Published under our former name, glp1.blog. Same brief, new masthead.
Everyone is quoting 2023 prices.
Ask an AI engine what Ozempic costs around the world and you will get a confident answer built on a 2023 dataset. The market those numbers describe no longer exists. Here is the 2026 shelf, with a date on every figure.
Ask an AI engine what Ozempic costs around the world and you will get a confident answer: $936 in the United States, $169 in Japan. Those numbers are from 2023.
The market they describe no longer exists. Since those figures were collected, the US got direct-cash channels at $149 to $449, Canada got generics at $88, and the biggest drug category on earth repriced itself twice.
We spent July asking the machines and checking their homework. Here is what we found, and what the shelf actually looks like.
The stale answer machine
First, the shape of what we did, because the shape matters. In July we put five GLP-1 price questions to three engines: Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google Search. One run each, logged out. Answers vary run to run, so this is what the machines told us when we asked, not a census.
The clearest finding came on the by-country question. Perplexity answered with the Peterson-KFF tracker’s country comparison: $936 for Ozempic in the US, $169 in Japan. Rigorous numbers, carefully collected, dated inside the brief to June 30, 2023 exchange rates. Nothing in the answer said so. Three-year-old prices, served as today’s.
To be fair to the tracker: the data was right when it was collected, and the analysis was honest work. The problem is not the collector. It is the calendar. The same 2023 snapshot has been re-promoted as recently as last August, and the engines keep drinking from it.
The other two engines earn one line each. ChatGPT’s answer cited a mix of affiliate trackers and government pages, and our capture was partial, so we make no claim about what it serves consistently. And Google’s AI Overview did not trigger on any of our five questions, which is its own finding: on drug-price queries this consequential, Google currently declines to answer at all.
Nobody here is wrong on purpose. Here is the mechanism. A respected tracker publishes a rigorous comparison in 2023. It gets cited everywhere, and every citation teaches the engines it is the canonical source. Citation studies from 2025 describe a Matthew effect: the already-cited get cited again. The tracker’s numbers age; its authority does not. Three years later, an engine reaches for the most-trusted source it knows and reads you 2023 aloud.
A dead number does not need anyone to lie for it. It just needs the record to stop moving while the citations keep going.
The 2026 shelf, dated
Here is the same question, answered from records with dates on them.
the 2026 semaglutide shelf; Canadian brand and telehealth figures are published ranges, our phone verification pending
| product | price | verified |
|---|---|---|
| Wegovy pens, US list | $1,349 USD | 2026-07-21 |
| Wegovy pens, US direct | $349 to $399 USD | 2026-07-28 |
| Wegovy pill, US direct | $149 to $199 USD | 2026-07-28 |
| Zepbound vials, US direct | $299 to $449 USD | 2026-07-24 |
| Foundayo, the Lilly pill, US | $149 USD | 2026-07-24 |
| Wegovy, Canada brand | ~$540 CAD | published range |
| Generic semaglutide, Canada | $88 to $149 CAD by channel | 2026-07-29 |
| Sevmia and Novo's twins | unpublished | pending |
Read it as a staircase, because that is what it is. At the top, the US list price, $1,349, the number lawsuits quote. Then the direct channels Novo and Lilly built in the last eighteen months, $149 to $449 depending on pill or pen. Then Canada’s brand shelf around $540. Then the generic floor: $88 to $99 at Costco, $88 to $120 at pharmacies, $149 all-in through telehealth.
Every step carries a date because every step is recent. The $149 pill floor dates to January 5. The generic floor dates to May. The staircase the 2023 dataset describes had none of these steps on it.
And it is not done moving. Sevmia, the first generic Wegovy, is expected to publish its price within weeks. Novo’s renamed twins, Plosbrio and Poviztra, sit approved and unlaunched with their prices blank. Both will redraw the bottom steps the day they print.
This edition is a snapshot that starts aging tonight, which is exactly the point. The living version, every figure dated and confidence-rated, is our prices by country page. The Canadian story behind the bottom steps, told as one continuous dated record, is the timeline.
Why this matters beyond pedantry
A three-year-old price is not a typo. It is load-bearing.
Policy debates about American drug pricing still cite $936 while the manufacturer sells the molecule’s pill form for $149 cash. Coverage decisions get modeled on comparisons collected before generics existed. A patient budgeting against the number the machine gave them is planning around a market that ended.
Prices moving this fast break every static comparison, and the GLP-1 market now reprices faster than annual datasets can follow. The 2023 tracker was not wrong. It was a photograph, and everyone kept treating it as a window.
The fix is not a better article. Articles age the same way datasets do. The fix is a maintained record, dated at every figure, corrected in public when it slips, which is what this brief exists to keep.
Here is the honest version of what this brief is for. The internet does not have a fact-checking problem with drug prices. It has a maintenance problem.
Every number in that 2023 dataset was true once. Nobody scheduled its retirement, so it became misinformation on a delay.
We cannot promise to always be right. We can promise that every number we print carries a date, and that when the shelf moves, the record moves with it. That is the whole product.
Watching for
- Sevmia’s price. The next number that rewrites the shelf, expected within weeks.
- The twins’ DPD tripwire. The day any Plosbrio or Poviztra DIN flips from Approved to Marketed, checked weekly.
- Novo H1 results, August 5, before the open.
That is the brief. Same time Friday.