A Siteline study found that when an AI agent could not read a company's pricing page, it pulled 58% of its content from third party sources instead. JavaScript rendered price tables are invisible to these agents. Make sure the machine reads the truth from you, not a guess from someone else.
If a machine cannot read your price, it will trust someone else's version of it. Now that version is what your buyer sees.
A study from Siteline tested an AI agent on the pricing pages of 100 top business software products, across 534 attempts to find plan prices and features. The finding should land for any B2B marketer. When the agent could not read your prices, it did not stop. It went and asked a third party blog instead.
The numbers show the leak. In runs where the agent hit an access error, 58% of the content it pulled came from third party sources, against 12% when there was no error. Only 65% of plans showed readable prices. Around 14% posted no price at all and routed to a sales contact. Among marketing, sales and support products, roughly 30% had no visible pricing, compared with none in productivity and developer tools.
The technical cause is simple. Agents from the major AI companies do not run JavaScript the way Google does. Siteline found pricing pages that loaded fine for a human but whose price tables were JavaScript rendered, invisible to the agent. So the agent fell back to blogs, aggregators and comparison sites, often outdated, sometimes wrong.
Why it matters
Buyers are starting their research inside AI tools. If those tools cannot read your pricing page, they will describe your pricing from whatever third party they can read, and you have no control over that source. A stale figure, a competitor's framing or a plain error becomes the first number your prospect sees. The "contact sales" wall that felt like a lead gen tactic now reads to a machine as no information, and the machine moves on.
Share of content an AI agent pulled from third party sources when it could not read a company's own pricing page. Source: Siteline, Search Engine Journal.
For B2B especially, the pricing page just became a machine readability problem, not just a conversion one.
What to do about it
Your buyers are letting machines do the first pass of research. Make sure the machine can read the truth from you, before it reads a guess from someone else.