The short answer. When an AI assistant like ChatGPT quotes a price for your business, it often cites pages that aren't yours. In the largest study we know of, a company's own page was rarely the first source. When that number is wrong, ask the assistant for the links behind it. The link tells you which of three jobs you have: fix your own page, ask a third-party site for a correction, or make your own page easier for a machine to read.
If Monday's search of your own business name turned up a price in Google's AI summary (the October 5 roundup), this piece picks up from that line.
Most owners who spot a wrong number about their business argue with it in their head, or type "that's not right" into the chat and move on. Neither changes anything. When there's a page behind the number, that page is what you can actually change.
All three studies below involve Profound, a company that sells AI search tracking. The pricing study looked at software companies, and the other two covered brands and web pages in general, not dental offices or local service businesses. We'll say where we're reasoning past the data.
1. Even software companies rarely get their own pricing page cited first
In September, Kyle Poyar's newsletter Growth Unhinged published a study he ran with Nikolas Laskaris, a researcher at Profound. Profound also sponsors the newsletter, and the article says so. They took the Cloud 100, a list of the top private cloud software companies, and gave six AI engines the same short prompt: "Evaluate Company X on pricing."
Out of 7,675 responses, the company's own pricing page appeared somewhere in 3,532 of them, or 46%. It was the first source cited in just 12%. Not one company had its pricing page cited first in a majority of its runs.
We know of no comparable study for plumbers or med spas, so we can't give you your numbers. What it shows is that a page being yours, and current, doesn't by itself put it on top.
2. No number is still a number
The Growth Unhinged study included one company that published no prices at all. The six engines answered anyway. Across those 77 runs, the prices they quoted ranged from roughly $100 to $2,400 per user per month.
Staying quiet doesn't protect you from an answer. An assistant that can't find your price finds someone else's.
If nothing about your price is written anywhere, AI doesn't guess, it skips you explains what that silence costs. The fix there is a citable profile with a price range included. This piece is for when something is already written and the number is wrong.
3. Your own pages are the most likely source of the wrong number
In Profound's August analysis of more than 158,000 AI claims about brands, the wrong ones about pricing most often pointed to competitor sites or third-party publications. But the finding that surprises owners most: 54% of brands had at least one wrong claim that cited their own content. Their own pages, saying something the business no longer stands behind.
For prices specifically, two Google searches get you started:
site:yourbusiness.com pricelists the pages on your site that mention a price. Try it again with "cost", "fee" or "rate" if that's how you word it.site:yourbusiness.com filetype:pdflists the PDFs on your site. Old rate sheets, menus and brochures tend to live here, and they're easy to forget because they don't show up in your site's menu.
Compare each number with what you charge today. Anything outdated gets updated, or taken down if it no longer has a job.
Your own site is the only source you can fix before lunch
Every other fix here depends on someone else answering an email. This one depends on you finding an hour. Profound's advice points the same way: a brand's site counts as an authoritative source, so an outdated price on it can prop up wrong answers elsewhere.
If you're a dentist, physician, med spa, lawyer or CPA in Florida, check the rules before you add or change any price language, because some boards require specific wording around fees and discounts. We laid them out in what your website can't say in Florida.
4. A price a machine can't read doesn't count
Back to the Growth Unhinged study. Of the 77 companies with a public pricing page, 57 had pages that bots could read in full. Ten hid at least 40% of the page's content from them. The study names four usual causes:
If you can only see the price after a click, assume the assistant never saw it
Here's a two-minute check. On a computer, open the page where your price appears, right-click an empty spot and choose View page source. That opens the raw code your server sends, which is close to what a crawler receives. Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and type the number exactly as it appears on the page, say 150. If it shows up in that code, a crawler can read it. If it doesn't, the price is being added later or tucked behind something, and that's a job for whoever runs your website.
This is also the only move you have when the wrong number comes from a competitor or an industry average. You can't edit their page. If you show a price on yours, you can make sure it can be read.
5. Each assistant tells its own version of your price
The same Profound study compared ChatGPT and Claude on identical questions. They overlapped on only 12.5% of the claims they made, and on only 11% of the wrong ones. Same question, mostly different mistakes.
Profound's September study on citations agrees from another angle: when a page drops out of one engine's citations, that says almost nothing about the others. Apart from Google's three products, each engine makes its own call.
So a check in ChatGPT tells you about ChatGPT. Someone using Gemini may be reading a different number from a different page.
If your customers ask in two languages, check in two languages
This part is our inference, not a finding: none of these studies compared English and Spanish. But an assistant answering in Spanish may lean on Spanish-language pages, directories and articles, a separate set of sources from the English ones. If you serve customers in both languages, a clean answer in English tells you nothing about the Spanish one.
6. The sources behind the answer rotate within weeks
Profound's third study, published September 30, followed 883,000 pages across seven AI engines for a year. The typical page lost half of its citation share within 11 days of its peak, and 78% of cited pages fell to half their peak share within two weeks. Pages tied to a date or a news event faded first. Sales pages, a group that includes pricing pages, held on longer than news and announcements.
That study measured how long a page keeps getting cited, not whether what an assistant says about your price changes. Still, if the pages behind an answer keep rotating, it's a reasonable inference that the answer can move too, and today's source may not be next month's.
One check is a snapshot; three months shows you whether the fix held
That's why the sheet below carries a date and gets redone monthly. Fix this month's source, ask the same questions next month, and see whether the number moved. By the third month you know whether the fix reached the answer, or whether a different source took the old one's place.
What you're doing today: your AI price sheet
Pick the service people ask about most and do this today. It takes about half an hour.
The guide has the sheet ready to copy, the questions written out in both languages, what to do with each kind of source, and the monthly log. Send the word and it arrives in that same chat.
To close
A wrong price about your business feels like something being done to you. When it comes with a link, it's something you can trace: a page of yours, a site you can write to, or a competitor you can't touch but can answer with a page of your own that a machine can read.
Ask where the number came from before you decide what to do about it.
Thank you for reading all the way down. If an assistant quotes you a wrong price this week, don't argue with it. Ask for the link and write it down: that link is the most useful thing it will give you.
Keep reading
- Monday's roundup, October 5 - the search of your own business name that this piece builds on
- AI doesn't guess, it skips you - what happens when nothing about you is written clearly
- Your Business Has More Doors Open Than You Are Counting - the pages, forms and profiles still live in your name
- SEO vs. GEO vs. AEO: Which One Does Your Business Need in 2026? - the full map
Sources
- What AI agents really think about your pricing, Kyle Poyar and Nikolas Laskaris, Growth Unhinged, September 2, 2026 - https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/ai-pricing-visibility-data
- Where do inaccurate AI claims come from?, Lucas Kopinski, Profound, August 17, 2026 - https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/where-do-inaccurate-ai-claims-come-from
- The half-life of an AI citation is 11 days, Davis McCain, Profound, September 30, 2026 - https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/the-half-life-of-an-ai-citation-is-11-days
