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Pricing is the question buyers ask most. It is also the one B2B websites most often answer with "contact us". I run marketing at Storylane, and in the Storylane Buyability Index we checked 10,580 buyer questions against 529 B2B websites. Pricing made up about one in seven of the questions, and 88% of the answers that sent the buyer to sales.
Real buyers behave the same way. In internal Storylane data on RepX website conversations, pricing was the biggest single topic buyers asked an AI website agent about. Across 26,382 buyer questions, price was close to four times as likely to be the first question with the agent as on a call with a rep.
So I think "should we put pricing on the website?" is the wrong debate. Hiding price doesn't stop the question. It moves the question somewhere you can't see it, usually at a moment that costs you more.
Where these numbers come from (and what they can't tell you)
There are two datasets here. Both are Storylane's, and both have limits worth knowing before you quote them.
The Storylane Buyability Index. Between Sep 8 and Oct 20, 2026, the Storylane Buyability Index checked 529 B2B websites against 10,580 buyer questions. It graded each one as fully answered, partly answered, fairly gated, sent to sales, or not on the site. A fair gate is an enterprise topic like a custom SLA, where "talk to us" is normal. Two caveats apply every time. The questions are generated for each company, as what a buyer would plausibly ask. They are not logged from real buyers. And the 529 sites were chosen by the people who ran scans, so this is not a random sample of B2B websites. Topic groups come from keywords, so they show the shape, not exact counts.
Internal Storylane data on RepX website conversations (published in Modern Buying Trends 2026). These are real questions buyers asked RepX, Storylane's AI website agent. There are 26,382 questions across 19 deployments from June 2025 to August 2026. We compare them with 5,687 prospect questions from 402 human discovery calls. A hand-coded subset of 2,225 questions from five deployments gives the topic shares. The caveats are that these are buyers on our customers' sites who chose to talk to an agent, the mix of questions varies a lot by company, and buyers who left without asking anything are not counted. The agent versus rep comparison is written up in full in our post on how buyers split questions between agents and reps.
One dataset shows what websites say. The other shows what buyers ask when someone is finally listening. Pricing is where they differ most.
How often do B2B websites avoid the pricing question?
More than any other topic. Here is how pricing questions did in the Storylane Buyability Index, next to product questions and all 10,580 questions.
| Outcome (Storylane Buyability Index) | Pricing questions (1,530) | Product questions (1,945) | All questions (10,580) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully answered | 46% | 77% | 59% |
| Partly answered | 35% | 21% | 33% |
| Sent to sales | 5.9% | 0.1% | 1.0% |
| Fairly gated | 4.4% | 0% | 1.0% |
| Not on the site | 8.1% | 2.5% | 6.3% |
Pricing questions are 14% of all questions in the Storylane Buyability Index. But they account for 90 of the 102 "sent to sales" answers and 68 of the 106 gated ones. Almost every time a B2B website says "contact us" to a question it could have answered, the question is about money.
It gets worse as the stakes rise. Pricing questions from self-serve buyers got a full answer 58% of the time. Pricing questions that need high assurance, the kind someone has to defend to a CFO, got a full answer 28% of the time. Pricing questions from executive buyers got one 36% of the time.
Is the problem that companies hide their price?
That was my first guess, and the table doesn't really support it. Sent to sales and gated together are about 10% of pricing questions. The bigger problem is the 35% that got a partial answer. The site said something, but not enough to settle the question.
You can see the pattern when you split pricing questions by topic.
| Pricing questions that mention (Storylane Buyability Index) | Questions | Fully answered | Sent to sales or not on the site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | 58 | 78% | 3% |
| Tiers | 81 | 59% | 5% |
| Contracts | 395 | 34% | 20% |
| Minimums | 156 | 35% | 26% |
| Per-user cost | 38 | 32% | 21% |
Websites answer the pricing questions they chose to answer, like whether there is a trial and what the tiers are. They go quiet on the questions a buyer needs settled before committing. How long am I locked in? What is the minimum? What counts as a seat? What will this cost us?
I call this the my-price gap. A pricing page says what the product costs. Buyers want to know what it will cost them.
Company size shows it most clearly. Across all topics in the Storylane Buyability Index, 123 questions mentioned "our size", as in a team our size or a company our size. Websites sent 12% of those to sales, against 1% of all questions. A buyer who tells you their size is giving you exactly what you need to quote a number. Most sites still don't use it.
It also explains where the answers live. When a pricing question got a full answer, the pricing page supplied it only 34% of the time. The rest came from help centers, legal and trust pages, docs and other corners of the site. The pricing page holds the list price. The my-price answers are scattered, if they exist at all.
