Google indexed a price that was three months old

Google indexed a price that was three months old

A SaaS company kept getting complaints: their pricing page in Google showed $29 — a plan they'd discontinued in spring. The live page clearly said $49. CTR on pricing queries was tanking as users bounced on the mismatch.

The data: the live DOM was current, but Google's cached rendered version was frozen in the past, and not just on one page.

The investigation found a prerendering service sitting in front of the app, serving pre-built HTML snapshots to bots. It had been set up a year earlier, its cache TTL configured to 90 days to 'save render credits.' So bots received three-month-old snapshots while users got the live app. Two different realities, and Google trusted the stale one.

Turns out a prerender layer is a second source of truth, and a long cache turns it into a museum of your old content.

The fix: drop the snapshot TTL to daily for pricing and key pages, trigger cache purges on deploy, and verify bot-served HTML matches live.

Result: pricing-page CTR recovered from 1.4% to 3.6% in four weeks, and the discontinued-plan complaints stopped within days of the first re-crawl.