ChatGPT’s got your hours wrong. Now what?

Why AI gets it wrong in the first place

AI models don’t ring you up to check facts. They build an answer from whatever’s already been written about you across the web, and that includes sources you’ve probably forgotten exist. An old Yell.com listing from years back with your previous address. A Facebook page you stopped updating when you moved to Instagram. A directory that scraped your details once and never refreshed them. A press mention from a house move a few years ago. None of these sources know about each other, and none of them get automatically corrected when you update your website. The AI model doesn’t know which one is right, so it either picks the most common answer across sources or the most recent one it happened to index, and neither of those is guaranteed to be the truth. This is genuinely nobody’s fault in the way it feels when you first spot it. It’s just what happens when information about a small business lives in a dozen disconnected places and only one of them, your actual website, is under your direct control.

What to check first

Before you do anything else, work out exactly what’s wrong and where it’s coming from. Ask the AI tool directly: ‘where did you get that information?’ Some platforms will give you a source or a rough indication, which is a genuinely useful shortcut. Then run a manual sweep of the obvious places: your Google Business Profile, your website’s contact page and footer, your top three directory listings, your Companies House entry if you’re a limited company, and your main social profiles. Write down every version of your address, phone number and hours you find. It’s common to discover three or four slightly different versions floating around that you didn’t realise existed, especially if you’ve moved premises, changed hours seasonally, or rebranded at any point. This audit is the unglamorous bit, but skipping it means you end up fixing your website while the actual source of the error sits untouched on page four of a directory you forgot you were ever listed on.

How to actually correct it

Once you know where the wrong information lives, update it at the source, not just on your own site. Claim and correct your Google Business Profile first, since it feeds a lot of downstream tools. Then work through directories in order of how likely they are to be an AI source, major aggregators like Yell, Bing Places and industry-specific directories tend to carry more weight than a listing site nobody’s heard of. Update your website itself with clear, unambiguous text: don’t assume a customer or a crawler will infer your hours from a photo of your shop front. Then wait. This is the part people find frustrating: correcting the source doesn’t instantly correct the AI answer, because models re-index on their own schedule, not yours. Expect weeks rather than days, and don’t panic if the wrong answer is still showing a fortnight later. Recheck monthly rather than daily, it’ll save your sanity.

When it’s worth getting help with this

If you’ve got one location and a handful of listings, the manual sweep above is entirely doable yourself in an afternoon. It gets genuinely harder with scale: multiple branches, franchise locations, seasonal hours that change several times a year, or a business that’s rebranded and is fighting old information that refuses to die. At that point, tracking every source, every platform and every re-index cycle by hand becomes a proper job rather than an occasional task, and mistakes slipping through cost you real enquiries from people who trusted the wrong information and turned up on a day you were shut. This is where ongoing monitoring earns its keep: catching a drift back to wrong information before it costs you a customer, rather than finding out three months later when someone mentions it in passing.