Update Website Prices and Hours With an AI Agent

Most small business websites are not wrong because they were built badly. They are wrong because nobody updated them. The price went up in January and the site still shows the old one. The receptionist left in March and is still on the team page. The December hours are from two Decembers ago.

An AI agent connected to the site over MCP turns each of those into a sentence: "change the consultation price to 1,200 on the services page." This post is about using that well: what goes stale, how to keep it current, what to automate and what to keep in human hands. It is part of our MCP guide.

Why sites go stale

The person who knows the price changed is rarely the person who can change the website. In a small business, the owner knows and the website belongs to whoever built it. The update goes into an email, the email waits, and the site is wrong for a month. Multiply by every fact on the site and a two-year-old website is wrong in a dozen small places that each cost a customer now and then.

This matters more than it used to. People now ask AI assistants about businesses, and the assistants read the site and the listings around it. Google's page on AI features and your website says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and lists the ordinary basics instead, among them making sure structured data matches the visible text and that Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up to date. A stale price on the site is now a stale price in an answer.

The four things that go stale

Prices. On services pages, product pages and pricing tables. Often in more than one place, which is how a site ends up showing two different prices for the same thing.
Hours and dates. Opening hours, holiday closures, event dates, "next course starts in".
People. Team pages, author bylines, "contact Ayşe for bookings".
Products and services. New items, discontinued items, changed options, sold-out status.

The common thread is that each of these lives in a field on a page, and the change is small. That is exactly the kind of work an agent with site tools does well.

The site is not the only place

A business's facts live in more places than its website: the Google Business Profile, a map listing, social profiles, a booking tool, a printed menu. When they disagree, customers and assistants have to guess which one is right.

The agent can only change the site, but it can help you keep the rest in line. Keep the facts in one short file, a list of prices, hours, people and services, and treat it as the source. When something changes, change the file first, then ask the agent to update the site from it, and update the other listings yourself from the same file. Once a month, ask the agent to read the site and compare it against the file. Anything that does not match is either a stale page or a stale file.

The routine that works

Ask, do not log in

The point of an agent over MCP is that you do not open the editor for a one-line change. You say the change where you already are, the agent reads the page, finds the exact sentence and changes it in the draft. In Beste, the agent calls get_page_markdown to read the page as written, then update_section to change the field. You read the draft and say publish.

For prices on products, set_product_price and update_product change the catalog directly, and the product page and any grid that lists it update with it.

Requests that work

Concrete requests get concrete changes. A few we use, one for each kind of stale fact:

Price: "The consultation is now 1,200. Find every page that mentions the consultation price and update all of them. Tell me where you changed it."
Hours: "We close at 7 on Saturdays from next week. Update the contact page, the footer and any FAQ answer about opening hours."
People: "Ayşe has left. Remove her from the team page and replace her name with 'our front desk' wherever she is named as a contact."
Products: "The blue variant of the canvas tote is sold out. Mark it sold out, but keep the page."

Keep one source of truth

If a price appears on three pages, tell the agent so in the rules, or ask it to find every occurrence. An agent reads every page faster than you can remember which ones to check. Better still, keep the price in one place, such as the products catalog, and reference it from pages, so there is one field to change.

Bulk changes from a spreadsheet

A seasonal price change across forty products is a spreadsheet, not forty conversations. In Claude Code or Codex, put the sheet in the project folder and ask the agent to apply it: read each row, find the product, set the price, report what changed. Then read the report and publish. The agent's advantage here is the one it always has: it does not skip row 27.

Two habits make bulk work safe. Ask for the report as a table with the old value and the new value side by side, so a wrong match stands out. And remember the change lands in batches that can be undone, so a bad run is a one-call rollback, not an afternoon of fixes.

A monthly check

Once a month, ask the agent to read the site and list anything that looks dated: past event dates, a "new" label older than six months, a team member who no longer appears on the contact page, a price that differs between two pages, a copyright year that is behind. This is a reading task, and reads cost nothing. The list it returns is your maintenance to-do for the month.

After every real-world change

The best routine is no routine: when the price changes, say so to the agent the same day, from a phone if that is where you are. The Connector for Claude and the Plugin for ChatGPT both work on a phone, which is where most of these messages happen.

What to automate and what to keep in human hands

Automate the finding and the typing. Keep the deciding.

Automate: reading every page for a term, applying a spreadsheet of changes, updating a date everywhere it appears, adding a redirect when a product page is removed.
Keep in human hands: the decision that the price is changing, the wording of an announcement, anything that reads like a promise, and the publish.

The guardrails that make this safe are in the server, not in your attention. In Beste, every change goes to the draft, most changes can be undone in batches, publishing happens only when you ask, and requests are rate limited per hour so a confused session cannot loop. Removing a page or a product is something the agent can do, so the rules should say when it may. What those rules look like is in Writing Rules for Your Website Agent.

For studios running client sites

If you run sites for clients, this routine is the difference between a retainer that pays and one that does not. A client's price change is a message to you, a sentence to the agent, a read of the draft and a publish. Ten minutes becomes two. Across thirty clients, that is the margin.

A facts file per client helps here too. When a client emails a change, update their file, ask the agent to apply it, and reply with the preview. The file becomes the history of what changed and when, which saves arguments later.

The alternative, which fits many small clients better, is to give them content-only access so they make the change themselves. Many studios use both: the client changes text and photos in their editor, and the studio runs the bulk and structural changes through the agent.

How this works in Beste

The Beste MCP server has tools for every field that goes stale: get_page_markdown to read a page, update_section to change it, update_product and set_product_price for the catalog, update_post for posts, add_redirect when a URL goes away, and preview_url and publish to check and ship. Reads never count toward a limit, a Free project gets 150 agent edits a month, and edits are unlimited on Pro, Team and Business. The tools are listed on the MCP server page, and the catalog side on the products catalog page.