fit the description. Keep it current and remove questions that no longer apply.
Is there any way to see the actual prompts shoppers use?
No provider exposes them, so there is no report to read. The workable substitutes are your own support and search logs, the search terms your paid campaigns capture, and a periodic manual exercise where you ask the questions yourself and record the answers. Together those give a reliable picture of the question shapes.