Why the AI has your facts wrong
The engine isn’t making things up out of nothing. It’s repeating something it read — from a source that’s stale, or from three sources that disagree. AI assembles a business fact from a spread of places: your Google Business Profile, your own site, the big directories, review platforms, and cached copies of pages that no longer exist. When those disagree, the engine picks one and states it with total confidence.
That’s how you end up “permanently closed” when you’re open, showing hours you changed two years ago, listing an old address, or offering services you’ve never offered. Audits in mid-2026 found AI engines doing exactly this — asserting wrong hours, false “closed” flags, and invented services — and often disagreeing platform to platform on the same business. The engine reads a bad source. The bad source becomes the answer.
You can’t edit the answer. You fix the source.
There is no field in ChatGPT where you correct your hours. There’s no “report this” button that reaches into the model. The answer is generated from whatever the engine can find, so the only lever you have is what it finds.
That’s the whole reframe. Stop trying to argue with the output. Go find the input.
The fix loop
1. Find the wrong answers, engine by engine
Ask each engine the way a customer would — “is [your business] open,” “hours for [your business],” “does [your business] do [service]” — in a clean, logged-out session, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and the rest. Write down exactly what each one gets wrong. The mistakes won’t match. One engine has you closed, another has the wrong number, a third invents a service. Log them separately, because they trace back to different sources.
2. Trace each wrong answer to its source
Where an engine shows citations, follow them — Perplexity always does, and Google’s AI surfaces link out. That tells you which page fed the error. Where it doesn’t cite, work backward: search your business name plus the wrong fact and find where that fact still lives on the web. Usually it’s a specific culprit — a directory you forgot you were listed on, an old profile, a review-site page with the wrong hours.
3. Correct the source — Google Business Profile first
Fix your Google Business Profile before anything else. It feeds Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode directly, it’s the record other services copy, and a bad “closed” flag there spreads fast. Then work outward: make your name, address, phone, hours, and services identical on your own site, the major directories, and the review platforms. The engines trust agreement. When five sources say the same thing and one says something else, consistency is what settles it — so remove the disagreement rather than adding one more voice to the pile.
4. Verify, and keep checking
Correcting the source doesn’t rewrite the answer that afternoon. Engines cache, and some hold onto old data longer than others, so a fix that lands in Gemini this week might sit in another engine for a while. Re-run the same questions until the wrong answer is gone from each one. Verification isn’t the last step you do once — it’s how you know the fix actually took.
The stakes, put plainly
Wrong facts don’t cost you the customers who already know you. They cost you the ones deciding right now — the person asking AI who’s open, who’s nearby, who does the thing they need. If the answer is wrong, they never reach you and never tell you why. Fixing your details isn’t polish. It’s plugging a leak you can’t hear.
Where to start
Fixing wrong facts is the floor — the errors that quietly lose you customers before anyone even considers whether to recommend you. Once your details are right and consistent everywhere, the next question is whether AI recommends you at all, and that’s the full playbook. If you’d rather see the wrong answers laid out for you first — every error, every engine, traced to its source — that’s the free report.