ChatGPT has the wrong information about my business

Wrong hours, a phone number you have not used in years, an address you left, services you do not offer. Each error has a different source and a different fix — here is how to work out which one you are dealing with.

Last reviewed August 10, 2026

First, find out whether it has a source at all

Before changing anything, ask the engine directly: “What sources did you use for that?” The answer splits your problem into two very different cases.

It names a page. Good — that page is your problem, and fixing it fixes this. Go and look at it.
It cannot name anything, or names something irrelevant. The detail was probably generated rather than retrieved. There is no bad source to hunt down; the fix is to make the correct fact easy enough to find that the model stops guessing.

Skipping this step is how people spend a weekend auditing directories for an old phone number that never existed anywhere.

Wrong opening hours

This is the most common complaint and usually the easiest to fix.

Google Business Profile. Check both regular and special hours. A holiday entry from last December that was never removed will be quoted as fact today.
Your own website. Hours have to be selectable text. Hours inside a graphic, or rendered only by JavaScript that a crawler does not run, are invisible.
Everywhere else. Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, and any trade directory. Facebook is the one people forget and it is quoted often.
Structured data. Add openingHours to your LocalBusiness markup. It is unambiguous in a way prose is not.

If your hours genuinely vary, say so in text — “kitchen closes at 9pm, bar stays open later” — rather than leaving a gap for something to be inferred into.

An old phone number or address

These persist longest because they were once true and are still published somewhere. Search your old number and old address in quotes and see who is still showing them. Data aggregators are the usual culprits, and they feed dozens of smaller directories, so one fix upstream clears many downstream.

If you moved, check whether an old listing survives as a separate record for the old location rather than as an outdated field on your current one. That old record is a different problem and needs to be closed or merged, not edited.

Services you do not offer

Usually one of three things, and it is worth telling them apart:

Category bleed. A model asked about a “garage” may describe what garages typically do rather than what you do. The cure is an explicit services list, on your Business Profile and in plain text on your site.
Something you dropped. If you stopped doing a thing three years ago, the pages saying you do it are probably still up — including your own.
Confusion with another business. Common if the name is shared. Including your full street address in your test question will tell you quickly whether this is what is happening.

It is worth stating what you do not do, plainly, if you are regularly asked. “We do not do MOT testing” on a services page is an extractable fact; its absence is a gap to be filled by guessing.

The wrong business entirely

If the answer describes somebody else, check whether you share a name with a larger or better-documented business. There is no clever fix for this beyond being more specific and better documented yourself: full address everywhere, a distinctive description, and structured data. Over time the specific record wins over the vague one.

The order to fix things in

Working in this order gets you the largest improvement soonest, because each step feeds the ones below it.

Google Business Profile — the richest source, and the fastest to propagate.
Your own website, in plain text, plus LocalBusiness structured data.
The big directories: Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook.
Data aggregators and trade-specific listings.
Anything else still publishing the old fact, found by searching it in quotes.

Then wait, and check again

Nothing here changes an answer today. Corrections propagate on each engine’s own schedule — days for Gemini, often weeks for ChatGPT. That gap is frustrating and entirely normal; it is not evidence the fix failed.

What matters is knowing the moment it flips rather than finding out from a customer months later. Re-run the checks in how to check what AI says about your business fortnightly until the answer changes — or have AI Business Monitor do it weekly and email you the moment the wrong detail disappears.

If the wrong detail is that you have closed, that one is more urgent than everything above and has its own guide: AI says my business is closed.

Common questions

Can I contact OpenAI to correct information about my business?

There is no correction process for a business listing, because there is no listing — the answer is generated from sources at the time it is asked. Reporting an individual answer is possible through the thumbs-down control, but it does not update anything for other users. Fixing the underlying sources is the only route that works.

Why does it invent a phone number that has never been mine?

When a model has no reliable number it can still produce one that looks right, because producing plausible text is what it does. This is why a number appearing nowhere in your records is usually pure invention rather than an old record — and why you should check whether the answer cited any source at all before hunting for one.

How long until a correction shows up?

Google Business Profile edits often reach Gemini and AI Overviews within days. ChatGPT can lag by weeks depending on when it last crawled the sources. Expect a month before concluding a fix did not work.

It has my old address after I moved. What is the fastest fix?

Update the Business Profile first, then any directory that still shows the old address, then make sure your own site has the new one in plain text and in LocalBusiness structured data. Old addresses persist longest in aggregators nobody thinks to check, so search your old address in quotes to find who is still publishing it.

Check it every week automatically

Doing this by hand once tells you about today. Things change: hours get edited, reviews land, a competitor opens. We check weekly and email you when something moves, with the source behind every finding.

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