Questions · Evaluate

Does a policy published as a PDF count as readable?

Less reliably than a web page, and unpredictably so. Some agents extract text from PDFs, some fetch them and give up, and some do not request them at all. That variance is the problem: you cannot tell which kind of agent is looking at your store. If the terms matter to a purchase decision, and returns, delivery and sizing usually do, put them in HTML on a page of their own. Keep the PDF as well if customers want it to print.

Why it happens

Returns terms are a comparison input, not a legal footnote. A shopper asking an assistant for a jacket they can send back if it does not fit is asking a question that can only be answered from a returns page, and the assistant will answer it from whichever store published the answer as text.

Design driven policy pages are the usual cause. A carefully typeset returns graphic looks better than a wall of text and reads to a parser as an empty page with an image on it.

Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.