When AI Says Wrong Things About Your Business

A customer arrives annoyed because an assistant told them you close at five, or that you do not take card, or quoted a price you stopped charging two years ago. When AI says wrong things about your business, the instinct is to find a contact form at the AI company. That is the one route that almost never works.

Models are mostly repeating something they read. Fix what they read and the output changes on its own.

First, reproduce it precisely

Before anything else, get the exact wrong claim, in writing. Ask the assistant the same question the customer asked, screenshot the answer, and note the date and which assistant. Then ask it directly where the information came from. Assistants with browsing or retrieval will frequently cite a URL, and that URL is usually your answer.

Do this in a fresh session. An assistant that has already been told the correct information earlier in a conversation will not reproduce the error.

Why AI says wrong things about your business: the four sources

In practice the first two account for most of it, and the first is the most common and the most embarrassing: an old pricing page, a "coronavirus opening hours" notice from years ago, a services page listing something you no longer offer. It is still live, still crawlable, and a model reading your own site has no way to know it is superseded.

Fix your own pages first

Search your own domain for the wrong claim. site:yourdomain.com "closes at 5pm" in a search engine will usually surface it in seconds.

Then do one of three things with every page you find: update it, redirect it to the current page, or remove it and return a 404. Leaving an outdated page up while publishing a corrected one elsewhere gives models two conflicting sources and no way to choose, and they sometimes choose wrong. Where the page needs to stay for some other reason, date it visibly at the top.

Check the places that are not pages too: PDFs of old menus or price lists, which get indexed and almost never get updated.

Correct your business listing, and check what Google collected

For hours, address, phone and category, the listing is the authority most assistants lean on. Edit it directly rather than waiting for the error to propagate out.

Two details from Google's documentation on Business Profile edits are worth knowing before you start. Changes are reviewed before they go live, and while a pending review usually takes about ten minutes, it can take up to 30 days. And when a member of the public suggests an edit to your profile, you may be given four days to accept or reject it, after which Google may publish the update anyway if other publicly available information supports it. An unwatched notification inbox is how a wrong edit becomes your official hours.

The underused part is the Collected info section under Edit profile, which shows details Google has gathered about you from elsewhere, along with the source and the date it was collected. That is the closest thing to a direct readout of where a wrong fact entered the system. It is only available in some regions, languages and categories, so check whether yours is one.

Chase the aggregators that matter, and ignore the rest

Directory sites copy from each other. Correcting the two or three that actually rank for your business name does more than correcting fifteen that nobody reads, including the models.

Search your business name and note which non-owned sites appear in the first page of results. Those are the ones worth a correction request. Keep a list with the date you contacted each, because you will do this again.

When the claim has no source at all

Sometimes nothing anywhere states what the assistant said. The model has combined two true things into one false one, or filled a gap with a plausible guess. There is no upstream fix, and feedback buttons rarely change an individual answer.

What does help is making the correct answer easy to find and unambiguous. A clear, current page that directly states the fact gives retrieval something better to surface than a guess. The mechanics of being the source models pick up are covered in getting cited in Google AI Overviews.

Then handle the customer in front of you. Honour the wrong price once if it is small, correct the record, and say where the mistake came from. A business that explains the error credibly comes out ahead of one that argues.

Know which problem you have

Three adjacent situations get confused, and the responses are different:

• Wrong facts from a general assistant, which is this article: fix the sources.

• Your own chatbot telling customers something false, which is a system you control. See what to do when an AI chatbot gives a customer wrong information.

• Someone impersonating you, which is not an accuracy problem at all. Telling whether a chatbot is impersonating a real company and what to do if someone deepfakes your business cover that.

Supplying good context up front also reduces the first category, and giving AI context about your business covers how.

FAQ

Can I report incorrect AI answers about my business directly?

You can use in-product feedback, and it is worth doing, but it rarely changes a specific answer on any useful timescale. Correcting the underlying sources is what actually moves the output.

How long until the correction shows up in AI answers?

It depends on how the assistant gets its information. Tools that retrieve live pages can reflect a change within days of recrawl. Answers drawn from model training data may not change until a later model, which is why the listing and your own site matter most.

What if a competitor is behind a wrong edit to my listing?

Reject the suggested edit inside the window you are given, and keep the notification channel monitored. If it recurs, document each instance with dates before escalating, because a pattern is far easier to act on than a single incident.

Should I publish a page correcting the misinformation?

Only if the claim is damaging and widely repeated. For ordinary stale facts, updating the page that carries the old version works better than adding a new page that argues with it, because you want one clear source rather than two competing ones.