ChatGPT Is Telling Customers the Wrong Thing About Your Business. Here's How to Fix It in 2026

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Short answer: There is no "edit my facts" button in ChatGPT, and you don't need one. AI assistants build each answer on the spot from your public record: your website, Google Business Profile, directories, and review sites. Fix those sources so they agree, leave a thumbs-down as a backstop, then re-test in a few weeks until the answer is right.

A cafe owner gets a call: "ChatGPT told me you close at 5, but I drove over and you were shut." The hours changed months ago. A salon owner asks ChatGPT about her own shop and finds it listing three services she dropped last year. The instinct is the same for both of them: hunt for the button that lets you correct the AI directly. There isn't one. And once you understand why the AI is wrong, you won't want one.

This is the correction playbook, in order. Not how to show up in AI at all, and not how to get recommended more. This is what to do when an answer is already appearing about your business and it is factually wrong.

Why does AI get your business wrong in the first place?

ChatGPT does not keep a private fact sheet about your shop that someone typed in and forgot to update. It assembles the answer the moment a customer asks, by reading whatever it can find about you on the open web. OpenAI says this plainly in its own help pages: "ChatGPT can search the web to answer questions with current information and links to relevant sources." The catch is in the next line. OpenAI warns that "search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect," and tells people to open a cited source and "use an authoritative source when accuracy matters."

Read that as an owner and it is good news. The answer is only ever as good as the sources it reads. If your public record is stale, thin, or contradicts itself, the AI will confidently repeat the mistake. Fix the record and you fix the answer.

It helps to know the assistant will not hedge. NewsGuard audited the 10 leading chatbots, ChatGPT among them, in August 2025 and found they repeated false claims 35% of the time, almost double the 18% rate a year earlier. The reason: the models now answer 100% of the time by pulling from the open web instead of declining when they are unsure. So assume the assistant will state whatever your public record says, right or wrong, as if it were certain. That is exactly why loose facts in old directories cause real damage. If you want the fuller picture of how these systems piece your details together, we cover how ChatGPT decides which businesses to name separately.

This is not a niche worry anymore. A BrightLocal survey in 2026 found 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to find local business recommendations in the past year, up from just 6% a year earlier. That makes AI the third most-used channel for local recommendations, behind only Google and Facebook and ahead of Yelp and TripAdvisor. ChatGPT is the frontrunner, used by 31% of consumers. A wrong closing time is now a wrong closing time in front of a third of the people asking.

Step 1: Audit what the AI actually says about you

Before you fix anything, write down exactly what is wrong, word for word. Open ChatGPT and ask it plain customer questions about your business by name: What are your hours? What services do you offer? What is the phone number and address? Are you open on Sundays? Then do the same in Google's AI answers, Gemini, and Copilot, because they read overlapping but different sources and a mistake in one is often a mistake in several.

Copy each wrong claim into a note, verbatim. "Closes at 5pm" when you close at 8. "Permanently closed" when you are open. An old address, a disconnected number, a service you stopped offering. Do not paraphrase. You will need the exact wording later to find where it came from and to confirm it has changed. If you want a repeatable version of this check, our guide to checking what ChatGPT says about your business walks through the same questions to ask.

Step 2: Trace each wrong fact back to the page feeding it

Every wrong fact has a home somewhere on the public web. Your job now is to find it. For each item on your audit list, go hunting for where that claim lives.

Start with the obvious suspects. Search your business name and look at the first two pages of results. Check your own website, and old pages on it especially: a "Contact" page from three years ago, an events page with last season's hours, a footer that never got updated. Then check your Google Business Profile fields one by one. Then the directories: Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, and the industry listings for your trade. Old listings are the usual culprit. A salon that dropped hair extensions still has them listed on a beauty directory it forgot the password to, so the AI reads that and lists them too.

When ChatGPT shows source links under a web answer, open them. OpenAI's own guidance tells users to do this, and it works just as well for you: the cited page is often the exact source of the wrong fact, handed to you. Cross-reference against the wording you saved in Step 1. If ChatGPT says you close at 5 and a stale directory says 5, you have found your source.

