ChatGPT got your business wrong. Here is how to check, and how to fix it

Type your company name into ChatGPT and there is a fair chance it gets something wrong: the wrong town, a phone number from years ago, a service you no longer offer, or in the worst case a different business with a similar name. It is not being malicious and it is not random. An assistant answers from what it has read about you, and if what it has read is thin, old or contradictory, the answer is too. That is fixable, and the fix is mostly on your own website. Here is how we check it for clients, and what we change when it is wrong.

Why an assistant gets a business wrong

There are three separate mechanisms, and they need different fixes.

• Old training data. The model learned about you at some point in the past, from whatever was public then. If you moved, rebranded or changed what you sell since, the model may simply not know.
• Live search that finds the wrong page. Most assistants now search the web before answering. If your own site says little about who you are and where you are, the assistant leans on a directory listing, an old news item or a competitor's page that mentions you.
• Name collision. Two businesses with similar names and no clear identity signals get merged. This is the case behind most "it mixed us up with a completely different company" complaints, and it is the easiest of the three to fix once you see it.

How to check, in ten minutes

Do this in a private window so your own history does not colour the answers, and ask the same questions in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude. The answers will differ, and the differences tell you where the problem is.

• "Who are [your company name] and what do they do?" Look for the town, the services and anything that belongs to someone else.
• "Where is [your company name] based and how do I contact them?" Old addresses and dead phone numbers show up here.
• "Recommend a [your trade] in [your town]." This is the one that costs you money. If you are missing and a competitor is named, note which one and why the assistant says it chose them.
• "Is [your company name] the same as [the similar name]?" Only if you suspect a collision. The answer usually reveals which page caused it.

Screenshot each answer with the date. You will want the before picture, because the fixes below take weeks to show and it is easy to forget how bad it was. If you would rather have it done for you, our free audit reports on whether the assistants can read your site at all, which is the first thing to rule out.

The fixes, in the order that works

Almost every wrong answer traces back to your own website not stating the facts clearly enough for a machine to trust them. So that is where you start.

• Say who you are in plain text on the home page and the about page. Legal name, trading name, what you do, where you are, who you serve. Not in an image, not in a slogan, in sentences a crawler can read.
• Put the same name, address and phone number everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, Companies House, the directories that already list you. Contradictions between those are exactly how a collision starts.
• Add structured data. An Organization or LocalBusiness block with your name, address, phone, founding date and the profiles you control tells an assistant which facts are the official ones. This is the single highest-value change for a name collision.
• Let the crawlers in. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended each have a name. If your robots file or your hosting blocks them, nothing you write can be read. Many sites block them without knowing.
• Answer the questions people ask, on pages of your own. An assistant that finds a page on your site titled with the exact question will quote it. A directory does not get that treatment.
• Fix the sources it is quoting. If the answer cites an old listing, update or remove that listing. If it cites a news piece, you cannot change it, but you can outweigh it.

What does not work

You cannot email ChatGPT and ask it to correct you. There is no form. Complaining about a wrong answer changes nothing, because the answer is generated fresh each time from the sources. Paying for ads does not touch it either. The only lever is the public record about your business, and the part of that record you control completely is your own website, so that is where the work goes.

An assistant does not know your business. It knows what has been written about your business, and most of that should be written by you.

How long it takes

The live-search assistants pick up website changes within days to a few weeks, once their crawler has been back. Model training data updates on the model's own schedule, which can be months, so an assistant with search off may stay wrong for a while even after the web is right. Check monthly, with the same questions, and keep the screenshots. When we run this for a client we log the answers on a fixed date each month so the change is measured rather than felt.

When to get help

If the checks above show your site is blocking the crawlers, has no structured data, or says almost nothing about who you are, those are technical fixes and we do them as part of our SEO and AI search work. If a competitor is being recommended in your place for your own trade in your own town, that is a content and authority problem, and it is the same work as ranking on Google, done with the assistants in mind. Either way, run the checks first; you will know within ten minutes which of the three problems you have, and tell us what you found if you want it fixed.