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ColaDigital Study · Original Research · November 2026

What AI Tells Shoppers About Cannabis Prices, and How to Fix It

We asked ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude who has the cheapest weed and the best deals in 20 US cities. We then compared every price and deal they gave with the dispensary's own live menu from the same day.

This is our third study and the second on what AI tells cannabis shoppers. The first AI study looked at what AI gets wrong about dispensaries, and our cannabis SEO study looked at who wins Google in 39 cities. This one is about the number a shopper cares about most, the price. More of our work is on the cannabis marketing research page.

Vee PopatBy Vee Popat, founder of ColaDigital · Published November 2026 · Answers collected November 11 and 12, 2026

Vee runs ColaDigital, which helps cannabis retailers get found, and has worked in search marketing for over 20 years.

The Short Answer (November 2026): When we could check an AI's price or deal against the dispensary's own live menu, 64% matched, 22% were close and 14% were wrong. The bigger gap is what we couldn't check. 227 of the 560 prices and deals the AI gave us weren't on the menu we could read. When a price was wrong, the AI said the dispensary costs more than it does 66 times out of 69, and most wrong answers traced to an old page.

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Study at a Glance

  • 5AI assistants
  • 20US cities
  • 400answers
  • 560prices and deals checked

What we found

  • 174 of 271prices and deals we could check matched the dispensary's live menu
  • 37 of 271prices and deals we could check were wrong, and 60 more were close
  • 66 of 69price misses had the AI above the live menu
  • 2 of 83answers naming a cheapest or best option matched a live menu
  • 20 of 97first-time deals were wrong

What We Found, in Short

Shoppers now turn to AI for where to buy weed and what it costs. We wanted to know how close those answers come to the price on the dispensary's own menu. So we asked five AI assistants four price questions in each of 20 US cities, then checked what they said the same day.

The AI tools gave us 560 prices and deals. We could check 271 of them against a live menu or deals page. 174 matched, 60 were close and 37 were wrong. The other 289 didn't get a verdict. 227 weren't visible on the menu page we could read, and 62 weren't answers because the assistant declined or gave no pick.

The misses leaned one way. Where an assistant's price was off, it was above the live menu 66 times and below it 3 times. Shoppers were told a dispensary costs more than it does.

Most wrong answers traced to a page that was old or gone. That's good news for an owner, because an old page is something you can fix.

How the Five AI Assistants ComparedMatched is out of the prices and deals we could check. Each AI tool gave us between 30 and 72 answers we could check, so small gaps don't mean much and we don't rank them.
AI assistantPrices and dealsWe could checkMatchedCloseWrongNo answer
ChatGPT1286141 (67%)1281
Google AI Mode1327244 (61%)16120
Gemini1055936 (61%)1851
Perplexity903023 (77%)4344
Claude1054930 (61%)10916

Perplexity matched most often, but it declined to recommend or compare dispensaries 44 times out of 90. Claude declined 16 times, usually saying it couldn't verify a current price.

What This Means for Your Dispensary

A shopper who asks an AI about your prices is reading an answer you didn't write. In our data that answer was more likely to be too high than too low, and it went wrong most often on the two questions that name your dispensary: your cheapest eighth and your first-time offer.

The cost is quiet. A shopper who hears you're expensive picks another dispensary and you never find out. A shopper who's quoted a first-time deal you stopped running shows up annoyed at the counter.

If an AI tool quotes an old page about your prices, that's the page it trusts. Fix that page, or put a current one on your own site, and the answers follow.

Only 25 of the 560 prices and deals said how old their source was, so a shopper had no way to tell a fresh price from a stale one.

Why We Ran This Study

Our first study, When AI Gets Your Dispensary Wrong, and How to Fix It, looked at what AI says about 40 dispensaries: where they are, when they're open and whether to go. Prices were the weakest part of those answers, and they're the part most likely to change by the week.

Price is also what shoppers weigh most. Price drives where people shop. In Sweed's 2025 shopper survey, 77% of 955 US adults said promotions decide where they buy. And 52% of consumers in SOCi's 2026 Local Discovery Index said they'd used AI to look for a local business during the previous 30 days.

