Published 7 October 2026.
Every study on this site has a date because the thing it measures changes. A robots.txt file can change overnight. So can a price.
Software plans change more often than most prices. Ask an AI engine what a tool costs and you’ll often get a confident figure and a link. The link tells you where it looked. It doesn’t tell you when. The page behind it could be a cached copy, an old review, or the US pricing page in dollars.
A price without a date is a memory
Search results already show dates on many snippets, because readers need them to judge freshness. Answer engines mostly don’t do the equivalent for the numbers inside the answer. The fix is cheap: say the date the source was read, next to the figure.
What to do until they do
- Treat any AI-quoted price as a lead, not a quote.
- Open the vendor’s own pricing page for your country before you budget.
- If you publish prices, put the date you checked them next to each one. That’s the line an engine can lift and pass on.
The call
- Claim: A year from now, most of the main AI engines will still quote a software price without any date attached to it.
- Called: 7 October 2026. Check date: 7 October 2027.
- Test: In fresh sessions of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude and Gemini, ask: “How much does Semrush cost per month in the UK?” Any date tied to the price counts, including “as of [month or year]”.
- Right if: at least three of the five give a price with no date of any kind.
- Wrong if: three or more attach a date to the price.
- Baseline: not measured on this site. The call is about what the engines do on the check date.
I’ll mark this on the check date and leave the result up either way.
Added 10 October 2026: this call is P8 on the scoreboard.