How to check what ChatGPT says about your business

Nobody at your business wrote the answer AI gives out

ChatGPT will tell a customer what your business does, where you are, and what your phone number is. It has never asked you whether any of that is right. Researchers recently ran that exact test on 165 real companies, grading every answer against official records. In 93% of them, the AI got at least one basic fact wrong or dropped it completely.

You can run the same test on your own business in about five minutes, and most owners never have.

Before you go looking, it helps to know why the AI gets this wrong. When a customer asks an AI assistant about your business, the assistant builds a reply out of whatever it can find about you. Your own website feeds part of that, and only a small part. McKinsey's research from October 2025 found that a business's own website supplies just 5 to 10 percent of what an AI answer gets built from. That study looked at big brands with real press behind them, so hold the exact figure loosely for a business your size. The point stands either way. The rest comes from directories, review pages, social profiles, and old listings nobody has touched in years.

When the assistant can't find a clear answer, it guesses. The guess arrives in the same confident tone as a fact it read straight off your homepage, and it reads exactly like the truth. A customer has no way to tell the two apart, and neither do you until you go and look.

Nobody calls to tell you about this. The customer who got a dead phone number doesn't know it was the AI's mistake, and wouldn't know how to reach you anyway. She just books the next name on the list. None of it shows up in your reporting, so the week looks normal and nothing in the numbers would send you looking.

What the test actually found

Searchable collected 13,365 answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini about 165 real companies and graded every one of them against official records and verified profiles. 93% of those companies had at least one basic fact wrong or missing.

Searchable sells software that tracks what AI says about a business, so it has money riding on a scary number. So do we, and that is worth saying out loud before you weigh the figure. The method still holds up. The 165 companies were split between small businesses and firms with 500 or more staff. Every answer was graded against public records, so the company's own marketing had no say in the score.

The gap between those two groups is the part that should bother you. 50% of the small businesses tested got back at least one invented fact, against 32% of the large companies.

The facts AI got wrong most often are the ones a customer needs in order to reach you: company size, website, founding year, phone number, and the services you actually offer. A wrong phone number means the call never comes in. When the service list is stale, the customer goes and books the HVAC contractor whose page said in plain text that he does ductless mini-splits.

Squarespace put the other half of the picture on paper. It surveyed 1,041 small business owners in April 2026, and more than two-thirds had never once looked at what AI says about their business. Nearly six in ten said they didn't know where to start (fair enough, nobody sends you a report about this). Of the smaller group who had looked, 40% found something about their business that was flat wrong.

The five-minute check

Open ChatGPT in a brand-new chat. If memory or personalization is switched on, turn it off first, under Settings. You want the answer ChatGPT hands a stranger who has never spoken to you before. Memory feeds your own words back to you and hides the gap.

Then ask four questions, using your business name the way a customer would say it out loud.

1. What does [your business name] do?
2. Where is [your business name] located?
3. What is the phone number for [your business name]?
4. What hours is [your business name] open?

Write every answer down word for word. Then ask the same four questions in Perplexity and in Gemini. That gives you twelve answers to grade.

Now compare each one against reality. Mark what is wrong, what is missing, and what the assistant made up out of nothing.

When I run this by hand for a business we are auditing, the errors that turn up are dull ones: hours that changed a year ago and never got fixed on an old directory page, a service the owner added last spring and never wrote down in plain text anywhere. A dental practice adds implants and only ever says so on an appointment form. A medspa lists half its treatment menu inside a booking widget. Dull errors survive because nobody reads their own listing closely enough to catch them.

Whatever you turn up, write it next to the answer that produced it. You will want to run this again in a month and see what moved.

If an assistant tells you it has never heard of your business, that counts as a finding too. Write it down. A blank means there isn't enough about you in public for the assistant to work with, and that's a different job from correcting a bad fact.

One more thing to try while you're in there. Ask each assistant who the best [your service] near [your town] is, and see whether your name comes up at all. That's a separate problem from a wrong phone number, and it's worth knowing on its own.

What to do with what you find

Almost everything you turn up traces back to a page you can edit or claim today.

• Wrong phone number or hours. Start with your Google Business Profile listing, the free business listing Google shows next to the map. Then work outward to your own contact page and any directory still carrying the old number. Budget an hour, most of it spent hunting down old logins.
• Missing services. Your services are probably sitting inside a photo or a booking widget, and most assistants cannot read either one. Put each service in plain text on the page, one line each.
• Wrong founding year or company size. This is usually an old profile somebody set up years ago and then forgot about (check the ones you don't remember making).
• Your name mixed up with a similar business. The hardest one to shift. It takes more pages that say plainly who you are and what you do.

Expect a lag. The assistants notice a change when they next read the page carrying it, which usually takes a few weeks. Fixing the page starts that clock.

There is one advantage in all this, and the Squarespace numbers settle it. Two-thirds of the owners you compete with have never looked. Whatever you find today, you are finding it ahead of them.

Doing all of this by hand works. It also eats an evening, and it goes stale, because the answers drift as the pages behind them get edited. Vyzz runs the same check across every assistant for you.