What AI tells customers about your business is often wrong

The answer a customer sees now

Somewhere this month, a customer asked ChatGPT whether you were open, got told you close at 5, and stayed home. That day you were open until 7. Nobody flagged it, and you never saw the visit you lost. That answer can cost you calls, and you can read it yourself in minutes.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about a local business, they often get one written answer instead of a list to pick from. That answer states your hours, your phone number, your address, and what you sell. It uses the same calm voice whether the facts are right or wrong. There's no report that tells you when it gets one of them wrong.

A year ago you could set this aside, because hardly anyone asked AI about a local business. Far more people do now. In the past 12 months, 45% of US consumers looking for a local business turned to an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity (BrightLocal, 2026). A year earlier, only 6% had.

ChatGPT alone was used by 31% of shoppers for local recommendations. That puts AI third among the tools people use to find local businesses, ahead of Yelp and behind only Google and Facebook. That paragraph is a busy front door, and no one has checked the sign on it.

People also believe what they read. Among those who use these tools, 63% trust the recommendations, and 64% trust ChatGPT's local picks as much as they trust customer reviews. A shopper who reads the wrong hours just moves on and calls someone else.

Why the answers come out wrong

Here's how the answer gets built. The AI tool pulls facts about you from wherever it can find them. It reads your Google Business Profile, your website, old directory pages, review sites, and pages other people wrote about you.

Then it blends those into one paragraph and states it plainly. No person checks whether the pieces agree, or whether any of them are still current. So if your website still lists a Saturday closing you dropped last year, the tool can repeat it as fact this morning.

That's why the error rate is higher than most owners guess. Across more than 13,000 questions in a large 2026 test, 93% of businesses had at least one basic fact wrong or missing in AI answers (reported by Search Engine Journal). The test covered 165 businesses across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Smaller businesses came off worse, since half of them had at least one flat-out false fact, against 32% of the larger companies.

When I check a business's AI answers myself, the same stale facts keep coming up: a Saturday closing time they changed last year, or a service they stopped offering that still shows as current.

The engines also disagree with each other. A separate test of more than 72,000 questions found about 1 answer in 16 was wrong. Broken out by tool, Perplexity was wrong about 10% of the time, Gemini about 5%, and ChatGPT about 4%. So checking one tool tells you nothing about what the others say. A dental office that stopped taking an insurance plan can still show as accepting it in one engine while another has it right.

There's a second problem worth knowing. These tools name only a small slice of businesses at all. One 2026 index of more than 350,000 locations found ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of them. If it names you and gets your number wrong, that is worse than being left out, because the customer dials what they were given and never reaches you.

The fifteen-minute check

You can't fix what you've never read. Reading it takes about fifteen minutes at your kitchen table on a Saturday, and you run it the way a customer would.

Start by writing down five questions a real customer asks:

1. What time do you close today?
2. Are you open right now?
3. What is your phone number?
4. Do you offer a service you are known for?
5. Are you a good fit for a common customer need?

Swap in the exact service and need your customers say when they call. Then ask all five in ChatGPT, in Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, in Gemini, and in Perplexity. Turn off saved chat history first, so your own past chats don't shape the answers. Ask each question twice, because these tools can give a different answer each time. Read each answer closely, since a wrong one is often close enough to sound true at a glance.

As the answers come in, sort what you find into three buckets: wrong facts, like the hours or the number; missing facts, like a real service that never comes up; and tone, like a flat "permanently closed" on a business open six days a week. Fix the wrong facts first, because a customer acts on a wrong fact before you ever get the chance to correct it.

Fixing what the check finds

Most wrong answers trace back to one thing. The facts about you don't agree across the places AI reads. Your Google Business Profile lists one set of hours, your website footer lists another, and an old review-site page has a third. The tool sees all of them, can't tell which is current, and sometimes picks the wrong one.

So the fix starts with the sources you control. Make your Google Business Profile, your website, and any location pages agree with each other and with reality. Your name, address, and phone number should be spelled the same way everywhere, down to the suite number. If you dropped a service two years ago, take it off the site today. You can fix all three of these yourself this afternoon, at no cost.

Then turn to the pages you don't own. Open the third-party pages the answer points to, plus the directories and listing sites it read from, and check whether they're stale. Many let you claim your entry and correct it. An old address on a listing the tool trusts can outweigh the right address on your own site. An HVAC company shown as closed on a Sunday it actually works hands those calls to whoever is listed right.

Then run the check again in a couple of weeks. These tools re-read the web on their own schedule, so a fix doesn't show up the same day. Set a reminder to repeat it after any change to your hours or phone number. When the answers line up with reality across every engine you checked, you're done, until something changes and you check again.

That's the whole job this week. Read the paragraph a customer reads, then make your own records agree with reality. A wrong phone number or a false closed sign costs you the booking before the phone ever rings, and nothing tells you it happened.