Why does AI give wrong information about my business?
Usually because it found an old or conflicting source and had no way to know it was outdated. An AI assistant doesn’t verify facts the way a person would, it reads what’s available and repeats the version it trusts most, which is sometimes a stale directory listing, an old menu, or a review from three years ago rather than your current website.
The assistant isn’t guessing, it’s quoting
When an AI assistant gets a fact wrong about your business, wrong hours, an old phone number, a service you no longer offer, it feels like the machine made it up. It didn’t. It found that detail somewhere real, decided it looked trustworthy enough, and repeated it. The error is almost never invention. It’s a citation of a source you forgot still exists.
That reframes the fix. You’re not correcting a hallucination, you’re finding the actual outdated page or listing the assistant pulled from and updating or removing it at the source.
Where the wrong version usually lives
The usual suspects: an old directory listing from years ago that never got taken down, a Google Business Profile with hours nobody updated after a season changed, a review that mentions a menu or a price that’s no longer accurate, or a page on your own site that still says something you meant to change months ago. Any one of these can outrank the correct, current version in an assistant’s eyes if it happens to be clearer or more consistent with other sources.
Sometimes the wrong information isn’t even wrong on its own site, it’s just older, and the assistant has no strong signal telling it your newer page is the one to trust over the older one saying something different.
How to actually find the bad source
Ask the assistant directly, in the same conversation where it gave you the wrong answer: where did that come from. It often can’t say precisely, but sometimes it names a domain or a type of source, which narrows the search. Beyond that, search your own business name alongside the wrong detail, the old hours, the discontinued service, and see what comes up. Old directory sites, outdated citation aggregators, and a Google profile you forgot you had are the most common culprits.
Check your Google Business Profile itself first, since it’s one of the sources an assistant leans on most, and a mismatch between it and your website is one of the fastest ways to end up with two different versions of the truth circulating.
Fixing it at the source, not just on your own page
Update or claim the outdated listing directly where it lives, don’t just fix your own site and assume the correction spreads. Old directories rarely notice or care that your website changed. If the source is a review, you can’t edit it, but you can respond publicly with the correct detail, which at least gives a future reader, human or assistant, two versions to weigh instead of one. Consistency across every place your details appear is what eventually tips an assistant toward the current, correct version.
This connects directly to why isn’t my business showing on Google Maps, since a mismatched or outdated profile is often the root of both problems.
Frequently asked
Can I ask ChatGPT to forget the wrong information?
Not directly and not reliably. There’s no delete button for a fact an assistant learned from the open web. The fix is correcting or removing the source it’s pulling from, which eventually changes what gets repeated.
Why would an old review cause this if my website is correct?
Because an assistant weighs multiple sources, not just your website, and a review with a specific, confident detail can read as more trustworthy than a general page, even when it’s years out of date.
How long does it take for a correction to show up in AI answers?
It varies and there’s no fixed schedule, since it depends on when the assistant’s sources refresh. Correcting the source as soon as you find it is the only way to speed that up.
