Data last verified: 6 October 2026. Figures re-checked against their primary sources under the Whito rolling re-verification programme.
Finding
Asked 44 UK marketing cost questions on 6 October 2026, no AI engine got more than 74% right, and 33 of 115 software answers quoted US dollars for tools that show UK buyers a price in pounds.
Source: Whito, whito.co.uk/research/ai-price-accuracy-league-table, 2026-10-06. Free to quote with a link to this page.
Last Updated on October 7, 2026
Built from: 220 answers collected on 6 October 2026 from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude and Gemini, each asked the same 44 UK marketing cost questions once. Every answer was scored against a price Whito measured: published UK provider prices for services, and the vendor’s own UK pricing page, read the same day, for software.
No AI engine got more than three answers in four right. We asked five of them what UK marketing costs, from a small business website to a Hootsuite subscription, and checked every figure against prices we had measured ourselves. Claude scored 73.9%, Perplexity 72.7%, Gemini 69.3%, ChatGPT 64.8% and Google AI Mode 61.4%.
The errors follow a pattern. Ask about a service and the engines tend to quote above what UK providers publish: four of the five put a small business website at between 3.7 and 6.3 times the published median of £520, and the fifth gave a range running from £100 to £10,000. Ask about software and a third of the misses come down to currency. 33 of the 115 software answers quoted US dollars for tools that show a UK buyer a price in pounds.
The league table: 6 October 2026
| Rank | Engine | Score | Service prices (21 questions) | Software prices (23 questions) | Right | Close | Off or no figure | Answers citing Whito |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude | 73.9% | 71.4% | 76.1% | 30 | 5 | 9 | 17 |
| 2 | Perplexity | 72.7% | 69.0% | 76.1% | 27 | 10 | 7 | 0 |
| 3 | Gemini | 69.3% | 64.3% | 73.9% | 28 | 5 | 11 | 0 |
| 4 | ChatGPT | 64.8% | 61.9% | 67.4% | 25 | 7 | 12 | 3 |
| 5 | Google AI Mode | 61.4% | 52.4% | 69.6% | 22 | 10 | 12 | 0 |
Score is points won out of 88: two points for an answer that lands on the measured price, one for an answer that is close, none for an answer that is off or gives no usable figure. The full rules are in the method below.
Read the top two as level. Claude and Perplexity are one point apart out of 88. Claude also cited whito.co.uk in 17 of its 44 answers, 17 of 21 on the service questions, so on that half of the test it was partly reading back Whito’s own measurements. On the 27 answers where it did not cite Whito, it scored 75.9%. No other engine cited Whito more than three times.
What we found
1. The dollar default: a third of the software misses are a currency mistake
We call it the dollar default: an AI engine answers a UK price question with a US-dollar list price, even though the vendor shows a UK visitor a price in pounds. 33 of the 115 software answers did it, either quoting dollars outright, converting dollars at a guessed exchange rate, or putting a dollar sign on a pound price.
Hootsuite is the clearest case. Its UK plans page shows Standard at £89 and Professional at £169 a user a month, billed annually. Not one of the five engines gave either figure. Across the ten Hootsuite answers, every figure given was in dollars, mostly $99. Claude said it could not find a reliable pound price.
The same thing happened with Semrush, Ahrefs and Brevo. Across the five Hootsuite, Semrush and Ahrefs questions, 25 answers produced one exact pound price. Gemini went furthest and told the reader Brevo “bills in US Dollars (USD) rather than local regional currencies in the UK”. Brevo’s pricing page shows UK visitors £6 a month for Starter.
A likely cause, which we have not proved: these vendors pick the currency from the visitor’s location. A crawler reading from the US sees dollars. A UK buyer sees pounds. The vendors that print one pound price in the page itself, such as Shopify, Xero, Canva and Google Workspace, were answered correctly almost every time.
2. A website costs a fraction of what AI says it does
UK web designers who publish a price charge a median of £520 for a small business website, with the middle half of 28 published packages between £399 and £898. Every engine quoted far more:
| Engine | What it said a small business website typically costs |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | £1,500 to £3,000 |
| Perplexity | £800 to £3,000 |
| AI Mode | £1,000 to £5,000 |
| Claude | £1,500 to £5,000 |
| Gemini | £100 to £10,000+ (no typical figure) |
The engines are describing the agency market, which mostly does not publish prices. The sellers who do publish are cheaper. A buyer who takes the AI figure as the going rate will read a £599 quote as suspiciously low when it is close to typical for a published package.
