Why this happens even to careful businesses
An assistant does not verify facts against a register. It repeats what its sources say, weighted by how often and how confidently they say it. One old directory page listing your previous suite number can outvote your own correct website if a dozen other pages copied that directory.
The closed-business case is the most damaging version, and it is usually caused by an unclaimed duplicate profile, a former location that was never marked permanently closed, or a review platform that inferred closure from inactivity.
Find the source before you fix anything
- Ask the assistant directly where it got that. It will often name or link a source. Treat it as a lead, not proof, because assistants sometimes reconstruct a plausible source.
- Search the wrong fact itself. Search the old phone number, the old address, or the phrase "permanently closed" next to your name. The stale page usually surfaces immediately.
- Check for duplicate profiles. A second, unclaimed Business Profile is the single most common root cause of contradictory facts.
- Only then start correcting, working from the most authoritative source outward.
Set expectations before you start
Your own site updates immediately. Your Business Profile updates within hours to days. Third-party pages that copied the old fact update on their own schedule, and some never do. Assistants then need to re-retrieve. Plan in weeks, verify by re-asking rather than by assuming, and keep a note of the date you changed each source so you can tell what worked.
One thing worth doing permanently
Put the facts on your own site in a form that leaves no room for interpretation: name, address, phone, hours, and service area as plain text, plus structured data saying the same thing. It does not force a correction, but it gives every future source something unambiguous to copy, which is how you stop this recurring.
Correction playbook
Find the wrong fact in the left column. Fix the source of record first, then the copies, in that order.
| What is wrong | Source of record to fix first | Then check | Realistic window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Says you are closed or permanently closed | Google Business Profile status, and any duplicate profile you did not know existed | Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, the two biggest review platforms in your trade | Days for the profile, weeks for assistants to stop repeating it |
| Wrong hours | Business Profile hours, including special and holiday hours | Your own site footer, which is often the contradicting source | Days to weeks |
| Wrong phone number | Business Profile, then your website, then every directory carrying the old number | Old print or partner pages that still list it | Weeks. This one has the longest tail. |
| Wrong address or service area | Business Profile address or service-area setting | Your site, structured data, and any listing that shows the old suite or unit | Weeks |
| Wrong services, or missing a service you sell | The services list on your Business Profile | A dedicated page on your own site for that service | Weeks. New service pages need to be crawled first. |
| Confused with a similarly named business | Your own about page stating the legal name, trading name, and city unambiguously | Structured data, and consistent naming across every profile | Weeks to months. Entity confusion is the slowest to unwind. |
| Describes you as the wrong kind of business | Primary category on the Business Profile | Your homepage heading and title, which are read as a category signal | Weeks |
| Repeats an old owner, brand, or merger | Your about page, plus a dated post announcing the change | Local press and association listings carrying the old name | Months. Old names live a long time in training data. |
Record the date you changed each source. When the answer eventually corrects itself, that log is the only way to know which fix did it.
You are looking for the term
Hallucination and entity resolution
When an assistant states something about you that is not true, that is a hallucination if it invented it and a stale-source problem if it copied it, and the two have different fixes. When it merges you with a similarly named business, that is an entity resolution failure. Naming which one you have tells you whether to fix sources or to fix your naming.
- Can I report a wrong answer to OpenAI or Google?
- You can use in-product feedback, and it is worth doing for something damaging like a false closure. It is not a correction channel with a service level, so do it in addition to fixing the sources, not instead.
- How do I know when it is fixed?
- Re-ask the same question, in the same words, in a signed-out chat, on a schedule. That is the only reliable confirmation.
- 01Guidelines for representing your business on GoogleGoogle Business Profile Help
- 02Verify your business on GoogleGoogle Business Profile Help
- 03Manage your services on your Business ProfileGoogle Business Profile Help
- 04Local business structured dataGoogle Search Central
Every link above was opened and confirmed reachable on September 1, 2026.
The automated version
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