Why Does AI Get My Service Details Wrong (Booking, Languages, Payment Options, Delivery Speed)?

Why do service details go missing?

• They are shown, not written. Payment logos in a footer image, a flag icon for Spanish, a "Book now" button that opens a third-party widget.
• They are in documents. Price lists and financing terms in PDFs, delivery zones in a map image.
• They load by script. Booking calendars and delivery estimators that appear only after scripts run, which most AI crawlers do not do.
• They are conditional. "Same-day delivery on orders before 1pm within the city" is harder to summarise than "Next-day delivery".
• Directories disagree. A directory profile set up years ago still lists "Languages: English" or "Payment: cash, card".
• Category defaults fill the gap. If nothing says otherwise, an assistant assumes what most businesses of your type do.

What should each detail look like on your site?

Put these facts on the pages that answer the question: a pricing and payment page, a contact page, a delivery page. Repeat the headline fact on your home or service page in one sentence.

Why does Claude describe one orthodontist as affordable but not mention my payment plans?

Because the other practice says it and you do not, at least not where Claude can read it. When Claude searches the web, Anthropic lists Brave Search among its subprocessors for web search. So the pages Claude sees are those Brave's index returns for the question. A competitor with a page titled "Braces cost and payment plans", saying "$0 down, interest-free monthly plans, insurance and HSA/FSA accepted", gives Claude a clear reason to call it affordable. If your plans are described only at the consultation, or in a PDF, Claude has nothing to repeat.

Publish a cost and payment page in plain text:

• Typical cost ranges for the main treatments, if you are comfortable publishing them, with what affects the price.
• Payment plan terms: deposit, monthly range, interest-free or not, length, and whether plans are in-house or through a financing provider.
• Insurance and accounts: whether you accept dental insurance with orthodontic coverage, and HSA or FSA payments.
• A one-line summary on your home and treatment pages: "Interest-free monthly payment plans available."

Then check the page is reachable: that robots.txt allows Claude's search crawler, Claude-SearchBot, and that a Brave search for "[practice name] payment plans" finds the page. How assistants decide who a business is for, including price level, is covered in why AI says your business serves the wrong customers, age group, company size or price.

Why does Claude describe my Spanish support service as an English-only company?

Usually because the Spanish service is invisible from the English pages. Common causes:

• The Spanish version is reached only through a switcher that sets a cookie or changes content by script, with no separate URLs.
• No language annotations. Without hreflang links between versions, crawlers may not connect the Spanish pages to the English ones. Google's documentation notes that Googlebot crawls without an Accept-Language header, and it recommends separate URLs for each language version with hreflang. Other crawlers are no more likely to find language variants served by content negotiation.
• The English pages never mention Spanish. A flag icon is not a sentence.
• Directory profiles list English only.

Fix it with separate Spanish URLs, such as a /es/ path, linked with hreflang. Add a sentence on your English home, service and contact pages: "Support is available in English and Spanish, Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm." Add availableLanguage to your ContactPoint markup, which schema.org defines as a language someone may use with the service. Update the language fields on your directory profiles. Test in both languages. A Spanish question may retrieve your Spanish pages while an English question does not mention them.

Why do AI assistants describe my same-day delivery as next-day shipping?

Because "same-day" usually comes with conditions that the rest of your site contradicts. Common causes:

• A general shipping page that says "delivery in 1–2 business days" alongside the same-day offer.
• Dispatch and delivery confused. "Orders ship the same day" means dispatch, not delivery, and answers mix the two.
• Feeds and markup with longer times. Product feeds and structured data often carry a default transit time of one or more days.
• Conditions left unstated. If the areas and cut-off time are only in a banner image, the offer looks unreliable.
• Marketplaces and retailers listing your products with their own delivery times.

State the offer with its conditions in one sentence: "Same-day delivery in [areas] for orders placed by 1pm, Monday to Saturday. Next-day delivery elsewhere in [country]." Give it its own delivery page, and make the shipping page consistent with it. In Google's merchant listing markup, shippingDetails carries a deliveryTime made up of handlingTime and transitTime, expressed in days. Google's own example uses a minimum handling time of zero days. Set these to match what you actually offer for each area, and match your Merchant Center shipping settings to them. Why markup alone rarely fixes an answer is covered in why Gemini ignores your business and whether schema markup helps.

How do you test what assistants say?

Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features, several times each:

• "Can I book [business] online?"
• "Does [business] offer payment plans?"
• "Does [business] have Spanish-speaking staff?" (and the same in Spanish)
• "Does [business] do same-day delivery in [area]?"
• "Affordable [service] near [place] with payment plans"

For each answer, record whether the detail is correct and which source it cites. Where the answer is wrong, the cited page, or the absence of one, tells you what to fix. Retest a month after changes.

What might an illustrative case look like?

Consider an illustrative florist offering same-day delivery across one city for orders placed by noon, with a Spanish-speaking team. Assistants described it as offering "next-day delivery" and never mentioned Spanish. Its shipping page said "1–3 business days" for national orders. The same-day offer appeared only in a banner image, and the Spanish site sat behind a cookie-based switcher. The florist rewrote the delivery page with the same-day offer, areas and cut-off in text, and moved the national times to a separate section. It gave the Spanish site its own URLs with hreflang, and added "Hablamos español" with hours to the contact page. A month later, most answers described same-day delivery correctly, and Spanish questions cited the Spanish pages.

What do people ask about service details and AI answers?

Do payment logos help at all?

They help visitors, but assistants need the words. Add a text list of payment methods next to the logos.

Should we publish prices to get described as affordable?

Not necessarily exact prices. Ranges, payment plan terms and what is included give assistants enough to describe your options.

How often do these details need checking?

Whenever an offer changes, and quarterly otherwise. Directory profiles are the details most often forgotten.