Here's the trap. Your team says "let's look at Fireflies", you search the pricing, and the third result is Adobe.
Not an article about Adobe. Adobe's own plans page, ranking on a query about a meeting notetaker. And Google's People Also Ask box asks "What do flexible Firefly plans offer at $29.99 per month?", which is Adobe's price, on a page about somebody else's product.
Fireflies.ai is $0 free and $18 a seat, verified 8 August 2026. If you took $29.99 into a budget conversation, you took Adobe's number for a product Adobe doesn't sell you.
We bought and archived 82 search results for this directory, and roughly 45 of the 293 follow-up questions across them are about a different company than the one searched. Not autocomplete noise. Google's own answer box, on commercial queries.
How bad is it, specifically?
Bad enough that one product returns nine off-target questions across four separate searches.
| You search | You also get | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Fireflies.ai pricing | Adobe Firefly, slots 2 and 3 | 2 SERPs |
| Fathom pricing | Three different Fathoms on one page | 1 SERP |
| Vector pricing | Cutco knife sales, vector databases, stock photos | 4 SERPs |
| Clay alternatives | Pottery. "What are the four types of clay?" | 1 SERP |
| Air AI pricing | Air Inc, holding slot 1 | 1 SERP |
| Gong pricing | The instrument. "How much does a Gong cost?" | 1 SERP |
| Lead411 pricing | Directory assistance. "Is 411 legitimate?" | 1 SERP |
| Unify GTM pricing | Google Tag Manager | 1 SERP |
The Fathom one is the neatest. Search it and you get the sales notetaker, an accounting analytics company and a privacy-focused web analytics company, all on the same page. Google's follow-up question is "Is fathom completely free?" without saying which one it means. Two of the three have free tiers. They are not the same free tier.
Why this happens, and why it won't be fixed
Search engines resolve a string to an entity, and when two entities share a name the bigger one usually wins. Adobe is enormous. Fireflies is not.
That's rational behaviour on Google's part. Most people typing "firefly" mean Adobe's. The failure only shows up in the minority case where you added "pricing" and meant the other company, and the answer box doesn't distinguish because it was never asked to.
It also isn't going anywhere, because the naming convention that causes it is the one this whole industry uses: a common English word plus AI, or a common word on its own. Clay, Vector, Gong and Fathom were all words before they were companies, and the directory is full of them.
What it actually costs you
Three things, and the first is the one that bites in meetings.
A wrong number in a business case. $29.99 versus $18 a seat is a 66% error, and it is the kind nobody catches, because both numbers are plausible and both came from Google.
Research that silently stops. Someone told to "look into Vector" searches it, gets knife sales and vector databases, concludes the tool is obscure or doesn't exist, and reports back that they couldn't find much. The tool is fine. The query was ambiguous and nothing said so.
Assistants inherit it. Ask a model what Fireflies costs and it may answer from the same polluted result set, with more confidence and no visible sources. That is the version most likely to reach a document unchecked.
How to search around it
Four habits, and they take no longer than the ambiguous search did.
- Search the domain, not the name.
fireflies.ai pricingresolves wherefireflies pricingdoes not. If you don't know the domain, that is the first thing to find out, and a directory like this one is faster than a search for it. - Add the category word, not the year. "Gong revenue intelligence" beats "Gong 2026". The category disambiguates the entity; the year just filters freshness on the wrong entity.
- Check the domain on every result before you copy a number. Sounds obvious. The Adobe result looks completely legitimate, because it is, and it is about a real product with real pricing that isn't the one you wanted.
- Treat the People Also Ask box as untrusted on a branded query. It is generated from a broader interpretation of your search than you typed, which is precisely how Adobe's $29.99 ends up under a Fireflies question.
So why does Google show the wrong tool?
Because your query was ambiguous and Google resolved it to the more famous company, which is usually right and is wrong exactly when you are doing vendor research.
There's no fix coming. The names are the names, Adobe is bigger, and the answer box will keep quietly answering about the wrong product because it does not know a swap occurred. What changes is your habit: search the domain, add the category, check the host before the number goes anywhere.
And when a colleague reports that a tool seems obscure, ask what they typed before you believe them. On the evidence of 82 archived searches, the query is wrong more often than the tool is.