Definition
A shopping answer or channel interpretation says something about shipping, returns, warranty, privacy, or terms that the public policy pages do not support. Equivalently: a false, incomplete, or materially misleading statement by an AI system about a merchant's return, shipping, warranty, support, subscription, loyalty, or other transactional policy.
StoreSteady treats ai policy misstatement as a reference term because Return-policy misstatement..
Why it matters
- Return-policy misstatement. Maps to `POL-001`. changes what a crawler, shopping channel, or AI assistant can safely infer about the merchant surface.
- Without a named category, operators tend to treat ai policy misstatement as generic AI noise instead of a reproducible finding with evidence and a validation path.
Evidence sources
- AI-generated statements attributable to the merchant (chatbot, voice assistant, AI search summary) about policies the merchant publishes.
How StoreSteady detects it
Run an AI mystery-shopper sweep across LLMs/agents asking canonical policy questions. Diff each answer against the merchant's current canonical policy artifact. For each grounded answer, verify the cited source matches the current policy version.
False positive risks
- An AI correctly answering "we offer 30-day returns" when the policy is 30 days.
- An AI declining to answer because the question is out of scope.
How to fix it
- Identify the merchant-controlled source that creates the ai policy misstatement signal.
- Reconcile visible copy, machine-readable data, policy text, feed state, and checkout behavior where the term applies.
- Keep the fix high-level in public docs; detailed remediation belongs inside paid scan workflows.
How to validate it
Rerun the same evidence capture used for detection. The finding is validated only when the original ai policy misstatement signal no longer reproduces and adjacent source surfaces still agree.
Example finding
Return-policy misstatement. Maps to `POL-001`.
Observed: A merchant chatbot states "we offer 60-day returns" when the canonical return policy is 30 days.
Likely impact: Return-policy misstatement.
Probable fix location: Policy source and answer grounding
Related StoreSteady issue codes
| Code | Title | Scanner mapping |
|---|---|---|
| POL-001 | Return-policy misstatement | no_merchant_return_policy, store_quality_return_experience_low |
| POL-002 | Shipping-policy misstatement | no_merchant_shipping_settings, store_quality_shipping_experience_low |
| POL-003 | Loyalty or personalized-offer policy misstatement | Planned detector |
| POL-004 | Stale-retrieval policy answer | Planned detector |
| POL-005 | Ungrounded policy answer | Planned detector |
Related standards
See also
Sources
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