Are AI Assistants Quoting Your Old Prices?

More of your customers now ask an AI assistant, not a search box, where to eat, stay or get their hair done. The assistant answers in one confident paragraph, using whatever facts it can find about you, including the outdated ones. When those facts are wrong, you pay for it in surprise discounts, awkward chats and bookings that quietly go elsewhere.

The screenshot at the front desk

Take Ibrahim, a composite example. He runs a six-room guesthouse in Nizwa with his brother and one cleaner. One evening in October, a couple from Lyon arrives and holds up a phone. An AI assistant had told them a double room costs OMR 25 a night with breakfast, and that check-in starts at 12 noon.

His real rate is OMR 32, and check-in is at 2pm. He honours the price, because arguing with tired guests at the door is bad for reviews. The next week it happens again. Ibrahim has not offered OMR 25 all season, so where did the assistant get it? The answer, and the fix that took him a single evening, come further down.

How AI assistants find your answers

An AI assistant is a tool like ChatGPT, Gemini or the AI answers at the top of Google that replies in full sentences instead of a list of links. When someone asks about a business, many of these tools look things up on the web first, then write a summary from what they found.

So they read the same places your customers do: your website, your Google listing, booking sites, social posts and reviews. Google's own guidance for site owners says no special tricks or AI files are needed to appear in its AI answers. What it asks for is plain: pages search engines can reach, important information written as text, and a Business Profile kept up to date.

OpenAI says something similar for ChatGPT search. It uses its own crawler (a program that visits and reads web pages), and sites that block that crawler will not show up in ChatGPT search answers.

If your website says one price and your Instagram says another, the assistant has to pick one, and it has no way of knowing which one is current.

Where the old price came from

When Ibrahim looked his own guesthouse up the way a stranger would, he found his facts scattered across five places. They did not agree.

Nothing on that list is a lie. Each line was true once. But an assistant reading it sees OMR 25 in two places written clearly, OMR 32 in one, and a price list locked inside a photo it may not read at all. Faced with that, repeating the older number is an easy mistake to make.

What a wrong answer costs

It is tempting to shrug this off as a tech problem. Put numbers on it and it looks different. Here is Ibrahim's month, with composite figures you can swap for your own.

For a boutique, a salon or a tuition centre the lines change, but the shape stays the same: a discount you never planned, chats you should not have to answer, and customers who went to the place with clearer information.

The one-evening fix

Ibrahim's way out was not a new website. It was one page and an hour of tidying. Here is what he did, in order.

1. Wrote one facts page. He called it "Rates, check-in and parking" and gave every fact its own short sentence: "A double room costs OMR 32 per night, including breakfast." "Check-in is from 2pm. Check-out is by 12 noon." "Free parking for four cars is in front of the building."
2. Answered the real questions. He scrolled his WhatsApp chats, copied the questions people actually ask, and answered each in a sentence that makes sense on its own.
3. Put a date on it. A line at the bottom says "Prices checked October 2026", so people and tools can see the page is current.
4. Made the Arabic page match. Same prices, same times, same parking. A translation, not a separate version that drifts.
5. Typed out the price list. The photo stayed, but the prices now also appear as plain text.
6. Matched everything else. He corrected his hours on the Google Business Profile, unpinned the old Instagram post and edited its caption to say the offer has ended, and checked his booking site rates.
7. Asked his web person one question. "Does our site block any search or AI crawlers?" It did not, but five minutes to know for sure was worth it.

Assistants do not update the moment you do, because they have to visit your pages again. But from that evening on, every place a tool might look told the same story.

Write every important fact as a sentence a stranger could copy word for word and still get right.

What this means for you

You do not need to understand how AI works to be quoted correctly by it. You need one place where your facts are written plainly, and every other place needs to agree with it.

Start with the facts that cost money when they are wrong: prices, opening hours, location, booking and cancellation rules, delivery areas and what is included. Write them as full sentences. "Open daily" is vague. "Open Saturday to Thursday, 9am to 10pm, and Friday from 4pm" is something an assistant can quote.

If your site already has a page of common questions, turn it into your facts page; the ten questions every website gets asked make a good starting list. If you publish in Arabic and English, keep both versions in step, as we covered in one site, two languages.

The bottom line

Customers who ask an AI assistant still end up at your door or in your WhatsApp, carrying whatever facts it gave them. Write your prices, hours and rules once, plainly, and make every other listing agree. An assistant can only quote what you have written down clearly.