Does ChatGPT quote the wrong price for your business?

Ask an assistant what a specific business charges and it will usually give you a number. The uncomfortable finding from our measurements: that number is assembled from whoever published a machine-readable one — the business's own prices, readable by people, are invisible to the pipeline.

Why does AI show the wrong price for your business?

Not because it guessed. A price shows up in an answer only when someone published a machine-readable one — and if that someone is a directory or an aggregator rather than you, the number is theirs, not yours. The measurement below puts real sizes on this: 53 quotes for one business, 17 of them with no price on the business's own site to check against.

What we measured

In the freshly measured published sample (a Nashville med spa), assistants produced 53 price quotes across the buyer questions we asked: 36 matched the business's own published prices exactly, and 17 had no price on the site to check them against. The quotes were assembled from directories, aggregator pages and whatever third party had published a parseable number.

Meanwhile the business's own site is not silent on price. We crawled 26 pages; 25 of them carry a price figure somewhere, visible to any human reading the page. The problem is the format: no Offer, no PriceSpecification, no priceRange in the structured data — nothing that tells a machine "this number is the price of that service." A human can see it; an extraction pipeline cannot use it.

So when a buyer asks "how much is Botox in Nashville," the answer is built from whoever published a machine-readable number — which is not you.

Why this costs you money

A wrong or stale third-party price does two kinds of damage. An inflated one kills the inquiry before it happens ("too expensive, next"). A suspiciously low one attracts the wrong conversation and makes your real price feel like a bait-and-switch. Either way, the decision about your pricing is being made without you, by whoever happened to publish a number in a format a machine can parse.

The fix is smaller than the problem

This is one of the cheapest findings to act on, because the information is already on your pages — it only needs to be machine-readable:

1. Put a "from" price in plain text on each service page. Not an image, not a PDF menu, not "contact us." A number next to the service name, exactly as a buyer would read it.
2. Mark it up. Offer or PriceSpecification structured data on the same element. Whoever maintains your site can add this in an hour; it is annotation, not new content.
3. Decide what stays unlisted — deliberately. Some businesses do not publish prices for good commercial reasons. That is a legitimate choice; the point is not "publish everything" but knowing that an unpublished price gets substituted by someone else's.

Then check whether it worked

The point of a measurement is being able to re-run it. Fix the pages, let the index settle, then ask the same questions again: are the price claims now quoting you, or still quoting third parties? That before/after comparison is how you know the fix landed — the method is published, and the free check shows you the cost questions we would ask before you pay anything.