Amazon Product Description vs A+ Content: Which One Google Reads

Two different questions living inside one confusing setup

The confusion isn't accidental — the two systems (Google's external crawler and Amazon's internal search) both encounter the same page, at the same URL, and it's reasonable to assume they see roughly the same thing. They don't, structurally: one is reading the rendered page a browser would show, the other is reading Amazon's own internal product record, and the two can genuinely diverge in what they treat as relevant text.

"Which one does Google read" and "which one does Amazon's own search read" are two separate questions that get conflated constantly, and the honest answer to each is different — worth separating clearly before drawing any conclusion. This page covers both, and flags where the answer is Amazon's own confirmed behaviour versus where it's practitioner observation Amazon hasn't directly documented.

What happens to the description field once A+ Content goes live

This is easy to verify directly rather than take on faith: open a listing's product description field in Seller Central after A+ Content has been published, and the old text is usually still sitting there, editable, even though the live page shows A+ modules instead. Checking this on an account's own listings is a five-minute exercise that settles the question more reliably than any third-party claim about it, including this one.

When A+ Content is published on a listing, it visually replaces the plain-text product description on the page a shopper sees — the description isn't deleted, it's simply not displayed anymore, sitting in the backend behind the A+ modules that now occupy that space. This is worth knowing on its own: a seller who assumes the old description content is gone once A+ goes live is wrong, and content that mattered in that field is still there, just not visible.

What Google's crawler can actually see

This distinction has a direct, practical consequence for anyone hiring a designer to build A+ Content: a brief that says "make this banner look premium" with no instruction about text placement can easily result in every important claim being baked into the graphic as styled text, invisible to Google, purely because that's how the design tool defaults to working. A brief that explicitly separates "design elements" from "searchable claims that need to exist as real text" produces a genuinely different, more search-visible result for the same visual outcome.

Google can crawl and index text that's typed directly into A+ Content's module text fields and headings — genuine text content, not an image. What Google's crawler cannot read is text baked into an image file, which is common in A+ modules built as design-heavy banners with text overlaid graphically rather than entered as actual text. Two A+ modules that look identical to a shopper can carry very different search-visibility value depending on whether their text lives as real text or as pixels in an image — a distinction invisible on the page itself.

This is an observation about how crawlers generally behave with visible page content, not a policy Amazon has published — Amazon doesn't state how Google indexes its pages, since that's Google's behaviour, not Amazon's. It's a reasonable, widely-observed technical fact rather than an Amazon-confirmed one, and it's worth treating with that distinction in mind.

What Amazon's own internal search does, separately

The reason this particular piece stays unconfirmed rather than settled is structural, not just an oversight — Amazon does not publish the internals of its own search-indexing system for competitive reasons, the same way Google doesn't publish its full ranking algorithm. Sellers reverse-engineer behaviour through testing and shared observation because there's no primary document to check against, which is a genuinely different situation from a policy question that simply hasn't been looked up yet.

Amazon's own on-platform search (the system that decides what shows up when a shopper searches inside Amazon) is a different system from Google's crawler, and practitioner consensus — not an Amazon-published statement — holds that Amazon's internal indexing does not read A+ Content body text for search-ranking purposes, while it does continue indexing the backend product description field even after A+ visually replaces it on the page. This is genuinely useful if it's accurate, and it's stated here as consensus rather than confirmed fact because Amazon has not published its own indexing rules for either field.

A worked implication: what this means for what to actually write

This is a case where erring toward the more thorough, slightly redundant-seeming practice — populated description and real text in A+ modules — costs almost nothing if the internal-indexing consensus turns out to be wrong, and provides genuine coverage if it turns out to be right. That asymmetry (low cost to hedge, real potential upside) is itself a reasonable basis for a decision when the underlying mechanics aren't fully confirmed either way.

If the practitioner consensus above holds, deleting or leaving blank the description field after A+ Content goes live is a mistake worth avoiding — that field may still be doing indexing work for Amazon's own search even though no shopper sees it displayed anymore. The safer practice is writing a real, keyword-relevant description and leaving it populated regardless of whether A+ Content is live, rather than treating it as obsolete once A+ exists.

Separately, for any A+ module built with the primary purpose of surfacing content to Google (off-Amazon search traffic), the practical takeaway is to build the module's important claims as real, typed text rather than text baked into a banner image — an accurate, well-designed image can still carry its key message as live text underneath or alongside it.

Where the uncertainty genuinely sits

The honest summary worth carrying forward: what's confirmed is that A+ Content visually hides the description without deleting it, and that Google's crawler needs real text, not image text, to index a claim. What's not confirmed is exactly how Amazon's own internal search weighs the description field versus A+ body text once both exist on the same listing — and until Amazon publishes that directly, the cautious, low-cost hedge is the reasonable default.

These come from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with $500M+ in managed revenue across 100+ brands. Dr. CRO's A+ Content builds keep the backend description populated and favour real text in module fields over baked-in image text specifically because of this gap between what's confirmed and what's observed — treating the more cautious, more compatible approach as the default rather than betting on an unconfirmed internal-indexing behaviour either way.