Business owners
AI Is Giving Out Wrong Information About My Business—How to Fix It
Jillian Oco, CMO— AI-assisted and reviewed prior to publication.
Correct your own site and business listings immediately, add structured data that tells AI models which facts are authoritative, then target the third-party sources each model actually cites. Fixes show up in Perplexity within two to four weeks, Google's AI Overviews in days to three weeks, and ChatGPT in two to six weeks once corrected sources are recrawled.
Where AI models get their facts about your business
ChatGPT combines training data with live web results fetched by its OAI-SearchBot crawler, leaning on editorial media, Wikipedia, review sites, forums and LinkedIn (clickforest.com). Bing Places for Business is one of the biggest data sources for ChatGPT's local recommendations (localfalcon.com).
Wikipedia, Wikidata, Google Business Profile, major news outlets, and popular review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor are primary sources (mannadigital.com). Google uses website content, structured data, Google Business Profile, social media profiles, industry directories, local citations, third-party mentions, review platforms, trusted websites, and public data sources like Wikidata (gotechark.com) to assemble its Knowledge Graph, which in turn feeds answers from Google's AI Overviews and other AI systems.
Maps, industry directories and booking aggregators are often read more readily than a site because they're already structured. If one directory has an old phone number and another has different hours, the assistant has no way to know which is right (pixellabs.az).
Why does fixing your own site take weeks?
No website means no first-party source at all, so the assistant falls back on whatever secondary sources exist, directories and social profiles. A website that exists but doesn't spell out prices, service scope or address in plain text is barely better.
Updating your site gives AI models a canonical reference, but it takes weeks to show up in answers because models pull from multiple sources simultaneously. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews construct their responses by synthesising information from multiple sources, and when those sources contain conflicting, outdated, or incomplete data about your business, the AI fills the gaps with inferences that may be incorrect (margen.net).
Owned-site changes are crawled in one to three days, influencing retrieval answers in one to four weeks. High-authority third-party corrections usually reflect in two to six weeks (deepsmith.ai). Propagation into AI assistants and Google's knowledge graph typically follows over the next one to three months as engines recrawl your corrected footprint and the consistent signals reach consensus.
Which sources actually move the answer?
Add schema markup to your site. Wells Fargo saw AI systems generating inaccurate and misleading information about certain branch locations. By implementing schema markup to clearly define and link location and service entities, Wells Fargo provided a trusted data layer that helped anchor AI answers to authoritative sources, resulting in more accurate AI-generated responses.
Start with LocalBusiness, Organization, FAQPage, and Product types in JSON-LD format. Schema markup explicitly defines and connects entities within your content. For example, schema can indicate that a page references a LocalBusiness named Joes Pizza in Thousand Oaks, CA, or identify Dr. Smith as a Dentist associated with XYZ Clinic. Content with proper schema markup is 2.5 times more likely to show up in AI-generated answers, and sites that have complete Tier 1 schema get up to 40% more appearances in AI Overviews.
Correct Google Business Profile first. AI Overviews lean on Google's live index and your Google Business Profile. GBP edits often surface in local answers within days. Corrected web pages flow in on normal recrawl schedules, faster if you request indexing in Search Console.
Then clean up third-party directories. Google doesn't rely on a single source to define your brand. It triangulates data from your site, structured data (like Schema.org), public databases, media coverage, and major profiles. Audit Yelp, Facebook, Bing Places, industry directories, and any niche listing sites for your category. Make name, address, phone, hours, and services identical across all of them.
Wikidata is the accessible starting point. The notability bar is lower than Wikipedia's, and an item can exist before an article does. Fill the core properties: instance of, country, headquarters location, inception, legal form, industry, official website, founder, CEO. Attach "stated in" and "reference URL" to every statement so reviewers can see your sources. A solid item often surfaces in Knowledge Panels within weeks, and it feeds Wikipedia infoboxes too.
How to check what changed
Ask the same questions weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews. Write down what each model says about your hours, services, location, and pricing. Track each error as its own line item: engine, question, wrong fact, source fixed on what date, current status. Corrections land unevenly, so Perplexity may flip in a week while the same fact stays wrong in ChatGPT's memory for months. Do not stop monitoring after the first clean answer. Probabilistic systems regress, and a fact that flipped once can flip back.
Run the free AI-visibility check (/check) to see whether Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your business when someone asks who to hire, and which competitors they recommend instead. Each assistant is reported separately, and every question asked is shown verbatim, so you know exactly what needs fixing.
If you are an agency managing multiple clients, ActiScore's pricing (/pricing) starts at $79 per month for 250 scans, each checking eight categories including security (SPF, DMARC, DKIM, TLS), SEO, performance, mobile, local SEO, AEO, accessibility, and best practices. The competitors those assistants name are then audited on the same rubric and scored side by side. It is white-labelled from the cheapest paid plan.
For ongoing monitoring, set a monthly calendar reminder. 83% of AI citations come from content updated within 12 months. If you fix errors once but never monitor, outdated information creeps back in. Monthly checks take 10 minutes and prevent weeks of wrong information reaching potential customers. Keep a spreadsheet with one row per fact (address, phone, hours, services offered, prices) and one column per AI platform, and mark each cell green when the answer is correct.
Read the guide (/guide) for the full framework on how AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend, and which technical signals matter most in 2026.
Common questions
Where do AI models like ChatGPT and Google get information about my business?
ChatGPT pulls from Bing Places, Wikipedia, review sites, forums, LinkedIn, and editorial media via its OAI-SearchBot crawler. Google's AI Overviews draw from your website, Google Business Profile, structured data, social profiles, industry directories, review platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor, news outlets, Wikidata, and other trusted public sources. Maps and booking aggregators are read more readily than your site because they're already structured, so conflicting data across directories confuses AI systems.
Why does it take weeks for my corrections to show up in AI answers?
AI models synthesise responses from multiple sources simultaneously, so even after you update your website, the assistant continues pulling outdated facts from directories, social profiles, and cached pages until those sources are recrawled and the signals reach consensus. Owned-site changes are crawled in one to three days but influence retrieval answers in one to four weeks. High-authority third-party corrections usually reflect in two to six weeks, and full propagation into Google's Knowledge Graph typically takes one to three months.
What is schema markup and why does it help fix AI errors?
Schema markup is structured data you add to your site in JSON-LD format that explicitly defines entities like your business name, location, services, and products so AI models know which facts are authoritative. Content with proper schema is 2.5 times more likely to appear in AI-generated answers, and sites with complete Tier 1 schema get up to 40 percent more appearances in AI Overviews. Start with LocalBusiness, Organization, FAQPage, and Product types to anchor AI systems to your first-party source.
Which third-party sources should I fix first to correct AI answers?
Correct your Google Business Profile first because AI Overviews and local answers pull directly from it and edits often surface within days. Then audit and standardise name, address, phone, hours, and services across Yelp, Facebook, Bing Places, industry directories, and niche listing sites for your category. Finally, create or update your Wikidata item with core properties and references, since it feeds Knowledge Panels and Wikipedia infoboxes, often surfacing within weeks.
How do I monitor whether AI platforms have fixed the wrong information?
Ask the same questions weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews, and track each error as its own line item with the engine, question, wrong fact, date you fixed the source, and current status. Corrections land unevenly, so one platform may update in a week while another takes months. Set a monthly calendar reminder because 83 percent of AI citations come from content updated within 12 months, and outdated information creeps back if you stop monitoring after the first clean answer.