When your chatbot quotes an old price, the figure is still sitting in one of its knowledge sources: a page that still says it, a page you deleted from the site but not from the bot, an older uploaded file, some pasted text or a Q&A pair. Find which source holds it, correct or remove it there, then ask the same question again. The fix takes minutes once you know where to look.
We cover wrong answers in general in how to debug a chatbot that's giving wrong answers, and the business side of price mistakes in when your chatbot quotes the wrong price. This guide is the tracing job itself: following one wrong number back to where it lives.
Why the bot still "knows" the old figure
A SpideyChat bot doesn't memorise your prices. Every time a visitor asks something, it searches everything it has been taught for the five passages closest to the question and answers from those. Each passage carries a label saying where it came from, and you can see the same labels in the dashboard:
- Crawled pages are labelled by their path, such as
/pricingor/services/boiler-repair. - Uploaded files are labelled by file name, such as
price-list-2025.pdf. - Pasted text carries the label you typed, or
manualif you left it blank. - Q&A pairs added with "Add a Q&A" are labelled
manual-qa. Entries in the FAQ section live in their own list further down the chatbot's page.
If the old figure exists in any one of those, it competes with the new one. A passage written as "Annual service: £95" will match "how much is a boiler service?" very closely, whether the £95 is current or not.
Step 1: reproduce it and write it down
Open the chatbot preview or your live site and ask the question the visitor asked. Then ask it twice more in different words: "what does a service cost", "price for annual service". Write down the exact figure each time. If the old price appears in one phrasing and not another, two sources disagree, which narrows the search.
Then open your chatbot's Test suite (linked from its page in the dashboard) and add the question with the correct price as the expected text. The test fails right now, which is the point: it becomes your proof that the fix worked.
Step 2: list every place the old figure could live
Work through these in order. The first two cause most cases.
| Where the old price lives | How it happens | Where to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| A page that is still live | An old landing page, a promotion or a service page nobody updated | Edit or unpublish the page, then re-crawl |
| A page you removed from the site | Re-crawling only replaces pages it reads again | Delete that path's source under Manage knowledge |
| An older uploaded file | Uploading a new version adds it next to the old one | Delete the old file's source, keep the new one |
| Pasted text or a "Teach your bot" session | A price typed in during setup | Edit or delete the entry |
| A Q&A pair or FAQ entry | Written once, never revisited | Edit the answer in place |
The removed-page case catches people out. Say you had /spring-offer with a lower price and took it down in June. The next crawl never visits it, so nothing replaces its entries, and the bot still holds the offer. The same goes for a page you unlinked from your homepage: if your site has no sitemap, the crawler finds pages by following homepage links, so an unlinked page simply stops being refreshed.
Step 3: search your own content for the number
Search for the old figure itself, not the topic. Use your website builder's content search or open the pages that mention the service. Check the places people forget: footers, comparison tables, "from" prices on category pages, and old blog posts if you ticked "Also learn blog / news posts" when you crawled.
Then open your chatbot's page, find Manage knowledge and click "Show sources". Expand any source that might hold a price: the pricing path, any file with "price" or a year in its name, manual and manual-qa. Each entry is shown as plain text, so an old figure is easy to spot. There is no search box in that list, which is another reason to start from the number in Step 1.
Step 4: fix it at the source, then refresh
Fix the original first, then bring the bot up to date.
- Live page: correct it on your site, then run the crawler again from the Website tool. On Starter and above you can re-crawl whenever you like, up to 150 pages per run. Re-crawling a page replaces that page's older entries once the new text is stored.
- Removed page: delete its source under Manage knowledge. Deleting a source removes every entry that came from it.
- Uploaded file: delete the old file's source, then upload the current version. A version number or date in the file name ("price-list-2026-10.pdf") makes the next swap obvious.
- Pasted text, Q&A or FAQ: edit the entry directly. Edits are re-indexed when you save.
On the Free plan, the crawler runs once, as a 10-page setup for your first chatbot, so you can't re-crawl. Edit the affected entry under Manage knowledge instead: change the figure and save. Keep the website itself correct too, because visitors read it.
When a Q&A pair helps, and when it doesn't
The tempting shortcut is to add a Q&A pair saying "Our annual service is £110" and move on. It often doesn't stick. Q&A pairs aren't given priority over other knowledge; they are ranked alongside page text by how closely they match the question. If the old £95 passage is still there, some phrasings will keep finding it.
So remove the old figure first. After that, a Q&A pair is useful when customers ask about price in words your pages don't use, for example "what's the call-out charge" when your page says "visit fee". Keep the answer short and include what the price depends on, so the bot doesn't present a starting price as a quote.
Step 5: re-test and keep the test
Ask your three phrasings again. All of them should give the new figure. Then open the Test suite and run it: the test you added in Step 1 should pass.
Leave that test in place. The next time prices change, re-run the suite after updating your site and re-crawling, and any question still returning the old figure fails straight away instead of being found by a customer. It also helps to watch Answer gaps in the dashboard for a week or two, since a visitor who gets an answer they know is wrong may give it a thumbs down, and those land there.
If you want to see how a chatbot answers from your current pages before changing anything on your own setup, try SpideyChat on your website address. It reads your public pages and builds a working assistant in about a minute, so you can ask it your price questions and see which pages it answers from.