ChatGPT can name your business and still get your hours wrong

The detail that travels with your name

The hours line on your website says one thing. The copy of it on your Yelp page says another, and the copy on your Facebook page hasn't been touched since whoever set it up typed it in. When a customer asks ChatGPT whether you're open on Saturday, it builds an answer out of those pages, and it has no way to tell which one of them is right.

You have probably typed your own business name into ChatGPT at some point. The name came back, you felt fine about it, and you closed the tab. That check only tells you ChatGPT knows you exist. It says nothing about the hours, the phone number, the list of what you do, whether you take a given insurance plan, whether you work weekends. That is the information a customer actually acts on, and it is the information that goes out of date.

Hours are the worst of them. A customer acts on an hours line without calling anyone first. So the error turns up in your parking lot on a Sunday morning, at the point where you can no longer save the visit.

Somebody measured this in January 2026. SOCi's Local Visibility Index looked at more than 350,000 business locations across 2,751 brands, all of them chains running many locations each. Business profile details came back about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and on Perplexity, per Search Engine Land's report on the study. That leaves roughly one detail in three coming back wrong, with nothing in the answer to tell you which one it was.

That sample was chains, so read it with care. A single-location dental practice or HVAC company has fewer people watching the same pile of records than a national chain does. There's no reason to expect the number to be kinder.

Why the details drift

ChatGPT and Perplexity have no single place to read your business details from. Localogy's write-up of the study explains that they cast a wide net instead, pulling from Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, your own website and other busy pages, then combining all of it into one answer. Google's Gemini got every detail right in the same study, because it only reads Google Maps, and that is the one page most owners do keep current.

So every one of those pages holds its own copy of your details, and any copy can be wrong on its own. Your Yelp page might still carry the Saturday hours you dropped two years ago. That is the version a customer can get read back to them, and you never see it happen.

Here is how it usually goes, and I have watched this exact sequence on calls with owners more times than I can count. You cut your Saturday hours last spring. Somebody updated the website that week, and somebody else updated Google, because those are the two everybody remembers. Yelp and Facebook still say you open at 9 on Saturday, because nobody checked those, and they have said it ever since. When ChatGPT reads all four, it has to pick one, and there is nothing on any of those pages telling it which.

A wrong hours line means a customer drove over on a Saturday and found the door locked. She has no idea a stale page sent her, and no reason to call and tell you about it. She books somewhere else next time.

BrightLocal's research on business listings and trust found that 73% of people lose trust in a business when its listing shows wrong information. A wrong phone number did the most damage, at 66%, with a wrong address close behind at 60%.

A wrong phone number is the quietest problem of the lot. The call lands somewhere else entirely, and your software has nothing to show for it. A customer who reaches a dead line leaves no complaint and no review behind, so the only trace is a slot on the schedule that stayed open.

The four records to check this week

The job here is small, and you can do it yourself this week. Work in this order.

1. Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ask each one for your business by name and location, then ask three follow-ups: what are the hours, what is the phone number, what services does it offer.
2. Write down every detail that comes back wrong. That list is the whole job.
3. Find where each wrong detail is still posted. Check four places: your Google Business Profile, which is the free listing that puts you on Google Maps, your Yelp page, your Facebook page, and your own website. A detail that is wrong in an answer is usually still wrong on at least one of them.
4. Edit the records so all four say the same thing.

Step 3 is the one I see people skip. Correcting a chatbot inside the chat window does nothing. The model is reading pages, and the pages are what carry the wrong line. Fix it where it is written down.

Here is what tends to be stale on each of the four.

The wording doesn't have to match exactly. If your site writes Saturday as 9am to 2pm and Yelp writes 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM, nothing is broken. If one says 2pm and the other says 4pm, ChatGPT picks one of them and you don't get a vote.

If somebody else handles your website, this is a short job for them, maybe 20 minutes. Send the list from step 2 along with the page each wrong detail sits on, and ask them to confirm when it is live.

What happens after you fix it

These systems re-read the pages they pull from over the following weeks. Nobody can tell you the day your corrected hours turn up in a ChatGPT answer, and any date you get quoted is somebody guessing. The study measured how accurate the details were and said nothing about how long a correction takes to land. What you can count on is that the wrong version stops being available to copy.

Put a reminder in for 90 days out and run the same four questions again. Hours change for holidays, phone systems get swapped, and a new service reaches two of the four records and stops there. The drift keeps happening after you clear it once.

One more thing worth knowing. Your Google ranking has nothing to do with any of this. Your position can be exactly where your agency says it is while ChatGPT reads out a phone line you disconnected back in 2024. They're separate systems reading separate pages, and nobody is watching what ChatGPT tells your customers unless you go look.