Wrong AI Prices and the DMCC Act: What Section 230 Makes a UK Retailer Spell Out, and Why a Fetcher Reads the Same Line

Section 230 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 lists the information an invitation to purchase has to carry, and the total price is on that list. Two details matter more to a British retailer than the headline does: subsection (4) says the total price "includes any fees, taxes, charges or other payments that the consumer will necessarily incur if the consumer purchases the product", and subsection (9) says omitting information includes providing it "in a way that is unclear or untimely" or so the consumer "is unlikely to see it". The Act is a specification for your own page rather than for an assistant's answer, so it hands you nothing to aim at ChatGPT or Gemini. What it hands you is a list of facts that have to be plainly readable, which is also the condition for being quoted correctly. Everything below is a reading of the statutory wording plus our own measurements. None of it is legal advice, and a solicitor is the right person for the legal half.

What section 230 actually names

The section reads in one sitting at legislation.gov.uk, DMCC Act 2024, section 230, which we read on 16 October 2026. Its commencement note records it in force from 6 April 2025 by S.I. 2025/272, and section 227 on misleading omissions commenced the same day with the same wording about information given unclearly. Subsection (2) lists the information. For a retailer the practical items are these.

• The main characteristics of the product, to the extent appropriate for the medium and the product.
• The total price, or, where part of it cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, how that part will be calculated. Subsection (5) adds that the explanation must let the consumer work the total out, with as much prominence as a total price would have had.
• The identity of the trader, defined in subsection (6) as its name and, if different, the name it trades under.
• The business address, the service address if different, and any business email address.
• Freight, delivery or postal charges including taxes outside the total price that the consumer may choose to incur, or the fact that they may be payable where they cannot be calculated in advance.
• The existence of a right of withdrawal or cancellation, for products that involve one.
• Where your practice on payment, delivery, performance or complaint handling departs from your published practice, the practice you are currently operating.

Subsection (10) defines an invitation to purchase as a practice giving a consumer information that indicates a product's characteristics and its price and that enables, or purports to enable, them to decide whether to buy. A product listing page is the ordinary example.

Two things commonly said about this Act that the text does not support

The first is that hidden mandatory fees are on the list of practices banned outright. They are not. Schedule 20, the list of practices unfair in all circumstances, runs to 32 paragraphs and we read it the same day. Its price entries are the bait advertising paragraphs, 5 and 6, and paragraph 13 covers fake and incentivised reviews. The total price duty sits in section 230, reached through section 225(4)(b), which makes omitting material information from an invitation to purchase one of the ways a practice is unfair. Section 225(1) is the prohibition: "Unfair commercial practices are prohibited."

The second is that the Act gives a retailer a route when an assistant quotes a price that was never yours. Section 225(3) defines a commercial practice as "an act or omission by a trader". The Act regulates what you publish and says nothing about what a third party generates. A solicitor can say where you stand; this page can say where the lever is, and the lever is the page.

The same line, read twice

Set the statutory list beside what a machine can retrieve and the two ask for the same thing in the same place.

What section 230(2) names	What makes it readable by a fetcher
The total price, including anything the buyer must pay	The figure in the served HTML, in pounds, not injected after scripts run
How part of a price will be calculated, with equal prominence	The rule in text beside the figure, not in an accordion that opens on click
Optional delivery and postal charges, named separately	Destinations and charges as text, so an answer about delivery to Inverness or Belfast has something to quote
Trader identity and the name you trade under	One spelling and one legal suffix, repeated across the site and every listing
A cancellation right where one exists	A sentence on the product page, not only a link to a policy

The mismatch to hunt first sits between the markup and the figure on screen. Google's guidance is that structured data should describe what the page actually shows, so a price carried only in the markup describes something no shopper saw. The trade and consumer two price problem, where most British catalogues go wrong, is worked through in the VAT inclusive price is the number an assistant repeats.

When an assistant quotes a figure that is not your price

The diagnosis is nearly always a source problem. Your pricing exists in more places than you think: the page as served, the feed, the marketplace listing, an affiliate page, an old blog post, a rate card, an archived copy of last season. Two public figures that contradict each other can end up quoted side by side, and a shopper reading that trusts neither of them. Enumerate every public source carrying a price with its URL, figure and the date you read it, then correct the oldest first. The protocol, with the five verdicts that stop a tax difference being counted as a wrong price, is in why AI quotes an old price. Where the complaint is about somebody else's advertising, the Advertising Standards Authority is a separate route with separate powers, set out in what the ASA can do and what the CAP Code lets you claim.

The measurement behind the advice

Our wide audit ran on 16 October 2026: 630 questions, two engines, three markets, 1,260 readings and not one unusable. It recorded 20,143 citations across 4,947 domains. The source mix was 82.0% vendor or agency own site, 12.3% official platform documentation, 3.2% news or large publisher, 1.9% social or community and 0.7% review directory. Six readings in 1,260 named our own domain, Britain accounting for 3 of those, all on ChatGPT. An earlier set eleven days before returned 597 usable readings, 3 citations and 85.6% on a vendor's own site, so this is a second reading of the same result. Its question set and every count sit in what AI assistants actually cite across 597 readings.

Three things that measurement is not. Only ChatGPT and Gemini were asked. The three other surfaces the product reads, Perplexity, Claude and AI Overviews, were absent from this run and nothing here speaks for them. Nothing in it was a retail measurement, so a shopping citation rate cannot be taken from it. And it holds no price accuracy rate for any market, which is why nothing here quotes one. The figure to act on is the 82.0%: when four citations in five land on somebody's own website, the page carrying your total price is the asset.

Questions about the DMCC Act total price rule and AI answers

Is a retailer bound by a price an assistant invents?

The Act regulates a trader's own acts and omissions and says nothing about what a third party produces. Contract formation is a solicitor's question and nothing here is legal advice. What is in your control is making your own total price the easiest number to read correctly.

Does the total price have to include VAT?

Section 230(4) says the total price includes any fees, taxes, charges or other payments the consumer will necessarily incur on purchase. Whether a specific charge is one of those is for a solicitor, and the consumer and trade split is on the UK ecommerce page linked above.

Is drip pricing one of the practices banned in all circumstances?

Schedule 20 runs to 32 paragraphs and the total price duty is not among them. It sits in section 230, reached through section 225(4)(b). Schedule 20's price entries are bait advertising at paragraphs 5 and 6, and paragraph 13 covers fake and incentivised reviews.

Where does delivery sit?

Section 230(2)(g) treats freight, delivery or postal charges the consumer may choose to incur as information in its own right, separate from the total price, and where they cannot be calculated in advance the fact that they may be payable is given instead.

One list, two readers

The useful accident in section 230 is that the statute and the machine want the same thing. A total price a consumer is unlikely to miss is a total price a fetcher finds. A delivery exception written out for a shopper in the Highlands is one an answer can quote. British retailers did most of this work in spring 2025 and left it in accordions, images and policy pages nobody links, so moving it into the served text of the product page is a week of editing. If you are deciding whether to buy that work in, the questions a British online retailer should settle first are in scoping the work for an online retailer. AI Knows Us sells that measurement and the pages that follow it, so read us arguing for dated, checkable facts with our invoice in mind.