An owner can fix a wrong address in a day. A wrong price, or a deal that ended last spring, costs a sale and nobody tells you. So this study asks one thing: when an AI tells a shopper what your dispensary charges, does your own menu say the same?

The Findings, Ranked

64%of the answers we could check matched the dispensary's live menu
14%of the answers we could check were wrong
66 of 69wrong prices were higher than the live menu
227of 560 prices and deals weren't on the menu we could read

How the 271 Prices and Deals We Could Check Did

  • 174 matched
  • 60 close
  • 37 wrong

Which Way Did the 69 Price Misses Go?

  • 66 higher than the menu
  • 3 lower than the menu

Where Did the 37 Wrong Answers Come From?

  • 23 from an old or dead page
  • 14 from something else
  1. Old pages caused most wrong answers23 of the 37 wrong answers traced to an old or dead source, about 62%. Only 25 of 560 said how old the source was.
  2. Questions that name your dispensary are where the errors show upThe cheapest eighth and first-time deal questions had 185 prices and deals we could check, and 33 were wrong (18%). The open questions about the cheapest weed and best deals had 86 we could check, and 4 were wrong.
  3. First-time deals were the most wrong20 of 97 first-time deals were wrong, more than any other question. Those offers weren't on the dispensary's own pages.
  4. When AI missed on price, it said you cost moreOf 69 prices that missed, 66 were above the live menu and 3 were below it.
  5. Asking for the cheapest or best is the weakest questionOf 83 answers that named a cheapest or best option, 2 matched a live menu and 1 was close. 41 couldn't be checked and 39 weren't answers.
  6. Some answers pointed to the wrong place27 answers pointed to a dispensary in the wrong city, state or location. 5 more pointed to a different dispensary with a similar name.
  7. Tax answers were mostly right, with gapsOf 20 tax and cannabis law statements we could grade, 14 were correct, 4 were incomplete and 2 were out of date. Both out-of-date answers gave Maryland's sales tax as 9%. It's been 12% since July 1, 2025.
  8. The same question didn't always get the same answerWe reran 40 questions a day later. 19 answers were the same, 13 were similar and 8 were different.

Did a Repeat Question Get the Same Answer?

  • 19 same
  • 13 similar
  • 8 different

What We Found, Question by Question

We asked four questions in every city. The first two are open questions that any shopper might type. The last two name a specific dispensary, which is how a shopper checks out a dispensary before visiting. In each city we named one dispensary: the top-rated one if its menu was readable, otherwise the lower-rated one.

How Each Question DidWrong is out of the prices and deals we could check for that question.
QuestionPrices and dealsWe could checkMatchedCloseWrong
Cheapest weed in the city1413928110 (0%)
Best deals in the city1524729144 (9%)
Cheapest eighth at a named dispensary13488532213 (15%)
First-time deal at a named dispensary13397641320 (21%)

Which Dispensary Has the Cheapest Weed?

This question gave us the fewest prices and deals we could check, 39 out of 141. Most answers came back as a list of dispensaries or a promise to check a menu, and what was inside couldn't be matched to a price on a live page. The 39 we could check had no wrong answers, but 11 were close.

Which Dispensary Has the Best Deals?

Deals were easier to check than a ranking, and 4 of 47 were wrong. The 4 wrong answers named deals the dispensary's own page didn't show, or a dispensary in the wrong state.

How Much Is the Cheapest Eighth at a Named Dispensary?

Here the AI tools had a specific dispensary and a specific product, and they still missed. 13 of 88 prices and deals we could check were wrong. Every miss we could give a direction was above the live menu: the assistant named an eighth that cost more than one already on the dispensary's own page.

What Is the First-Time Customer Deal at a Named Dispensary?

This was the hardest question for the assistants, with 20 wrong answers out of 97. A first-time offer is easy for a dispensary to change or drop, and old versions can live on in roundups and listings long after.

What Kind of Answer Went Wrong?

