The short answer
AI assistants repeat what they find written about you, on your own site and elsewhere. If the answer is wrong, the wrong fact is usually still out there: an old page, a directory listing, a profile nobody updated.
Find it, correct your own pages first, make every listing match, then re-check over the following weeks.
Why assistants get business facts wrong
An assistant does not know your business. It writes an answer from what it learned in training and, in many cases, from pages it looks up at the time of asking.
When those sources disagree, it has to pick one, and it may pick the older or the more widely copied version.
The usual culprits are dull ones:
- Old pages still live on your site. A 2021 price list, a "meet the team" page for an office you closed, a PDF brochure nobody removed.
- Listings that do not match. Directory entries, maps profiles and review sites with an old address, phone number or service list.
- Vague pages. If your own site never says plainly what you do, where and for whom, the assistant fills the gap from other sources, or guesses.
- Someone else's article. A news piece or blog post that described you once and has been copied since.
Six steps to correct it
- Write down exactly what is wrong. Ask the assistant about your business in a clean session, a few times, and copy each wrong statement word for word: the old price, the closed office, the service you stopped offering.
- Find where the wrong fact lives. Search the web for the same wording. Look at your own old pages and PDFs, directory listings, your Google Business Profile, review sites, press articles and social profiles.
- Fix your own website first. Make one clear page state the correct fact in a plain sentence, with the date it was last checked. Remove or redirect old pages that still say the wrong thing.
- Correct the listings you control. Update every profile and directory you can log in to, so the name, address, phone, services, area and prices match your website exactly.
- Ask for corrections elsewhere. Where a third-party page is wrong and you cannot edit it, ask the owner politely for a correction and give them the right wording and a link to your page.
- Re-check on a schedule. Ask the same questions again after a few weeks, then monthly. Changes are not instant, and some assistants rely on older data for longer.
Make the right fact easy to find
The aim is that anyone, person or machine, who looks for a fact about you finds the same answer everywhere. On your own site that means:
- One page per topic.
- Each fact stated in a plain sentence near the top.
- A visible "last updated" date.
Our guide to writing pages AI assistants can quote shows the pattern with a before-and-after.
Schema markup helps here too. Organization or LocalBusiness markup with your correct name, address, phone and opening hours gives machines a clean copy of the facts. It will not override a wrong fact repeated on many other sites, so do both.
Before you start, it is worth recording what assistants say today, so you can see whether the fixes worked. The six-step check works for facts as well as recommendations, and the question set builder gives you questions to ask.
Honest limits
- No one can edit an assistant's answer for you, and nobody can promise when, or whether, a correction will show.
- GEO Agency's tools run on Google Gemini, so they estimate how clear and usable your pages are; they are not a record of what ChatGPT or any other assistant said to a customer.
- No promises. We do not promise rankings or a place in AI answers.
Common questions
Can I ask OpenAI or Google to correct an answer directly?
Most assistants have a feedback button on each answer, and it is worth using. It is not a reliable way to fix a business fact on its own, though. Changing what the web says about you is the fix that lasts.
How long until the assistant says the right thing?
There is no fixed time. Assistants that look things up on the web may change soon after the pages they read are updated. Others rely on older data and can take much longer. Re-check monthly rather than daily.
Why is it quoting a page we deleted years ago?
Copies of old pages can survive in other places: directories, archived copies, scraped sites and older training data. If a deleted page had a lot of links, redirect its address to the correct page rather than leaving it as an error.
Is a wrong answer a legal problem?
That depends on what is said, and we cannot give legal advice. For most businesses a wrong price or an old address is a marketing problem, and the steps on this page are the practical fix.
Will GEO Agency fix it for us?
The self-serve tools help you find weak and unclear pages and suggest fixes. If you would rather a person did the checking and the clean-up, ask about the done-for-you service on the Services page.