3. When the engines miss on services, they miss high
Across 105 service answers, 57 landed inside the measured range. 29 were above it and 6 below. 13 gave no usable figure: a range so wide it covers everything, or a list of tiers with nothing marked as typical. The median answer sat 14% above the measured central price.
Photography was answered best. Headshots, day rates, product shots and drone filming were mostly right across all five engines. Videographer day rates, events photography and monthly social video packages were the weakest.
4. This year’s price rises had not reached every engine
Xero, QuickBooks and Sage have all raised UK prices this year. Five answers quoted the old price: Claude gave Xero Grow at £37 (now £39) and Sage Accounting at £18 (now £20). Perplexity gave QuickBooks Plus at £47 (now £56), QuickBooks Essentials at £33 (now £38) and Sage at £18. ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini were current on all five.
5. Simple list prices are close to solved
All five engines gave the current UK price for Squarespace Basic, Shopify Grow, Xero Ignite, Canva Pro, Google Workspace Business Starter and Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic. If a vendor prints one pound price on a UK page, the engines find it.
6. Two engines repeated Whito figures without saying where they came from
Asked what a marketing software stack costs, Gemini set out Whito’s figures from our UK marketing stack study almost line for line: £2,667 a year for the brand-name stack, £1,320 for the alternative, £5,678 for a small team, and a “Login Jump” that matches our three-login jump. It called this “recent UK market research” and linked to nothing.
ChatGPT did the same with our care plan figures: “seven plans offering exactly one hour of monthly changes, ranging from £49 to £170/month, with a median of £95/month”, with no link on the sentence. Both answers scored well, because the figures were right. The reader just could not see who measured them.
Every question, every answer
Service questions. The measured range is what UK providers publish. Each cell shows the typical figure the engine gave (the midpoint of its typical range) and the score: Right, Close, Off, or None for no usable figure.
| Question (UK) | Measured range | ChatGPT | Perplexity | AI Mode | Claude | Gemini |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A small business website cost | £399 to £898 | £2,250: Off | £1,900: Off | £3,000: Off | £3,250: Off | None |
| SEO cost per month | £409.50 to £1,500 | £550: Right | £650: Right | None | £750: Right | £1,550: Close |
| A basic local SEO package cost per month | £307.50 to £949.75 | £400: Right | £450: Right | £450: Right | £700: Right | £400: Right |
| Google Ads management cost per month | £280 to £828.75 | £1,000: Close | £1,000: Close | £1,750: Off | £1,750: Off | £650: Right |
| Social media management cost per month | £100 to £773.75 | £900: Close | £550: Right | £525: Right | £1,000: Close | £500: Right |
| A cheap social media management package cost per month | £49 to £299 | £149: Right | £350: Close | £200: Right | £375: Close | £250: Right |
| Website maintenance cost per month | £50 to £177.50 | £100: Right | £100: Right | None | £52: Right | None |
| A website care plan with one hour of changes a month cost | £49 to £170 | £98: Right | £100: Right | £175: Close | £95: Right | £100: Right |
| A link building campaign cost per month | £2,995 to £13,995 | £2,750: Close | £2,250: Close | £1,000: Off | £8,250: Right | £1,000: Off |
| A commercial photographer cost per day | £500 to £1,000 | £750: Right | £650: Right | £1,000: Right | £700: Right | £950: Right |
| Professional headshots cost | £110 to £350 | £275: Right | £188: Right | £188: Right | £230: Right | £180: Right |
| Product photography cost per image | £5 to £35 | £20: Right | £55: Off | £22: Right | £18: Right | £26: Right |
| Team headshots cost per person | £40 to £75 | £98: Close | £98: Close | £62: Right | £58: Right | £85: Close |
| Food photography for a restaurant cost | £300 to £850 | None | £475: Right | None | £650: Right | £825: Right |
| A videographer cost per day | £690 to £900 | None | £525: Close | £925: Close | £425: Off | £900: Right |
| An events photographer cost for a full day | £430 to £730 | £1,200: Off | £1,175: Off | £1,025: Close | £580: Right | £1,100: Off |
| A business mini photoshoot cost | £125 to £225 | £412: Off | £275: Close | £162: Right | £225: Right | £300: Close |
| A monthly social media video package cost | £295 to £650 | None | £695: Close | None | None | None |
| Drone filming cost for a half day | £250 to £650 | £550: Right | £550: Right | £550: Right | £425: Right | £500: Right |
| Amazon product listing photography cost per product | £100 to £397 | £250: Right | £350: Right | None | £250: Right | £245: Right |
| A marketing software stack cost a small business per year | £1,319.73 to £2,667 | £2,000: Right | £1,800: Right | £3,300: Close | None | £4,150: Off |
Software questions. The measured price is what the vendor’s UK pricing page showed on 6 October 2026, either billing basis accepted.