TypePrices and dealsMatchedCloseWrongNot checkedNo answer
Deal279105342410214
Price point173522312779
Cheapest or best832104139
Fact25152170

The 20 Cities We Tested

We kept the same 20 cities as our first study, so the two line up. Every city got two dispensaries, 40 in all, and we put the same four questions to all five AI tools. Here's where they are:

  • Arizona: Phoenix and Tucson
  • California: Fresno, San Diego and San Jose
  • Illinois: Chicago, Peoria and Springfield
  • Maryland: Baltimore
  • Massachusetts: Boston and Springfield
  • Missouri: Columbia, Springfield and St. Louis
  • Nevada: Las Vegas and Reno
  • New Mexico: Albuquerque and Las Cruces
  • Ohio: Cincinnati and Cleveland

If your dispensary is in one of these cities, the findings above are the closest match to what your shoppers see. If it isn't, the fixes still apply, because the same old-page problem shows up everywhere we looked.

The Cases Behind the Findings

First-Time Offers the Dispensary Never Published

For one dispensary, several answers offered 30% off a first purchase, or 99% off a first eighth with a $30 minimum. Its own FAQ said 10% off for first-time customers. Some answers marked the bigger numbers as coming from a third-party listing, and some noted that the sources disagreed. Others stated them as the offer.

For a second dispensary, four answers quoted 20% off a first purchase, one of them from a customer report dated October 2025. Its specials and location pages showed no first-time deal at all.

A Cheapest Eighth That Was Too High

Three answers named $29.75 as a dispensary's cheapest eighth. Its own menu showed one at $22.50 on sale. In another city, an answer built its cheapest eighth from a producer's listing, not the dispensary's menu, and quoted $27. The dispensary's own menu showed one at $10.

The gap runs from a few dollars to more than half the price. A shopper who reads $27 for an eighth and never checks the menu is a sale you lost without knowing it.

A Dispensary From Another State Presented as Local

Asked for the best deals in one Illinois city, an assistant listed a dispensary that belongs to a Massachusetts group and attached prices to it. Separately, Perplexity declined to recommend dispensaries but still showed place cards for dispensaries outside the shopper's city, including one in another state.

An Offers Page That No Longer Existed

For one dispensary, an AI tool quoted a one-cent first-time gram, a half-ounce buy-one-get-one deal with a $1 eighth and a 20% weekend deal. Its online menu showed none of them, and its offers page returned a 404 error.

A Real Offer for the Wrong Customer

An AI tool told shoppers a dispensary gives $25 off $100 on a second visit with a rewards account. Its listing showed $10 off a second visit with a $60 minimum. The $25 off $100 offer is a real one, but it's that dispensary's medical first-order offer.

An AI Tool That Said a Dispensary Might Not Exist

One assistant said it couldn't find a deal listing for a dispensary in a large California city and wasn't sure the dispensary had a location there. It does, and we read its page the day before. The same assistant had named it the day before.

What AI Said About Tax and Cannabis Law

Price answers often came with a tax or legal note. We found 24 such statements in 22 answers and checked each on the state regulator's own page on November 12. We checked 20. The other 4 were rough totals, like “about 30% in taxes,” that depend on local rates we didn't verify.

14 of the 20 were correct. 4 were incomplete and 2 were out of date. None were wrong.

How the 20 Statements We Checked Did

  • 14 correct
  • 4 incomplete
  • 2 out of date
  • Out of date: two Google AI Mode answers gave Maryland's sales tax as 9%, and the rate has been 12% since July 1, 2025
  • Incomplete: two Chicago answers suggested a Michigan trip to save money and didn't warn that Illinois says cannabis shouldn't be taken across state lines
  • Incomplete: one answer gave Illinois excise as 10% to 25% and left out the 20% rate on infused products
  • Incomplete: one answer rounded Missouri's general sales tax to 4% and left out the 3% local tax

Google AI Mode made 13 of the 24 statements, Claude 7, Gemini 3 and ChatGPT 1. Perplexity offered to explain taxes but gave no figures.

How to Fix Your Prices in AI Answers

Everything below is something you control. We've put the fixes in the order of how many wrong answers they would have prevented in our data.

Date Every Deal and Retire the Old Ones

Old offers did the most damage, and first-time offers had the most errors of any question. An assistant will quote a deal from a roundup or a customer report long after the dispensary stopped running it.

