A customer asks ChatGPT if you're open Sunday. It says no. You are. Nobody tells you — the customer just drives to a competitor. Wrong AI answers about basic facts are the most damaging AI visibility failure because they're invisible to you and decisive for the buyer.
Where wrong answers come from
AI assistants don't have a phone line to your business. They assemble facts from your public web footprint:
- your website's text,
- your structured data (schema),
- your Google Business Profile,
- directories, socials, and old press mentions,
- and for non-browsing models, a training snapshot that may be 1–2 years old.
When those sources agree, the AI answers confidently and correctly. When they disagree — old hours on your Facebook page, a previous address in a directory, a price list from 2023 in a cached PDF — the model either picks one (maybe the stale one) or hedges with "hours may vary."
The audit: find your disagreements
Search these five surfaces for your name, address, phone, and hours (the classic NAP+H set) and note every mismatch:
- Your website — every page, including the footer and contact page
- Google Business Profile
- Facebook / Instagram bios
- Yelp and your industry's main directory
- Ask Perplexity "what are [business]'s hours" — it cites its sources, so you can see exactly which page fed it wrong data
That citation trick is the fastest debugging tool in this whole space: the wrong answer usually names its source.
The fix, in priority order
- Make your website the unambiguous source of truth. Plain-text hours, address, phone, and prices on your contact page and footer — not in an image, not only in a Google Maps embed. AI can't read your hours off a JPEG menu.
- Add LocalBusiness schema that matches that text exactly.
- Publish an llms.txt so answer engines get the canonical facts in one file.
- Sweep the third-party listings — GBP first, then Facebook, then directories. You can't fix them all; fix the ones AI actually cites (Perplexity showed you which).
- Kill stale content you control — old promo pages with expired prices, a "temporary hours" banner from 2024. If it's on your domain, AI will treat it as current.
Verify the fix took
Fixes propagate at different speeds — browsing AIs update within days, snapshot models take longer. Re-test monthly with the same buyer questions, or run a free scan and let Scout ask six of them for you, quoting every answer. Starter re-checks weekly and emails you the delta, so the next wrong answer doesn't run for a quarter before you catch it.