The Short Answer
An AI assistant asked what something costs will answer with whatever figure it can find and trust. If your pricing page states a clear number, in text, with the currency, what it includes and the date, and every other copy of that price on the web agrees with it, you are the easiest source to quote. If your pricing says contact us, or gives a range, the assistant will quote a directory, a competitor or a two year old review instead. In a category where everybody hides the price, publishing it is most of the strategy.
The one sentence version
Put the real number in plain text, mark it up with the right type, and hunt down every older copy of it, because an assistant repeats the price it finds most often, not the one you meant.
How Assistants Answer the Cost Question
How much does it cost is one of the most common questions people put to assistants before buying anything, and it is one of the easiest to answer badly. The assistant needs a figure, a currency, a unit such as per month or per project, and ideally what that figure includes. It looks for a sentence that contains all of them.
| What your pricing page says | What the assistant can do with it | Likely result |
|---|---|---|
| A fixed price with currency, unit and inclusions | Quote it directly and attribute it to you | Your number, your name |
| A starting price with what the starting plan includes | Quote the floor and explain what raises it | Usually your number, with a caveat |
| A wide range such as a few hundred to several thousand | Repeat the range, which answers nothing | A vague answer, often sourced elsewhere |
| Contact us for pricing | Nothing, so it searches for someone who guessed | A third party estimate, or a competitor price |
The last row is the one that surprises people. Hiding a price does not keep it private. It hands the job of stating it to whoever is willing to guess, and a guess on a review site or a forum is now what a buyer hears first.
Why Ranges Lose
A range feels safer to publish because it can never be wrong. That is exactly the problem. A statement that can never be wrong carries no information, and an assistant looking for something to quote passes over it for a source that commits to a figure. It is the same reason a specific claim beats an adjective everywhere else in writing for extraction.
If your price genuinely varies, publish the floor and the rule. A starting price, what that starting plan includes, and the two or three things that raise it, with one worked example. That is still a number an assistant can repeat accurately, and it is honest in a way a range is not, because it tells the reader what they would actually pay in a common case.
Publish the floor, not the peak
If you are unsure what to commit to, commit to the lowest price a real customer can actually buy at, and say what it includes. A floor stays true for months. A marketing figure invented for the page does not.
What We Did on Our Own Pricing Page
Agency pricing is one of the most hidden categories on the web, and we decided some time ago to publish ours. Our pricing page lists fixed prices with a checkout button on every line, and none of them start with the word from. Retainers, one time projects and small fixed scope jobs are all priced in plain text.
The first search click our site ever earned on a commercial query came on a phrase about programmatic SEO agencies, to a service page that did not show a price at the time. We added the price to that page, a build at $7,900 and a growth retainer at $2,500 a month, put it in the page description as well as the body, and gave the page a real checkout button. The reasoning was simple. A person searching for an agency wants to know what it costs, and so does any assistant answering on their behalf.
Mark It Up With the Right Type
The machine readable half of a pricing page is structured data, and the type matters more than most guides admit. Getting it wrong does not just fail to help. It can tell every engine that reads the page something false about what you sell.
| What you sell | Type to use | Type to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Software or a subscription app | SoftwareApplication, with offers for each plan | Product, which is graded as a shop listing |
| A professional service | Service, with offers where the price is fixed | Product, for the same reason |
| A physical product that ships | Product, with offers, shipping and returns | Nothing, this is what Product is for |
We learned this the expensive way. On one of our products, 37 pricing pages were marked up as Product. The validator did what it is built to do and graded them as shop listings, then flagged every one for a missing product photo, missing shipping details and a missing returns policy, for software that is never posted to anyone. The tempting fix was to add a zero day shipping policy and a returns address. That would have passed the validator by writing markup that lies. The real fix was the type: SoftwareApplication with the same offers, which asks for none of those fields.
One offer per plan
Each offer carries the price, the currency and availability, and matches a visible price on the page exactly.
Name the billing period in the text
Per month, per year or one time, stated beside the number where a reader and a crawler both see it.
Generate markup from the same source as the page
One list of plans drives both the visible table and the structured data, so they cannot drift apart.
Never add ratings you have not earned
Invented review scores in markup are a fast route to losing trust with search engines and with buyers.
