Why is ChatGPT recommending products we discontinued?
AI tools cache and index old catalog data, meaning they continue suggesting deleted items and outdated prices that no longer exist on your website. Because this traffic bypasses traditional analytics like Google Search Console, business owners have zero visibility into the phantom recommendations until a confused customer reaches out.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
Why is ChatGPT recommending products we discontinued?
- 1Keeping old product pages active with notices that the item is discontinued and linking to replacementsDid this help you?
- 2Updating Google Merchant Center and product feeds to show items as out of stock with replacement notesDid this help you?
- 3Using redirects once traffic to the original product dropsDid this help you?
- 4Running manual checks across different AI search platforms like Perplexity and Claude, or using monitoring tools like Pallas.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“customer messaged us last week asking about a bundle we don't even carry anymore. turned out they got the idea from asking chatgpt for recommendations in our niche. it still had our old price listed too, $149, even though we bumped it to $189 back in january”source ↗
“none of this shows up in google analytics or search console. we had zero visibility into it until an actual customer flagged it”source ↗
“I asked where they saw it and they said ChatGPT recommended it.”source ↗
“So I checked ChatGPT myself and yep, it was still recommending the old product.”source ↗
“Now I’m trying to understand where all of these systems are getting that information from in the first place.”source ↗