| Question (UK) | Measured price | ChatGPT | Perplexity | AI Mode | Claude | Gemini |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace's Basic plan cost per month | £12 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Shopify Basic cost per month | £19 or £25 | Wrong billing basis | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Shopify's Grow plan cost per month | £49 or £65 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Xero Ignite cost per month | £18 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Xero Grow cost per month | £39 | Right | Right | Right | Old price | Right |
| QuickBooks Simple Start cost per month | £16 | Right | Right | Quoted $ | Right | Right |
| QuickBooks Plus cost per month | £56 | Right | Old price | Quoted $ | Right | Right |
| QuickBooks Essentials cost per month | £38 | Right | Old price | Right | Right | Right |
| Sage Accounting cost per month for one user | £20 | Right | Old price | Right | Old price | Right |
| FreeAgent cost per month for a limited company | £33 | Right | Right | Quoted $ | Right | Right |
| Brevo's Starter plan cost per month | £6 or £5.42 | Quoted $ | Right | Converted from $ | Right | Quoted $ |
| Brevo's Standard plan cost per month | £13 or £11.67 | Right | Right | Quoted $ | Right | Converted from $ |
| Hootsuite Standard cost per month | £89 | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | No figure | Quoted $ |
| Hootsuite Professional cost per month | £169 | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ |
| HubSpot Marketing Hub Starter cost per month | £7 or £9 or £18 | Quoted $ | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Pipedrive cost per user per month | £14 | Converted from $ | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Semrush cost per month | £95.07 or £113 | Converted from $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ |
| Ahrefs Lite cost per month | £99 | Quoted $ | Right | Converted from $ | Quoted $ | Converted from $ |
| Ahrefs Standard cost per month | £199 | Quoted $ | Quoted $ | Converted from $ | Quoted $ | Quoted $ |
| Canva Pro cost per year | £100 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Google Workspace Business Starter cost per user per month | £5.90 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Google Workspace Business Standard cost per user per month | £11.80 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic cost per user per month | £5.40 | Right | Right | Right | Right | Right |
What to do with this
If you are buying
Use an AI price as a question to ask, never as the going rate. For software, open the vendor’s pricing page from a UK connection and read the pound figure yourself; if an engine quotes dollars, assume it is wrong. For services, compare quotes against published UK prices, such as our marketing cost calculator, before you decide a quote is cheap or dear.
If you are selling
Publish your price in pounds, in the page text, on a UK address. The vendors that did this were quoted correctly by almost every engine. The ones that switch currency by location were quoted in dollars. For a service business the same rule applies: if you do not publish a price, the engines fill the gap with someone else’s, and on this evidence it will usually be higher than yours.
Method
- Questions: 44 fixed questions, asked word for word, once each, with no follow-ups. 21 ask about service prices (websites, SEO, PPC and social management, care plans, link building, photography and video, a software stack). 23 ask about named software plans. The full list is in the dataset.
- Engines and settings, 6 October 2026, UK connection: ChatGPT at chatgpt.com, signed out. Google AI Mode at google.com, signed out. Perplexity, signed out; after a sign-up prompt at question 26 the rest were asked in a second signed-out browser. Claude at claude.ai in an incognito chat on Sonnet 5.5 with web search. Gemini signed in, Flash-Lite, temporary chats where the option loaded. Microsoft Copilot was dropped because it now asks for a date of birth and account details before answering.