Our guide to schema markup for AI search covers the wider picture. For pricing, the rule is short: the right type, the real number, and one source of truth for both.
Every Copy of the Price Must Agree
This is the part almost nobody audits, and it is the part that decides which number an assistant repeats. Your price does not live on your pricing page alone. It lives in button labels, comparison pages, old blog posts, translated pages, instruction files written for machines, directory listings and review profiles. When those disagree, assistants tend to repeat the version that appears in more places, which is rarely the one you updated last.
We found this on one of our own products after a price change. The checkout had the new price. Nine of the ten monthly buttons on the site still showed the old, lower one, and opened a checkout at the higher price plus tax, displayed in the buyer's local currency. Older prices again survived on alternatives pages, comparison pages, blog posts, a machine readable llms file and 25 of 30 translated versions of the site. Sales nearly stopped after that change. The new price level was the main reason, but a buyer who clicks one number and is asked for another is a buyer given a reason to leave.
Search your own site for every old price
Look for the previous figures, not the current one. Every hit is a copy that can outvote the pricing page.
Check translations and machine files
Translated pages and llms files are updated least often and read by machines most literally.
Match buttons to checkout
The number on the button, the number on the page and the number at checkout should be the same, with tax stated.
Date the pricing page
A visible last updated date tells a reader and an assistant which copy is current.
Put the Price Where Machines Look
Beyond the pricing page itself, a few places carry more weight than their size suggests. The page description is often what appears in results and what some systems read first. Your llms.txt, if you keep one, is written specifically for machines and should state current prices plainly, as our llms.txt guide explains. Comparison pages, including your alternatives pages, are where cost questions get compared, so their price rows need the same care as the pricing page.
| Place | What to put there |
|---|---|
| Pricing page | Every plan with price, currency, billing period, inclusions and a date |
| Page description | The starting price or the most common plan, in plain words |
| llms.txt and similar files | Current prices, stated exactly as on the pricing page |
| Comparison and alternatives pages | Your current prices, dated, alongside the competitors |
| Service or product pages | The price for that specific offer, with a link to buy |
Currency, Tax and the Small Print
A price an assistant can quote accurately needs its context attached. State the currency beside every figure rather than once at the top of the page. Say whether tax is included or added at checkout, because a buyer quoted one figure by an assistant and charged another at checkout will assume the worst. If your checkout shows prices in the buyer's local currency, say so on the pricing page, since a figure that appears in dollars on the page and in another currency at payment looks like a different price to the person paying it.
The same goes for the terms that change what a price means. Billing period, what happens at renewal, whether a plan can be cancelled at any time, and whether there is a refund window all belong in plain sentences near the prices, not only in a terms page nobody reads. These are exactly the follow up questions a buyer asks an assistant once they have the number, and a pricing page that answers them keeps the whole conversation anchored to your own words.
Objections Worth Answering
The usual objection is that competitors will undercut a published price. They can see it anyway, through a demo request or a sales call, and the buyer cannot. Publishing moves the advantage to the buyer, and the buyer is who you are trying to reach. A second objection is that every client is different. Then publish the common case and the rules, which is more useful to a buyer than a form, and keep a custom option for the genuinely unusual.
The honest limit is that a price is only one input. An assistant that trusts your price will still not recommend you if nothing else says you are good, and a published price does not make a weak product competitive. What it does is remove a reason to leave you out of an answer about cost, and in many categories that reason is the one excluding almost everyone.
How to Check What Assistants Say About Your Price
Ask the cost question in fresh sessions
Ask what your product costs, and separately what the category typically costs, in two or three assistants.
Note the number and the source
Record the figure quoted and which page it came from, if the assistant shows sources.
Compare with your current price
Any older figure points to a copy somewhere that still carries it.
Find and fix that copy, then ask again next month
Answers from live search move within weeks once the sources agree.
This fits naturally into a monthly routine alongside the rest of your citation work. Price is one of the easiest facts to verify, which makes it one of the most useful early tests of whether assistants have your current information at all.
The Bottom Line
The cost question is asked constantly and answered badly in most categories, because most companies hide the one fact the question is about. Publish the real number with its currency, period and inclusions, mark it up with the right type, and make every other copy of it agree. Do that and the easiest price for an assistant to quote is yours, attributed to you, instead of a guess from someone who never sold the product.