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The last questions a buyer asks before signing are rarely about the product. How long do we have to commit? How do we get out if it doesn't work? What happens to our data when we leave? I call these the exit question, and most B2B websites don't answer it.
In the Storylane Buyability Index, 236 websites were asked at least one question about minimum contract length or commitment. 159 of them, two in three, didn't fully answer a single one. As a group, commitment questions get a full answer less often than any of the nine topics the index sorts questions into.
My argument is simple. A buyer reads silence on the exit question as lock-in, and you can fix it with a few plain sentences on your pricing page.
Where do these numbers come from?
The Storylane Buyability Index writes the questions a likely buyer would ask about a company, then checks the company's website for each answer. It grades every answer as full, partial, gated (a "contact us" where that is reasonable), sent to sales (a dodge where a straight answer was expected) or nothing found. Between September 8 and October 20, 2026, people ran it on 529 B2B websites, which produced 10,580 questions.
Two limits apply to every number below. The questions are generated for each company to reflect what a buyer would plausibly ask. They are not logged from real buyers. And the 529 sites were picked by whoever ran the scans, so they are not a random sample of B2B.
The index has no "exit" topic, so I built one. I matched the question text against three groups of phrases and read the matches by hand to remove false hits (a "minimum order quantity" on a parts supplier, say, or a question about whether data ever leaves a region). That left 463 exit questions on 345 sites.
What is the exit question?
It has three parts, and buyers ask them in roughly this order:
- Commitment. Is there a minimum contract length or spend? Can we go month to month?
- Getting out. Can we cancel early? Is there a notice period, a break clause or an exit fee?
- Data on exit. What happens to our data, content and work if we leave? Can we export it, and who owns it?
None of these is a sign the buyer plans to leave. They are how a careful buyer measures the size of the bet. Every question about commitment in the data was tagged as one a procurement or finance buyer would ask.
How often do B2B websites answer the exit question?
Less often than anything else. Here is each part next to every other question in the index.
| Question group (Storylane Buyability Index) | Questions (sites) | Fully answered | Partly answered | Gated or sent to sales | Nothing found |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commitment and contract length | 250 (236) | 32.4% | 36.8% | 12.8% | 18.0% |
| Getting out (cancel, notice, exit terms) | 78 (76) | 46.2% | 30.8% | 3.8% | 19.2% |
| Data on exit | 135 (134) | 54.1% | 34.1% | 0.7% | 11.1% |
| All exit questions | 463 (345) | 41.0% | 35.0% | 7.8% | 16.2% |
| Every other question | 10,117 (529) | 59.4% | 33.1% | 1.7% | 5.8% |
Commitment questions were fully answered 32.4% of the time. The index sorts all 10,580 questions into nine topics, and the weakest of those, support, still got a full answer 43.7% of the time. Pricing questions as a whole got one 46.4% of the time. B2B websites say how much far more readily than they say for how long.
Exit questions found nothing at all 16.2% of the time, close to three times the rate for every other question (5.8%).
Why do websites go quiet on contract length?
The obvious explanation is the one I gave for the assurance gap: high-stakes answers belong to legal and finance, nobody in those teams owns a web page, and so the site ends up with a vague summary. That explains a lot of partial answers. It doesn't explain this table.
Look at the gated column. Across the whole index, 2.0% of questions were gated or sent to sales. For commitment questions it was 12.8%, more than six times as often. Across all pricing questions it was 10.3%. So on contract length, the silence is often a choice. Companies decide not to say.
I have a theory for why. Contract length is one of the few levers a sales team can trade. An annual deal for a discount, a two-year term for a price lock. If the website says "12 months minimum", the rep loses something to give away. So the term stays off the site, and the rep keeps it for the call.
The data-on-exit row supports this. It is the best-answered part of the exit question, and 32 of its 73 full answers came from trust, security or legal pages. Data processing agreements and privacy policies have to say what happens to customer data at the end of a contract, so somebody already wrote it down. Only one full answer came from a pricing page. The part regulation makes you write gets answered. The part that is a commercial choice doesn't.
What does a buyer hear when the website says nothing?
They hear the worst case. Economists have a name for this, unraveling: if a seller with good terms would gain by stating them, a buyer who sees no statement assumes the terms are bad. A company with month-to-month plans would say so. So a site that says nothing about term length reads as "annual minimum, maybe more". A site that says nothing about cancelling reads as "you can't".
That is a costly guess to leave in a buyer's head, because the exit question comes late. The buyer has already decided the product fits. Now they are working out how much they risk if they are wrong, and they are often doing it for a boss or a finance lead who never saw your website.
The gap is widest for the buyers with the most to lose. Commitment questions a self-serve buyer would ask were fully answered 51.7% of the time. The ones that need high assurance, from a buyer about to sign for a team, were fully answered 22.8% of the time.
Doesn't publishing terms cost you leverage?
This is the strongest case for silence, and it is partly right. Some terms really are negotiable, and a sales team should be able to trade them.
But you can publish the standard position and still negotiate. "Plans are annual by default. Monthly is available on the starter plan. Multi-year terms are open to discussion" gives the buyer a floor and gives your rep the same room as before. What you give up is the chance to surprise the buyer on the second call, which is a poor way to start a contract anyway.
The other worry is that easy exits invite churn. I don't think a pricing page decides whether a customer stays. The product does. The buyers you lose to silence are the careful ones, who never book the call because they couldn't size the risk. You never see them leave.
How do you answer the exit question on your website?
Put it where the buyer already looks for commitment: the pricing page. Only 25 of the 81 full answers to commitment questions in the index came from a pricing page. The rest were scattered across help centres, docs, legal pages and pages with no clear home, which matches what we found about answers that live in the docs, far from where buyers start.
An exit section can be five lines. The wording below is illustrative, not anyone's real terms:
- Minimum term: "Monthly and annual plans. Enterprise contracts start at 12 months."
- Cancelling: "Cancel monthly plans any time from settings. Annual plans end at the close of the term."
- Notice and renewal: "Annual plans renew automatically. Give 30 days' notice to stop renewal."
- Your data: "Export everything as CSV before you leave. We delete it within 30 days of the contract ending."
- What is negotiable: "Term length and renewal dates can be discussed for enterprise plans."
Then link it from the places the exit question gets asked: the trust page, the security page, the FAQ. If you publish a data processing agreement, the data line is already written. Copy it into plain words.
The same logic applies to the other question buyers ask late, how long setup takes. And if you are still deciding whether to show prices at all, our piece on putting pricing on your website covers that choice. Contract terms are an easier call. You can publish them without publishing a number.
Can a website agent answer the exit question?
We sell one, RepX, so weigh this with that in mind. An agent is useful here because the exit question rarely comes first. A buyer asks about features, then integrations, then, three questions in, "and if it doesn't work out?" RepX is trained on your website, docs, files and sales transcripts, so it can answer that from the terms you have written down, at whatever hour the buyer asks. Qualified leads and conversation summaries flow to HubSpot, Salesforce and Slack, so your team sees who asked about terms before the call.
Buyers also ask an agent what happens to the data they share in the chat. We covered that in what B2B buyers ask about AI agents and data privacy.
The one thing to do on Monday
Ask your own website the three exit questions. How long do I have to commit? How do I get out? What happens to my data? If the answer to any of them is a "contact us" or nothing, a careful buyer has already assumed the worst. Write the standard position in plain words and put it on the pricing page.
If you want to see how an agent answers late-stage questions like these from your own terms, book a walkthrough with our team.