ChatGPT got your business wrong, or left you out. How to check it, fix it and keep it fixed

If ChatGPT gets your business wrong, the cause is almost always a page or a listing that still says the wrong thing, and the fix is to correct the sources, starting with your own website. If it leaves you out when someone asks for your trade in your town, the cause is that nothing on your site says, in plain text a machine can quote, what you do, where, and for how much. You cannot correct an assistant directly. You can check it in ten minutes, fix the public record in a few weeks, and keep it fixed with the same check every month. This post covers all three, including what we have watched happen on our own sites.

Why an assistant gets a business wrong

Four 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, a page of yours that still loads with last year's prices, or a competitor's page that mentions you.
• Name collision. Two businesses with similar names and no clear identity signals get merged. This is behind most complaints of the kind "it mixed us up with a completely different company", and it is the easiest of the four to fix once you see it.
• Pages that only exist after JavaScript runs. Google renders scripts; most other AI crawlers do not. If your page is empty until a script fills it in, ChatGPT and Perplexity see a blank page and describe you from someone else's words.

Your competitors show up and you do not

Being looked up and being recommended are different questions. When someone asks an assistant for a plumber in Wrexham, it runs a search, reads the pages it can index, and picks the ones that answer that exact question with specifics: the service, the town, what it costs or what decides the cost, and what happens next. Google's own guidance for its AI features says a page can only be used if it is indexed and eligible to be shown as a snippet, and the other assistants behave the same way in practice. A page that says "we offer a wide range of services across the region" gives them nothing to quote.

We have seen this from the other side. On 18 September 2026 we asked ChatGPT, with search switched on and in a private window, for a web designer in Wrexham. It named this site first, twice. The pages it drew on were the ones that state the town, the service and the price in ordinary sentences. Nothing clever about it. The facts were written down where a machine could read them, which is more than most local sites manage.

• One page per service that names the town and says what it costs, or what moves the price. That page is what gets quoted.
• A Google Business Profile with the right primary category, the services ticked, real hours and recent reviews. Google names its profiles as an input to its AI answers, and the others read them too.
• Crawlers allowed in, and content that is in the HTML rather than loaded afterwards.
• Something a directory cannot say: your process, a real job you did, a straight answer to the question people ask before they ring.

Wrong price, wrong phone number

This one has a specific cause: something carrying the old figure is still readable. An old page that still answers, a directory nobody updated, a PDF price list, a number printed inside an image. When we merged an older brand of ours into this site, assistants kept quoting the old brand's prices for months afterwards. The old pages had been redirected, but copies of the old figures were still out there in listings and cached pages, and an assistant has no way to know which copy is current unless the current one is unmistakable and everywhere.

• One price and one phone number, identical on the website, the Google profile and every directory that lists you. A single old listing with a different number is enough to keep the wrong one alive.
• Old URLs redirected with a permanent 301, not left to answer. A page that still loads is a page that can still be quoted.
• Prices and numbers as text on the page, not in an image or a PDF.
• The telephone number and your price range in the Organization or LocalBusiness structured data, so the official figures are marked as official.
• When the wrong answer cites a source, fix that source. ChatGPT with search shows where it got the figure; that list is your to-do list.

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.
• "What does [your company name] charge for [your main service]?" If it quotes a figure, check where it says it came from.
• "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 and how an old number survives.
• 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.
• Redirect anything you have retired. Old pages, old domains, old brand names all get a 301 to the current page, so the only version that loads is the right one.
• 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.

How to keep it fixed

Write the five questions above down once, with your own names filled in, and ask them on the same day each month in a private window. Keep the answer and, where the assistant shows them, the sources it cited. Month to month you are watching for three things: a fact that has gone wrong again, a source you have not fixed yet, and whether you are named when the question is a recommendation rather than a lookup. When a wrong answer comes back, the cited source is the job. We run this for clients on a fixed date and keep every answer, because a change you can put beside last month's is measured; a change you remember is a feeling.

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. The old-price case above took months to fade, and it faded from the search-connected assistants first. Check monthly, with the same questions, and keep the screenshots.

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. Agencies that do this well are doing ordinary SEO with the facts stated more plainly; anyone promising to "submit" you to ChatGPT is selling something that does not exist. Either way, run the checks first; you will know within ten minutes which problem you have, and tell us what you found if you want it fixed.