Why AI Doesn’t Trust Discount-Heavy Stores
High-low pricing was a great strategy for humans. For agents, it looks like instability. Here is how pricing volatility kills your confidence score.
For decades, retailers have used the "High-Low" strategy: Inflate the MSRP, then constantly run a "50% Off" sale. It creates urgency for human shoppers.
For AI Agents, this strategy creates a Reliability Crisis.
Agents crawl your site repeatedly over time. If they see the price bouncing from $100 to $50 to $80 to $40, they flag the pricing data as "Volatile."
Why does this matter? Because Agents hate being wrong.
If an Agent tells a user, "This jacket is $50," and the user clicks through to find it's now $100, the user loses trust in the Agent. To protect itself, the Agent will simply stop recommending products with volatile pricing histories.
Price Volatility and Agent Risk
When an LLM (like GPT-5) retrieves pricing, it assigns a "Temporal Confidence" score.
- Stable Price ($50 for 6 months): Confidence 99%. "I can safely quote this price."
- Volatile Price (Changes weekly): Confidence 40%. "I cannot safely quote this price."
If the Agent can't quote the price, it often skips the recommendation entirely, because "Price" is almost always a user constraint.
Hidden Discounts and Contradictions
Another common issue is the "Cart-Only Discount."
"Add to cart to see price!" or "Use code SAVE20 for 20% off!"
Agents usually read the structured data (Schema) on the Product Page. If your Schema says price: 100.00, but your marketing banner says "20% Off", the Agent sees a contradiction.
It doesn't know if the final price is $100 or $80. It defaults to the higher price ($100) to be safe, which might make you lose a "Under $90" filter search.
Deterministic Pricing Explained
To win in the Agentic Economy, you need Deterministic Pricing.
This means the price the Agent sees is the price the user pays.
If you must run discounts, update the price field in your Schema to reflect the actual selling price, not the theoretical MSRP.
Use the priceType: https://schema.org/SalePrice property to explicitly signal that this is a temporary reduction, rather than just changing the main price and confusing the history logs.
Naridon's Pricing Consistency Checks
Naridon monitors your store for "Price Drift."
We check:
- Does your Schema price match your visible price?
- Does your Schema price match your Google Merchant Center feed?
- Is your price volatility affecting your crawl frequency?
Stable data wins. Volatile data loses.
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