When ChatGPT gets your business wrong
In our test, AI assistants never got an address or phone number wrong, but gave the wrong hours for 5 of 12 businesses. Why, and how to fix it at the source.
When ChatGPT gets a fact about your business wrong, the fix is almost never inside ChatGPT. It is on the pages it reads. In our test of 12 Australian businesses, the four main AI assistants were right 94% of the time when they stated a fact, never got an address or phone number wrong, and gave the wrong opening hours for 5 of the 12. The facts that go wrong are the ones that change, so that is where to look first.
What went wrong, and what never did
On 5 October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude about each of the 12 businesses by name: address, phone number, opening hours including Saturday, main services, languages and prices. Then we checked every answer against the business's own website and Google business page.
The assistants stated 238 facts. 224 were right and 14 were wrong. The wrong ones fell into three groups:
- opening hours, wrong for 5 of the 12 businesses
- Saturday hours, wrong for 1
- services, wrong for 1
Addresses and phone numbers were never wrong, not once, across all four assistants.
An address or a phone number rarely changes, so every page about you tends to say the same thing. Hours change with the season, the staff roster, a public holiday or a new owner. Each change is a chance for one copy of the old hours to be left behind on a page somebody forgot.
Where the wrong answer comes from
Of the 4,657 sources the assistants cited in our test, 60% were business websites, 18% were Google Maps and Google business pages, and 8% were directories. The five directories cited most were Fresha, Healthdirect, Yellow Pages, Yelp and Localsearch.
We counted an answer as right if it matched either the website or the Google page. So each wrong answer gave hours that appeared on neither, and some of them named where they came from: a directory, a booking page, an older listing. Our reading, which the test can't prove, is that most wrong answers are an old page repeated, not a fact made up.
Your own pages can disagree too. Seven of the 12 businesses had a website and a Google page that didn't match on at least one detail, most often opening hours. Our test counted either version as right, so this problem doesn't show up in the 14 wrong facts. A customer told the old version still finds a closed door.
When it says nothing at all
There is a quieter version of the problem. Eleven times, an assistant we asked for one of these facts simply left it out. Not guessing is better than guessing wrong, but a fact the assistant leaves out is a fact the customer never hears.
If a fact matters to your customers, such as the languages you speak, your prices or whether you open on Saturday, write it on your website in plain words, on a page about that thing, not only inside a photo, a PDF menu or a booking widget.
What doesn't fix it
Arguing with ChatGPT in your own chat changes that conversation. The next person who asks gets an answer built from the same pages as before.
The feedback button under an answer is worth a click, but it is a report, not an edit, and you can't tell when or whether it changes anything.
Publishing pages you haven't read does the opposite of what you want. Your website is the source the assistants cite most, so a page written quickly by an AI tool that gets your hours, prices or guarantees wrong is the page most likely to be repeated back to customers.
Fix a wrong answer this week
Keep your website and Google business page open in another tab while you do this.
- Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, each with web search on: "What are [your business]'s opening hours in [your suburb], including Saturday, and what services does it offer?"
- Write down each answer and the sources it shows underneath. Mark each fact right, wrong or missing.
- For every wrong fact, open the sources it cited and find the page that says the wrong thing.
- Fix that page. On your own site, check the footer, the contact page, the booking page and old posts or promotions. For a directory, log in and update the listing, or claim it if you never have.
- Make your website and Google business page say exactly the same hours, day by day.
- Set public holiday hours now, on both. Melbourne Cup Day falls on Tuesday 3 November in most of Victoria, and Christmas and New Year come next. Google business pages have a "special hours" setting for single days.
- Give the wrong answer a thumbs down and say what the right fact is.
- Ask the same questions again in four weeks. Answers vary from one try to the next and the assistants take time to pick up changes, so two checks tell you more than one.
What we're doing on sbw.studio
The assistants can't get us wrong yet, because they don't name us at all. On 7 October we asked them the eight questions we track about our own work, and none of the 32 answers named sbw studio. We ask again on 2 November. When they do start naming us, we'll run this same check on ourselves and report what they get wrong in our monthly growth log.
How we measured
On 5 October 2026 we ran our AI Recommendation Report method for 12 local businesses (five dentists, four physiotherapists and three hair salons) in 11 areas across five states, with each assistant's web search on. 46 of the 733 answers asked about a business by name, and those are the ones we checked fact by fact. Twelve businesses on one day is a small sample, so read these numbers as a first look, not a rule. The full findings and method are at score.sbw.studio/findings.
For a step-by-step check written for clinics, read what ChatGPT says about your dental clinic. For why your Google page carries so much weight, read your Google business page is what AI reads.
If you'd rather have it checked for you, the AI Recommendation Report asks the four assistants about your business, checks every fact against your website and Google page, and tells you which page to fix first.