What happens to the pricing question when the website doesn't answer it?
The buyer still asks it. They just pick a place where asking is easy.
In internal Storylane data, a hand-coded sample of RepX website conversations, "pricing, plans and packaging" was 23.1% of all questions. That was the largest of 15 categories. Pricing and feature checks together were 42%. Across all 19 deployments, pricing was the very first question 9.4% of the time with the agent and 2.5% of the time on a human call. On a scale where 0 is the first question and 1 is the last, price sat at 0.45 on average with the agent and 0.64 with a rep.
My theory is that asking a rep about price has a cost. You book a meeting, sit through discovery, and signal that you are shopping on price. Asking a web page or an agent costs nothing. So buyers who can ask early do. Buyers who can't wait until two thirds of the way through a call they may not have needed.
So a website that hides price can lose in three ways.
- The buyer books a call to ask one question. Your AE spends a discovery slot on something a page could have answered. The buyer is annoyed by the time it comes up.
- The buyer leaves for a rival that answers it. At industry events this October, the story that booked the most meetings for us was that AI assistants now send buyers to a website with rival vendors open in other tabs. The vendor that answers the money question first gets the next question.
- The buyer never asks anyone. Nobody can count these people, which is exactly the problem.
What is the best case for keeping price off the website?
It is a real case. Enterprise deals are often custom. A published number can anchor negotiations low, tell competitors where to undercut, and scare off a buyer before they see the value. Sales leaders want the conversation, because that is where they shape the deal.
Two things in the data weaken it. First, the Storylane Buyability Index already makes room for that case. "Fairly gated" exists for topics where talking to someone is normal, and only 4.4% of pricing questions landed there. Most of the misses were questions a buyer could reasonably expect answered. Second, internal Storylane data on RepX conversations shows pricing ranged from 6.0% of questions at one company to 37.4% at another. If your buyers rarely ask, hiding price costs you little. If you are at the high end, you are holding back the answer to more than a third of what your buyers ask.
Where I land is simple. Publish the shape of your price even if you won't publish the number. Give a starting point or a range, say what drives the cost up, and say where "custom" starts. You keep the negotiation and drop the dodge.
What should a pricing page answer?
Start from the questions that failed most, not from the layout. For layout, our guide to SaaS pricing page design covers that side. For content, the Storylane Buyability Index points to five answers most sites are missing.
- A starting point or a range, even for plans you quote. A line like "most teams of 50 to 200 pay between X and Y" answers the size question. (That line is a template, not a benchmark.)
- What drives the price. Name the seats, usage or modules, and define each one. "Per user" questions got a full answer only 32% of the time.
- Contract terms. State the minimum term, annual versus monthly billing, and what happens at renewal. Contract questions were the largest group we checked (395) and among the worst answered.
- Minimums, stated plainly. 23% of questions about minimums found nothing on the site at all.
- Where custom starts, and why. That is the honest version of "contact sales", and it is the one buyers accept.
Then put those answers where buyers and AI assistants will find them, not only on the pricing page. An assistant summarizing your site reads the help center and the FAQ as readily as the pricing page. Answer engine optimization for B2B SaaS explains how that works. If you want to see how your own site does, the Storylane Buyability Index will run the same check on it.
Where an AI website agent fits
We sell RepX, an AI website agent, so read this section knowing I want you to buy one.
RepX is built for teams whose buyers ask about price early and often. You train it on your website, docs, decks and call scripts, including the pricing details you are happy to share. It answers buyer questions the moment they are asked, at any hour, works out whether the buyer is a fit, and hands sales-ready buyers to your team. Qualified leads flow to HubSpot, Salesforce and Slack, so your team can see which pricing questions buyers actually ask. The learnings from 1,332 RepX conversations show what else buyers ask once something is there to answer.
Buyers still bring integration and implementation questions to people. In internal Storylane data, integrations made up 29.7% of questions on human calls and 16.5% with the agent. So an agent works best next to your reps, moving the price conversation earlier and leaving the detailed fit questions for the call.
What to do on Monday
Pull last month's pricing questions from wherever they land. Check chat logs, discovery notes and the "contact sales" form. Sort them into list-price questions and my-price questions. Then check your site for answers to the top three my-price questions, and publish the ones you are willing to answer in public.
The idea to keep is that buyers ask about price either way. The only choice is whether they ask you, early and on your page, or ask a rival, late and somewhere you never see.
If you want to see how an agent answers pricing questions on your own site, book a RepX demo.