Step 3: Fix your own site and Google Business Profile first

Correct the sources you fully control before you touch anything else. Your website and your Google Business Profile are the two records with the most weight and the fastest turnaround, so make them agree with each other down to the detail. Same business name, same address, same phone, same hours, same services, in the same format on both.

On your site, update the live pages and hunt down the stale ones. Old blog posts, an outdated location page, a PDF menu with last year's prices. If a page no longer reflects reality, fix it or take it down, because the AI cannot tell your current page from your abandoned one. On Google Business Profile, work through every field, not just hours: categories, services, attributes, the description. A profile that is complete and current is one of the strongest signals you can send, and it feeds far more than Google. Our walkthrough on optimizing your Google Business Profile covers the fields that matter most and the order to do them in.

One more lever worth adding while you are in there: structured data. Google's own Search Central documentation calls structured data a standardized format for describing a page's content, and recommends JSON-LD as the preferred way to hand Google explicit clues about what a page means. Google only speaks to how its own Search engine uses it. But the same logic reasonably extends further: tagging your business name, address, phone, and hours in a machine-readable format leaves less room for any system reading your site to guess wrong, AI assistants included. It is a one-time technical fix your web developer or platform (Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix all support it) can usually turn on without a rebuild.

Here is the pattern worth naming. When you do this work for owner-run shops, the wrong fact is almost never a mystery in the AI. It is almost always sitting in plain sight on a page the owner forgot existed: a second Facebook page a former employee made, a Yelp listing auto-generated years ago, a directory entry from a one-time promotion. The fix is rarely clever. It is finding the forgotten page and making it tell the truth. Treat this as housekeeping on records you already own, not as a fight with a black box.

Step 4: Correct the third-party listings to match exactly

Now make every other listing match the source of truth you just set. Go down your audit list and update Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, and any trade directory that carried a wrong fact. The word that matters here is exactly. The same name, address, phone, and hours everywhere, in the same form. "Suite 4" on one and "Ste. 4" on another, two different phone numbers across two listings, a nickname on one and the legal name on another: these small disagreements are what give the AI a wrong answer to choose from.

Some directories are slow or awkward to claim. Do it anyway for the ones that showed up in your trace, because those are the pages actively feeding the mistake. Consistent listings across the web are the backbone of local visibility in general, not just AI, and we go deeper on getting them right in our piece on local citations for small businesses. When every profile says the same thing, the assistant has nothing contradictory to get wrong.

Step 5: Leave the thumbs-down feedback as a backstop

Now, and only now, use the in-product feedback. In ChatGPT, hover on the wrong answer, click the thumbs-down, then "Select an issue," and for a factual problem about your business the closest route is "Safety or Legal concern." OpenAI also runs a content-reporting webform for content that "may violate OpenAI's Terms of Use or applicable laws."

Be clear on what this does and does not do. OpenAI says reported content "may be reviewed by OpenAI's Model Quality team, which may apply filters or other mitigations to help prevent ChatGPT from relying on unreliable sources in future responses." In plain terms: it acts on the sources, it does not hand-edit a fact about your business on request. There is no per-business correction desk. That is why feedback is Step 5, a backstop, not Step 1. Skipping straight to the thumbs-down without fixing the sources is the single most common mistake owners make, and it is why the answer never seems to change.

The founder of Glama AI learned this the hard way, and his story is worth borrowing because it is honest about the limits. Google's AI Overview started showing his support email as the contact for a different, similarly named company, and he spent months on the receiving end. As he put it: "Hundreds of frustrated customers over six months, all because of a hallucinating AI summary. I'm now mashing the thumbs-down button on every bad AI Overview I find. No idea if it'll help, but here's hoping I don't spend another six months starting my day with someone else's angry customers." His case was a Google AI Overview, not ChatGPT, but the mechanism is identical: an AI assistant repeating a wrong public fact, and a feedback button that may or may not fix it. The lesson is the same. The button is a backstop. Fixing the sources is the fix.

Step 6: Re-test on a schedule until the answer flips

Corrections do not show up the next morning. AI assistants read a cached and periodically refreshed version of the web, so it takes time for your updated site, profile, and listings to propagate into what the model reads. Plan for weeks, not hours.

