How Do I Test Whether AI Gives Customers an Outdated Order Tracking URL?

Why does this matter?

Order tracking is one of the most frequent support questions, and customers who ask an assistant instead of visiting your site will follow whatever link it gives. A wrong link has three possible outcomes:

• A broken page, which produces a support ticket and a frustrated customer.
• A redirect to the wrong place, such as an old platform's generic page.
• A page you do not control, if an old domain lapsed and someone else registered it. That can become a phishing page collecting order numbers, addresses or card details.

Old URLs linger in AI systems for a long time. A December 2024 Vercel and MERJ analysis found that 34.82% of fetches by OpenAI's crawler hit pages returning 404 errors, many of them requests for outdated files. That measures crawler behaviour rather than answers, but it shows why an old tracking path can keep surfacing long after you change it.

Which questions should you test?

• "How do I track my [brand] order?"
• "[Brand] order tracking link"
• "Where is my [brand] package?"
• "How do I return something to [brand]?"
• "[Brand] customer service phone number"
• "How do I cancel a [brand] order?"

Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI features, with web search on and, where the assistant allows it, off, three to five times each. Include the countries you ship to, since help pages and domains may differ by market.

How do you check each link?

1. Open it in a private browser window, and note the status code and final destination.
2. Check the domain against your list of current and former domains. Look closely for lookalikes, such as extra words, hyphens or different endings.
3. Check the destination: is it your current tracking page, a relevant help page, a generic home page, or an error?
4. Check the certificate and registration of any unfamiliar domain.
5. Record the source the assistant cited, if any.

Check phone numbers the same way, against your published numbers. What to do if an assistant gives out a scammer's number is covered in what to do if ChatGPT gives customers a scammer's phone number.

How do you classify the results?

Where do outdated tracking links come from?

• Store platform changes, which move tracking and account pages to new paths or subdomains.
• Carrier changes, which leave old carrier links in help articles.
• Old help-centre articles and FAQs that were never updated.
• Order confirmation email templates posted publicly by customers or kept in archives.
• Social profiles, marketplace pages and link-in-bio pages with old links.
• Former domains after a rebrand.

How do you fix it?

• Redirect every old tracking, account and returns URL to its current equivalent, and keep the redirects in place for years, not months.
• Keep former domains registered, and redirect them. A lapsed domain can be bought and used against your customers.
• Publish one order-help page in plain text: how to track, where the tracking page is, how to return and how to contact you. Link to it from your footer and help centre.
• Update help articles, email templates and profiles with the current links.
• Make the tracking page itself readable without scripts where possible, with a short text explanation above any form.
• Report wrong answers through each assistant's feedback option, especially unsafe links.
• Recheck after every platform, carrier or domain change, and monthly otherwise.

Retesting after site changes is covered in how to retest the same AI prompts after updating your website.

What might an illustrative case look like?

Consider an illustrative clothing retailer that moved to a new store platform and changed its tracking page from /pages/track to /apps/tracking. Months later, customer service was still getting calls from people whose tracking link "didn't work". Testing showed that ChatGPT and Perplexity gave the old path in most answers, citing an old help article. Gemini sometimes gave a URL on the retailer's former domain, which the retailer still owned but had stopped redirecting. The retailer added redirects from both old paths and the former domain and updated the help article. It published a plain-text order-help page. Within a month, most answers gave working links, and tracking calls fell.

What do people ask about AI and order tracking links?

Can I stop assistants inventing URLs?

Not entirely. You can make the real page easy to find and cite, and make sure plausible old paths redirect to it.

Should I register lookalike domains?

For large brands with frequent impersonation, registering obvious variants can help. At minimum, keep all former domains.

Is it a problem if assistants link to the carrier's tracking site?

Not if it works. But a link to your own order-help page keeps customers with you and lets you update the route when carriers change.