ChatGPT says the wrong thing about my business. How do I fix it?
There's no form to edit what an AI assistant says about you. But wrong hours, old addresses and missing services usually come from a source you can fix. Here's how to find it.
A customer turns up at the address you left two years ago. Someone asks if you're open on Sundays because “ChatGPT said so”. It's frustrating, and the first instinct is to look for a way to contact OpenAI and correct it. There isn't one for this, and there doesn't need to be. Most wrong answers about a business come from something the assistant read, and you can usually change that.
First, work out where the answer came from
AI assistants answer in one of two ways, and the fix depends on which:
- From a live search. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews look things up and show the sources they used. If the answer has links or citations, click them. The wrong fact is almost always on one of those pages.
- From what the model learned in training. If there are no sources, the answer may come from older web data the model was trained on. You can't edit that directly. What you can do is make the current facts easy to find, so that answers that do search, which is most local questions now, get it right.
A quick test: ask the same question again and add “search the web and cite your sources”. If the corrected answer appears, the problem was old training data. If the wrong fact comes back with a citation, you've found the page to fix.
The usual culprits
Your own website
Check the footer, the contact page, old blog posts and any PDF still online. A 2019 post announcing “new Sunday hours” is still a page that says you open on Sundays. Check your schema markup too: it's common to update the visible hours and forget the JSON-LD. The SEO Health Snapshot shows the structured data on any page.
Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect
These are the main business-listing sources for Google, for Bing (which Copilot uses) and for Apple Maps and Siri. Claim all three and make the name, address, phone and hours identical. Bing Places is the one most owners have never logged into.
Directories and review sites
Yelp, Facebook, the BBB and trade directories (Healthgrades, Avvo, Angi and so on) are cited often in local answers. Claim the ones in your trade and correct them. For directories you can't claim, most have a “suggest an edit” or support form.
Old data aggregators and copycat listings
Some small directories scrape their data and never update. If one keeps being cited, contact it and ask for a correction or removal. It's tedious, but usually it's only one or two sites.
Then tell the assistants
- ChatGPT: use the thumbs-down on the answer and say what's wrong. It won't change the answer immediately, but it's the channel OpenAI provides.
- Google AI Overviews: use the feedback option on the overview.
- Perplexity: answers follow the cited sources closely, so fixing the source is usually enough once it's re-crawled.
Then help the corrected pages get re-read. Submit them in Google Search Console and ping Bing with IndexNow, which tells Bing a page has changed.
What not to do
- Don't block AI crawlers to make it stop. That removes your correct pages from AI answers and leaves the wrong third-party ones. Our guide to AI crawlers explains which bots you can block safely.
- Don't use OpenAI's privacy request form. It's meant for personal data about individuals, not for business details.
- Don't expect it to change overnight. Pages need to be re-crawled, and answers based on training data change only when models are updated.
Make the right facts the easiest ones to find
The long-term fix is a site that states your basic facts once, clearly, as text and in schema: name, address or service area, phone, hours, services. Add a short llms.txt if you like. It's optional, but it's one more clean summary. Our industry guides list the facts that matter most in each trade.
Sources
How to show up in each AI assistant
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