  • Search your own first-time offer in a private window and note every page that still shows an old version
  • Remove ended offers from your site and from every third-party listing you can edit
  • Put a start and end date on every promotion so an old page can't pass as current
  • Keep one standing page for your first-time offer, and check that your offers page doesn't return an error

Keep Your Menu Current and Readable

An assistant can only quote the price it can read. When a menu sits inside an app, behind a gate or on page 7 of a list, the assistant falls back on whatever third-party page it finds. Our guide to making your dispensary website easy for AI to read shows how to set up a menu so it can be quoted. Our dispensary menu SEO guide covers how to build the menu page itself.

  • Open your menu in a private window and look at your cheapest eighth, the way an assistant would
  • Put your menu or deals on a page of your own site that a search tool can read, not only inside an app or a menu behind a sign-in
  • Take sold-out products off the top of the page, or mark them clearly

Make Your Location Details Match Everywhere

We found 27 answers that pointed to a dispensary in the wrong city, state or location. AI tools mix up chains, near-duplicate names and dispensaries with the same name in different states.

  • Make each location's address, city and hours read the same on your site and on Google
  • Claim your listings on the menu and review sites shoppers use, and keep them current
  • Search your dispensary name with your city and see whether a different dispensary with a similar name shows up first

State Your Tax Rate and Update It

Two Google AI Mode answers told Baltimore shoppers Maryland's sales tax is 9%. The rate rose to 12% on July 1, 2025. If a state changes its rate, assistants keep the old one until a current page says otherwise.

  • State the current tax rate on your site if you can show it clearly
  • Update it the week the state changes it, and date the line

Curious what AI is quoting for your prices today? I'll run these checks on your menu and tell you what I find.

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How to Test What AI Quotes for Your Menu

You can run our test on your own dispensary in about 20 minutes. Use a private browser window and sign out where you can. Begin a new chat for each question, and use a temporary or incognito chat if the assistant offers one. Google AI Mode may still tailor results to you, even when you're signed out.

Put each of these to all five assistants, in a new chat every time:

  • “Which dispensary has the cheapest weed in [your city]?”
  • “Which dispensary has the best deals in [your city]?”
  • “How much does the cheapest eighth of flower cost at [your dispensary] in [your city] right now?”
  • “What's the first-time customer deal at [your dispensary] in [your city]?”

We asked these four exactly as written above, so you can compare your answers with ours.

Then open your own live menu and deals page and compare. For every price or deal an assistant gives, write down whether it matches, how far off it is and which source it cited. That source is where your fix starts.

Rather not spend the time? We'll run the check for you.

Have Us Check Your Dispensary

We'll send you:

  • What AI tools tell customers about your prices, deals and location
  • What Google and AI tools can and can't read on your menu and website
  • The first three things we'd fix

What Fixing Local Visibility Has Done for Our Clients

This study comes out of the daily work of getting dispensaries found. Here's what that work has produced:

  • Sales through one dispensary's own web shop climbed 96% in its first 60 days with us (read the case study)
  • A dispensary with delivery went from missing Google's top three map results in January to #3 about 90 days later (read the case study)
  • Over 100 cannabis operators have hired us since 2017

How We Ran the Study

  • We picked 20 US cities across legal markets and asked each of five assistants (ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude) the four questions above, 400 answers in all
  • We asked in a private or incognito window with a VPN set to each city, and checked the dispensary's own live menu or deals page the same day
  • We pulled 560 prices and deals out of the 400 answers and checked each one, then marked it as a match, close, wrong, not checked or no answer
  • A match is within $0.50 or 2% of the menu price. Close is within 15% or $3, or a minor difference in the offer, such as the right deal at another location of the same chain
  • Not checked means the page we could read didn't show that product, or the menu was behind a sign-in, in-store only or only partly read. We never counted those as right or wrong
  • We also logged the direction of every price miss, whether the answer said how old its source was, and whether the source was old or gone
  • To double-check our work, ChatGPT checked a sample of 127 of them without seeing our grades. It agreed with us 74% of the time at first and 90% after we tightened the rules
  • We reran 40 questions a day later and compared the answers
  • We checked tax and legal statements against state regulator pages on November 12

The data file has every grade, with dispensaries shown as codes and not names.

