AI Assistant Has Your Business Wrong? How to Fix It

A customer drives twenty minutes to your shop on a Monday, finds the door locked, and shows you her phone. She asked an AI assistant when you open, and it answered with the hours you had two years ago, before you started closing Mondays. Nobody typed a wrong answer into a box. The assistant assembled it from places that still say the old thing.

That detail shapes the whole fix. When an assistant gets your business wrong, the error almost always lives somewhere else on the web, and the assistant is repeating it. Arguing with the assistant changes one conversation. Correcting the source changes what it says to everyone who asks next.

Find out what the assistants say today

Start with a short audit. Open ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Perplexity, and ask each of them the questions a real customer would ask. Use a fresh chat each time so earlier answers do not color the next one.

• What time does [your business name] in [your city] open on Saturdays?
• What is the address and phone number of [your business name]?
• What services does [your business name] offer?
• Does [your business name] take walk-ins or appointments?
• Is [your business name] any good? What do reviews say?

Copy each answer into a simple table with the date, the assistant and the claim. Mark every line as correct, outdated or invented. Pay attention to the sources the assistant shows. Perplexity and Google's AI Mode usually list the pages they drew from, and ChatGPT does the same when it searches the web. Those links are your map.

Ask the same question in two or three phrasings, because the answers can differ. A question about "hours" and a question about "is it open now" may pull from different pages. Record the differences instead of averaging them.

Trace each wrong answer to its source

For every outdated or invented claim, find the page it came from. If the assistant cites a source, open it. If it gives no source, search the exact wrong fact in Google, such as the old closing time or the discontinued service, and see which pages still carry it. The usual suspects are below.

Google Business Profile

This is the most common origin of wrong hours and phone numbers. Check regular hours, special hours for holidays, the primary category, the service list and the attributes. Owners often update the website and forget the profile, or the reverse.

Old directory listings

Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, industry directories, chamber of commerce pages and the data aggregators behind them can each hold a copy of your name, address and phone number from a past move or rebrand. Assistants pull from these because they are structured and easy to read.

Your own website and its schema

Look at the footer, the contact page and the structured data. A LocalBusiness schema block with old opening hours will contradict the visible text on the same page. A forgotten page, like a 2022 promotion or a staff page listing someone who left, can also surface as if it were current.

Third-party reviews and articles

Assistants summarize what reviewers say. If three reviews from last year mention a service you no longer offer, the summary may repeat it. Local news posts, event listings and old press releases work the same way.

Fix the source, not the assistant

Work through the sources in the order they appeared in your audit, and change one thing at a time so you can tell what moved the answer.

1. Correct the Google Business Profile first. Update hours, add holiday hours in advance, and make sure the category and services match what you sell now.
2. Make the website the clearest statement of the facts. Put hours, address and phone number in plain text on the contact page and keep them identical everywhere. Update the LocalBusiness schema to match, including opening hours.
3. Fix each directory listing you found, starting with the ones the assistants cited. Claim the listing if you have not, edit the fields, and remove duplicates.
4. Retire or update stale pages. Redirect an old page to the current one, or edit it so the facts are current. Delete pages that describe offers and staff you no longer have.
5. Respond to reviews that repeat outdated facts. A short public reply such as "We closed Mondays starting last spring, and our current hours are on our contact page" gives the correction a place to be read.

Keep the name, address and phone number written the same way on every listing. Small differences like "Suite 4" versus "#4" are easy for people to read past, but they split your data into entries that look like different businesses.

Use the assistants' own feedback options

Once the sources are right, tell the assistants directly. Each product has a way to flag a bad answer, and the options change over time, so look for what is currently offered inside the product.

• ChatGPT shows a thumbs-down control under each answer, and it accepts a written explanation of what was wrong.
• Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews include a feedback link on the answer, plus the Business Profile edit flow for facts about your listing.
• Perplexity has a report option on its answers, and you can flag individual sources it used.

Be specific and factual in the note: the question you asked, the wrong claim, the correct fact and the page where the correct fact is published. A report that points to your updated contact page is more useful than one that only says the answer is wrong. Expect these reports to work slowly, since they feed review processes and not an edit button. The source fix is what changes the answer, and the report supports it.

Recheck on a schedule

Answers drift as assistants refresh their sources, so one cleanup does not stay done. Put a recurring reminder on the calendar and repeat the audit with the same questions.

• After any change to hours, address, services or staff, recheck within two weeks.
• Once a month, run the five questions on each assistant and log the results next to the earlier ones.
• Before holidays and seasonal changes, confirm special hours show correctly in the Business Profile and on the website.

Your log also shows progress. If an old closing time showed up in all three assistants in October and in one of them by December, the fixes are working, and the remaining one points you to the source still carrying the old fact.

Back to the customer at the locked door. The fix for her was a profile that said closed on Mondays, a contact page that said the same, and two old directory entries brought up to date. None of it involved the assistant. It involved making every page that describes your business agree with the others, then checking back on a date you chose in advance.

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