AI describes your company wrong: how to check and correct the public information

A conversational assistant that gets your address wrong, attributes services to you that you don't offer, or confuses you with another company doesn't have an opinion about you: it's summarizing what it finds published out there. You can't correct the answer directly. You can correct the sources, and check over time whether the answer changes.

The work is therefore in three parts, and none of them is technical: recording the error in a verifiable way, understanding what feeds it, fixing what's under your control. The fourth part, the most uncomfortable one, is accepting that a portion of it doesn't depend on you.

Record the error, or it doesn't exist

A wrong answer reported verbally can't be acted on: answers vary from one time to the next, and change with the phrasing of the question and the moment. Before any action, you need a precise record.

• The platform used and, if visible, the mode it answered in.
• The exact question, copied word for word.
• The exact answer, copied or captured in a readable screenshot.
• The date and time.
• The sources cited, if any appear: they're the most direct shortcut to the problem.
• The context of the test: language setting, country, whether you were signed in to an account or not.

It's worth repeating the same question two or three times and noting whether the answer is stable. An error that appears once and doesn't recur carries different weight from one that comes back identical every time: the second points to a specific source, the first may not point to anything.

Understand what type of error it is

Not every error is addressed the same way, and the type determines where you intervene.

The last row falls outside the scope of this guide the moment the information is damaging. In that case the first step stays the same — document it with dates and screenshots — but the decision on how to proceed needs to be made together with someone qualified in the matter.

Searching for the sources feeding it

The search is done by hand and doesn't require any special tools. It requires being systematic, because the wrong data point is almost always in more than one place.

1. Search for the company's name in every variant it's written in: with and without its legal form, with abbreviations, with old names.
2. Search for the wrong data point together with the name: the old address, the service attributed by mistake, the wrong person's name.
3. Check the profiles and directories where the company appears, including ones created by others and never claimed.
4. Check your own old pages: previous locations, press releases, pages for past events, documents still reachable.
5. Check the public documents about you that report company data.
6. Check articles, press releases, and third-party citations that picked up a piece of your information that's now outdated.

Correcting in stages, starting from what you control

Sources fall into four levels, and it's worth going through them in order instead of starting with the hardest one.

• What you manage directly: site, published documents, materials, signatures. This can be fixed right away and without asking anyone's permission.
• Profiles and listings you can claim: they require a process, but the decision remains yours.
• Third-party sources: you contact them with a short request stating what the wrong data point is, what the correct one is, and where it can be verified.
• What can't be corrected: old content that nobody updates anymore, archives, copies. Here all that's left is making the correct version clearer and easier to find.

When correcting your own pages, two precautions matter more than everything else: don't leave two contradictory versions of the same information online, and don't just hide the old page while leaving it reachable for anyone with the direct link. A page removed without a redirect keeps existing in many copies; an updated page replaces the information wherever it's already been read.

It's also worth making explicit what you took for granted. A service you offer but that only appears on the site inside a photograph or an internal trade name isn't readable by anyone: not by people, and not by an automated system.

Rechecking, without expecting a switch to flip

Answers don't update on request, and there's no moment when a correction gets certified. Checking happens over time, using the same method with which the error was recorded.

• Repeat the same questions, with the same words, at regular intervals.
• Note the date and answer next to the original record, even when nothing has changed.
• Watch whether the cited sources change, since they often shift before the content of the answer does.
• Check the other platforms too, because they don't all behave the same way or on the same timeline.

Nobody can say when or whether a correction will be picked up, or guarantee that a given answer will stop appearing. Whoever promises that is promising something they don't control. What can be stated is more modest and more solid: a corrected source has a chance of being read; a wrong source left online will certainly keep being available.

The log: four columns and one row per error

The log is the only tool you need. It keeps you from starting over from scratch each time, and it lets you know, months later, what was done and when. The second row below is a demonstration example.

If there's more than one error, the log quickly shows something useful: they almost always trace back to just two or three sources. Fixing those resolves several reports at once, which is why it's worth filling in the entire sources column before starting to make corrections.

What this guide doesn't cover

This guide covers the accuracy of information: how to record an error, trace it to its sources, correct it, and recheck it. How often your company gets cited in automated answers, in what context, and with what method all of this is measured over time is covered in the dedicated guide on measuring citations. The consistency of local information — locations, hours, service areas — also has its own guide.