Limits of This Study

  • Timestamps are approximate, and prices change daily, so this is a one-day snapshot
  • Some Claude answers were collected on November 12, a day after we read the menus, and Claude's message limit meant its cheapest and best-deal mentions weren't in the same-day menu ranking for 9 of the 10 second-day cities
  • We read two St. Louis dispensaries on November 12, not November 11
  • We often read only the first page of a long menu, so a lower price may sit further down
  • Many menus live on platforms like Dutchie and Weedmaps, and some sit behind a sign-in or are in-store only, so 227 of the 560 couldn't be checked
  • One dispensary's menu had an expired deals heading that we treated as not current
  • Perplexity declined many questions, and 44 of its 90 got no answer
  • We pulled the prices and deals out of the answers ourselves, and ChatGPT checked a sample of 127, not all 560
  • We pulled out the tax and legal statements in one pass and checked them once
  • The 20 cities are examples, not a ranking of US prices, and we don't rank the assistants

Download the data we used: every price and deal we checked, the tax and legal statements, the rerun results and the README. The charts are here too: by question and by AI assistant. Dispensaries appear as codes, not names. If you use the data or charts, please link back to this page and name ColaDigital as the source.

What Owners Ask About This Price Study

Does AI Know Current Cannabis Prices?

Not reliably. Where we could check an answer against the dispensary's own live menu, 64% matched and 14% were wrong. But 227 of the 560 prices and deals couldn't be checked from the menu page we could read, so how accurate those were is still unknown.

Why Is AI Usually Too High on Cannabis Prices?

In our data, most wrong answers came from an old or dead page. 23 of the 37 wrong answers traced to one, and the live menu was usually cheaper. When a price missed, the assistant was above the live price 66 times out of 69.

Which AI Assistant Is Most Accurate on Cannabis Prices?

We don't rank them. Each AI tool gave us between 30 and 72 answers we could check, and the gaps are small. Perplexity matched most often, 23 of 30, but gave no answer to 44 of its 90 prices and deals. Claude declined 16 times, usually because it couldn't verify a current price.

Can I Trust an AI's Answer About the Cheapest Weed?

Treat it as a lead, then check the dispensary's menu. Only 2 of the 83 answers that named a cheapest or best option matched a live menu.

Which Fix Should Come First?

Remove old offers and date every promotion. Old pages caused 23 of the 37 wrong answers, and first-time offers had more errors than any other question.

Can I Use Your Data and Charts?

Vee Popat, ColaDigital. “What AI Tells Shoppers About Cannabis Prices, and How to Fix It.” Published November 2026 at https://coladigital.ca/ai-cannabis-price-answers-study/. If you quote our charts or numbers, please cite ColaDigital and add a link back here.

Sources

We checked the tax and legal sources below on November 12, 2026. The two surveys were last checked on November 9, 2026, and any date inside an entry is the source's own.

  1. SOCi 2026 Local Discovery Index: soci.ai/insights/local-discovery-index

  2. Sweed, The 2025 Cannabis Shopper Experience Report: online survey of 955 US adults 21+, October 6 to 10, 2025, conducted by Wired Research (info.sweedpos.com)

  3. Maryland Comptroller, sales and use tax notice on the cannabis rate change, May 22, 2025

  4. Illinois Department of Revenue, cannabis tax FAQ

  5. Illinois Cannabis Regulation Oversight Office, FAQ on transporting cannabis across state lines

  6. Ohio Revised Code 3796.40, version in force from March 20, 2026

  7. Nevada Department of Taxation, cannabis tax page and Tax Fundamentals for Cannabis Establishments (January 2025)

  8. Massachusetts Department of Revenue, tax rates for marijuana (mass.gov)

  9. California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, cannabis retailers page

  10. Missouri Department of Revenue, marijuana tax page; KBIA, April 4, 2023, on Columbia and Boone County 3% taxes

  11. New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, 2025 tax changes

  12. Arizona Department of Revenue, adult-use marijuana page

More Research From ColaDigital

Prices are one piece of how a shopper picks a dispensary. These two studies cover the rest.

Browse all of it on our research page.

Find Out What AI Says Your Dispensary Charges

Want to know what AI is telling shoppers about your menu, prices and deals? Book a 30-minute call with Vee and he'll go through the answers with you, then list what to fix first. We handle fixes like these inside our dispensary SEO work. Our dispensary SEO case study shows what that did for one dispensary.

Book a Discovery Call