AI is answering questions about your business right now. Half of all searches happen through platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews. When customers ask about your services, locations, or pricing, AI gives them an answer.

But AI makes mistakes.

40% of users flag AI answers as inaccurate. Therefore, it’s important to audit what AI is saying, correct the sources it’s synthesizing, and build a strategy that ensures AI gets it right going forward.

AI is a pattern-matching machine piecing together information from multiple sources, but this process can go wrong in three ways:

• AI is relying on outdated information: AI models are trained on snapshots of the web from specific points in time. If a model’s training data has a cutoff date from a year ago, it will confidently state old facts as if they’re current. Your business moved locations six months ago? The AI might still be citing your previous address.
• AI is finding contradictory facts across the web: When AI finds conflicting signals, it makes a best guess about which version is correct. That guess can easily be wrong, especially if an outdated listing appears on a high-authority site that AI trusts more than your own website.
• AI is hallucinating answers: AI hallucination happens when the system fills in gaps in its knowledge by inventing plausible-sounding facts. An AI might confidently state your business hours or services based purely on patterns it learned from similar businesses, even though those specific details about your company are completely made up.

Fixing how AI talks about your business follows a three-part process:

• First, audit what AI platforms are currently saying about you.
• Second, address the most common sources of misinformation with immediate fixes.
• Third, build a long-term strategy that establishes you as the authoritative source AI should cite. 

This framework gives you both quick wins and sustainable solutions.

At this point, you have some idea that AI is saying wrong things about your brand. But, you need to conduct an audit to see exactly what it’s getting wrong.

Here’s how you can do it:

Start by creating a list of terms people would use to search for information about your business, such as:

• Company name
• Product and service names
• Executive names
• Common customer questions

Think about queries like “What services does [Company] offer?” or “Where is [Company] located?” or “[Product name] pricing.” These show you exactly what customers are seeing when they ask AI about you.

By conducting these searches, you can get a sense of where AI is getting information wrong about your business.

AI engines use different data sources and can produce wildly varying results for the same question. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity might all give different answers about your business.

So, test your key queries across multiple platforms to see the full range of what people might encounter. You should:

• Open each tool and enter the same query to compare responses side by side.
• Track the response
• Note which platforms cite sources and which ones make unsupported claims.
• Pay attention to how each platform phrases information, even when the core facts match.

You can use a spreadsheet to document any responses that are delivering inaccurate information. Make sure you record:

• What query triggered the incorrect information
• What platform gave the wrong answer
• The wrong information shared
• Source given for the information (if provided)

This list becomes your action plan for the next step. You’ll be able to see patterns in where the misinformation is coming from and prioritize which issues to fix first.

Fixing the inaccuracies of AI’s output will take a lot of time and correction, but can ultimately help AI get a more accurate picture of your brand.

Here’s how you can do that:

Whatever entities you have for your brand that you control, make sure they’re accurate. This includes things like your website, Google Business Profile, and social media profiles. Any profiles you own should be 100% accurate, so make sure that’s the case.

AI cross-references your website with major third-party directories to verify information. Use your audit spreadsheet to find every listing site where your information appears incorrectly.

Update your business details on platforms like Yelp, industry-specific directories, review sites, and any other third-party platforms where you have a presence.

Most AI platforms have “Feedback” or “Report a problem” features built into their answer interfaces. When you find wrong information, use these tools to flag the issue.

This is a secondary tactic, and results aren’t guaranteed, but it’s still worth doing. Some platforms review flagged content and may update their responses, especially if multiple users report the same problem.

In addition to correcting current issues, it’s wise to build a long-term strategy that ensures accuracy of your brand for the future.

Create a dedicated page on your website with all your essential business facts in one place. Include:

• Your exact business name
• Current address
• Phone number
• Hours of operation
• Services you offer
• Pricing structure (if applicable)

Having a “single source of truth” can help create a reliable source for third-parties to get information.

Additionally, add schema markup to the page, so AI can easily extract the information. Schema tells search engines and AI exactly what each piece of data represents. You can use Schema types like Organization, LocalBusiness, or FAQPage, depending on your business type.

Link to this page from your homepage and other high-traffic pages so search engines can easily find it to get the right information.

A big mistake businesses make is only updating their information in one or two places, like their website or Google Business Profile. But those aren’t the only places that AI engines extract information — there are other third-party sites that provide information about your business, too.

So, if you make changes to your business, make sure you’re making updates across platforms where your information shows.

A tool like LocalFX (from WebFX) can help you keep track of all your local citations and sync the information across 100 directories. That means you keep your listings in popular directories accurate, so AI engines have a higher probability of pulling and serving the right information.

A recent analysis examined more than 11,000 links cited by ChatGPT in responses to business queries. Nearly half of those citations came from PR-influenced sources, such as analyst reports, industry forums, reviews, and social platforms.

When authoritative third-party sources validate your expertise and cite your business correctly, AI is more likely to include those citations in its own answers. If you’re consistently not cited in AI answers, building this kind of third-party validation is often the missing piece. So, you should:

• Create original data studies that publications will want to cite
• Get your team featured in industry roundups, expert lists, or thought leadership pieces
• Publish case studies and success stories on reputable third-party platforms in your industry.

Showing up accurately in search results is more important than ever. If you aren’t sure how you can take the first steps to changing what AI says about you, the team behind SEO.com (WebFX) can help.

We can help audit what AI is saying about your brand, implement fixes to help correct inaccuracies, and build long-term strategies that keep AI citing you correctly. Explore our AI search services and take control of how AI represents your business.