- Measured prices, services: the middle half (interquartile range) and median of Whito’s June 2026 dataset of 128 published prices from 47 UK providers for websites, SEO, PPC and social management; Whito’s 11 September 2026 read of 18 care plan price lists; Whito’s 13 August 2026 read of 82 provider price pages for budget social packages; the published campaign tiers in our September 2026 link building check; the 40 published price lists in our August 2026 photography study; and our 1 October 2026 stack study. Each figure is a published price, so the measure is what UK sellers publish, which leans towards the sellers who choose to publish.
- Measured prices, software: each vendor’s UK pricing page, read in a UK browser on 6 October 2026, with screenshots kept. Where only one billing basis could be read, only that figure was accepted. HubSpot’s £18 list price comes from our 1 October read.
- Scoring, services: we took the narrowest range the answer itself presented as typical, or as the price for a small or local business; failing that, its headline range if the top was no more than ten times the bottom. The midpoint of that range scored 2 inside the measured range, 1 within one and a half times either end, and 0 beyond. An answer with no usable figure scored 0.
- Scoring, software: 2 for a current UK pound price within 5%; 1 for an old price, a dollar conversion within 25%, a wrong billing basis, or a dollar sign on the right number; 0 for dollars only, no figure, or anything further out.
- Checking: a second pass re-read every answer against its score before publishing and changed five scores where the typical range or a currency rule had been applied inconsistently. The scoring script re-runs the table from the dataset.
What this does not prove
- One run on one day. Ask again and some answers will change. The next edition, with the same 44 questions, will show how much.
- Published prices are not the whole market. Many agencies publish no price at all, and their quotes may be closer to what the engines say. This measures how close an AI answer is to what UK sellers publish, which is the price a buyer can check.
- Choosing the “typical” range in a long answer involves judgement. The rule is written down above and applied to all five engines, and every choice is in the dataset.
- Claude cited Whito in 17 answers. Its service score partly reflects Whito’s own figures. The no-Whito score is shown above.
- Gemini and Claude were run in a signed-in account, in temporary or incognito chats. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode were signed out. Signed-in results can differ.
- Whito uses AI tools in its own research, including Claude. The scoring rules are mechanical and the full answer log is published so anyone can re-score it.
Data
The full dataset is free to download: whito-ai-price-accuracy-2026-10-06.csv (220 rows: question, engine, the figures each answer gave, the measured price, the score and a short quote from the answer).
Cite this: Whito (2026), AI price accuracy league table: UK marketing costs, October 2026, whito.co.uk/research/ai-price-accuracy-league-table/, collected 6 October 2026.
Corrections: if you think we have scored an answer wrongly, email hello@whito.co.uk with the question number and engine. We will re-check it against the saved answer and publish any change on this page with its date.
Questions
Which AI is most accurate on UK marketing prices?
In our 6 October 2026 test of 44 questions, Claude scored 73.9% and Perplexity 72.7%, one point apart. Gemini scored 69.3%, ChatGPT 64.8% and Google AI Mode 61.4%. No engine passed 74%.
Why do AI engines quote US dollars for UK software prices?
33 of 115 software answers in our test quoted dollars for tools that show UK visitors a pound price, including every answer about Hootsuite. A likely cause is that these vendors choose the currency from the visitor’s location, so a crawler outside the UK reads dollars.
How much does a small business website cost in the UK?
UK web designers who publish prices charge a median of £520, with the middle half of 28 published packages between £399 and £898 (Whito, June 2026). In our test, four AI engines gave typical ranges with midpoints of £1,900 to £3,250; the fifth gave £100 to £10,000.
Will this be repeated?
Yes. The same 44 questions will be asked again each quarter and the results published as a new dated edition beside this one.
Jacob’s take: AI answers quote prices without saying when they were true (jacobwhitmore.com, 7 October 2026)
The structural checks behind this research run on any website in about twenty seconds. Enter yours and read the full result on the page. Free, and we do not ask for your email.
Run the free Visibility CheckIf your business is named here and you think we have a fact wrong, email hello@whito.co.uk and we will check it and correct it. If you want to respond, send us a statement and we will publish it alongside. Full detail: Corrections, right of reply and removals.