Put a reminder in your calendar. Re-run the exact questions from your audit every few weeks and check whether the wrong claim has changed. Keep the note from Step 1 open so you are comparing against the original wording. When the answer flips to correct, you are done. If it hasn't after a month or so, go back to Step 2: there is usually one more source you missed, a listing still carrying the old fact. Owners who track this over time catch regressions early, which is worth building into your routine. Our guide to tracking what ChatGPT cites about you shows a simple way to keep an eye on it.

What not to waste time on

There is no phone line to call at OpenAI to correct a fact about your cafe. There is no removal form for "this is wrong," and no per-business "edit my facts" route. Do not spend an afternoon looking for one. The feedback tools that exist are the thumbs-down and the content-report webform, and both act on sources, not on your specific answer on demand.

The other trap is stopping after the thumbs-down and assuming the job is done. It usually isn't, because the wrong source is still sitting there feeding the next answer. If you only do one thing from this article, make it the source fix in Steps 3 and 4. That is the part that actually changes what customers see.

Prevention: keep one set of facts everywhere

Once the answer is right, keep it right by never letting your records disagree again. Pick one canonical version of your details: exact name, address, phone, hours, services. Write it down. When something changes, update your website and Google Business Profile the same day, then push it out to the directories. Give the assistants one consistent story and they have nothing contradictory to get wrong next time. This is the same discipline that helps you get listed cleanly in ChatGPT in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Can I contact OpenAI to fix a fact about my business directly?

No. OpenAI does not offer a per-business fact-correction route. The only channels are the in-product thumbs-down and a content-reporting webform, and OpenAI says reported content may be reviewed by its Model Quality team, which may apply filters to keep ChatGPT from relying on unreliable sources. It acts on the sources, not on your specific answer on request.

How long does it take for ChatGPT to show the corrected information?

Plan for a few weeks, not days. AI assistants read a cached and refreshed copy of the web, so your updated website, Google Business Profile, and directory listings take time to propagate into what the model reads. Re-test on a schedule and keep checking until the answer flips.

Why does ChatGPT confidently state wrong details instead of saying it isn't sure?

Because the leading chatbots now answer nearly every question by pulling from the open web rather than declining. A NewsGuard audit in August 2025 found they repeated false claims 35% of the time, up from 18% a year earlier. Assume the assistant will state whatever your public record says as if it were certain.

Which source should I fix first?

Your own website and Google Business Profile, made to agree with each other exactly. They carry the most weight and update fastest. Once those are correct, match every third-party listing to them, then leave the thumbs-down feedback as a backstop.

Why does ChatGPT show the wrong hours for my business?

Almost always because one old listing still carries your previous hours. Hours change gradually, a holiday schedule here, a seasonal adjustment there, and an old directory listing or a forgotten second Facebook page keeps the original entry. Since the assistant reads whatever public source it finds, one stale listing is enough to produce a wrong answer. Run the audit-and-trace process from Steps 1-2 above, starting with the loudest offender: check your live hours against your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory that came up when you searched your business name.

Do agencies that fix wrong AI business info do anything different from this guide?

Not really. They run the same six steps above, which any owner can do without paying for it. What an agency, or a tool like Fonzy, mainly adds is keeping it done: watching your site, Google Business Profile, and directories on an ongoing basis so a fact never has time to drift out of sync again. The fix itself is always the same, matching every source to one canonical set of facts.

Does adding schema markup to my website help fix wrong AI answers?

It cannot force ChatGPT to read it, but it helps. Structured data (JSON-LD) marks up your business name, address, phone, and hours in a standardized, machine-readable format instead of leaving them buried in free text. Google's own documentation recommends this specifically for its Search engine, and the same logic holds for any system, AI assistants included, that has to read your site to find your facts. Pair it with the source fixes in Steps 3 and 4; schema supports that work, but it does not replace it.

You never edit the AI. You fix the cafe's hours on the pages the AI reads, then wait for the answer to catch up. That is the whole job, and it is housekeeping on records you already control, not a fight with a machine. Keeping those records clean across every profile is exactly the kind of steady, unglamorous work Fonzy handles on autopilot, so the next customer who asks an assistant about you hears the truth.

Sources

Roald

Founder Fonzy. Obsessed with scaling organic traffic. Writing about the intersection of SEO, AI, and product growth.