Pricing pages take 19% of citations on cost prompts
Written by Tom Fry. Reviewed by Claire Williamson. Updated .
If you do not publish a price, the assistant quotes somebody else's guess. Across every completed run in our data, 1.6 million citations, URLs with pricing or cost in the path take 19.4% of citations on prompts that ask about cost. On every other prompt they take 0.8%.
The second number surprised us more. Of those pricing citations, 90% go to third-party sites: 19,279 against 2,108 on the brand's own domain.
What the assistant does when you stay quiet
Growth Unhinged ran “Evaluate Company X on pricing” for the Cloud 100 across six assistants, 7,675 responses in all. The company's own pricing page appeared in 46% of responses and was cited first in only 12%. Vendr, Reddit and G2 filled the gap. One vertical AI company with no pricing page drew negative pricing language in 67 of 76 responses, and a quoted range of $100 to $2,400 per user a month. That is a 24-fold spread, on a page the vendor never wrote.
Ten of the 77 public pricing pages hid at least 40% of their text from bots, through client-side rendering, toggles or iframes. A price behind a toggle may as well be no price.
What we changed as a result
We publish every GEOSearch price as plain text in the first HTML response, in both currencies, with the VAT position. That is the whole of our pricing page. It carries a worked budget too, because a clear figure gets quoted more reliably than a range.
If you do one thing after reading this, fetch your own pricing page with JavaScript turned off and see what is left.