We asked the AIs what commercial cleaning costs. None of them knows.
Increasingly, this is how buying starts: not ten blue links, an answer. So in August 2026 we put the exact question an Adelaide office manager would ask — “How much does commercial cleaning cost in Adelaide?” — to the AI assistants people actually use, word for word, and recorded what came back. Logged out wherever the surface allowed it, so the answers are what a stranger gets, not what our history earns us. Two runs made on accounts too personalised to report fairly were excluded, and we say so.
Four surfaces, zero bookable prices
ChatGPT (logged out). A$35–65 per hour, $60–150 a visit for a small office. Ended by asking our size, type and frequency.
Microsoft Copilot (logged out). $35–60 per hour — and a per-metre figure ten times lower than everyone else's. Ended by asking for our details; appended a sponsored ad for a lead-gen marketplace.
Google AI Mode. $45–65 per hour, $1.76–3.44 per m², monthly ranges by office size. Ended by asking our square meterage and frequency.
Perplexity (logged out). Refused to answer without creating an account. The price of the answer was our email address.
Every range above is roughly as wide as the industry’s own pricing guides — and the per-square-metre figures disagree with each other by up to a factor of ten. If you asked two of these assistants to budget the same 400 m² office, their answers would not be in the same postcode.
An AI can only cite what someone published
This is not the AIs failing. Look at what they cite: SEO cost-guide pages — several of them from the same 94 websites our transparency study audited, where not one operator publishes a firm price. The assistants are faithfully summarising a market that has never written the answer down. Garbage ranges in, garbage ranges out.
And notice how every answer ends: tell me your size, your industry, your frequency… The AI reproduces the quote funnel — it cannot replace a sales process that is the only place the real number exists. The words that fill the gap have their own translation guide.
We’re publishing the answer they can’t find
The disclosure, as always: Sarto publishes real, dated, firm prices for Adelaide commercial cleaning — computed by the same engine that will price your specific site in about 20 seconds. That makes this audit self-interested, and it also makes it a testable bet: we will re-run the same question, the same way, every quarter, and publish what changes. The day an AI answers “what does commercial cleaning cost in Adelaide” with an actual number, you will know where it learned it.