Straight answer
Why does ChatGPT give the wrong hours or information about my business?
ChatGPT gives wrong hours or details when the sources it reads disagree or are out of date — an old Yelp page, an unclaimed Bing listing, a directory entry nobody has touched in years — and it picks one. You fix it at the sources: make Google, Bing, Yelp and Apple Maps match your website, then ask again in a week or two to see whether it changed.
Updated October 4, 2026 · Free check at the bottom
Where the wrong facts come from
When there’s no clear page of your own, assistants fill the gap with whatever the cheapest source says. In our October test, a family pipe yard was described with the wrong number of years in business, taken from an old Yellow Pages entry. A white-tablecloth dinner spot was described as a plate-lunch and po-boy stop. A suit shop was summed up in one line from a directory site.
None of those answers came from a website of the business’s own. The directory won by default.
Fix it in this order
- Your website: hours, holiday hours, address, phone and what you do, as plain text.
- Google Business Profile: hours and special hours, and make sure the website link is there.
- Bing Places: claim it if you haven’t, then copy the same facts.
- Yelp and Apple Maps: same name, address, phone and hours.
- The stragglers: Yellow Pages, Facebook, Tripadvisor, your chamber of commerce page. Update or claim what you can.
Then check it
Ask ChatGPT “what are the hours for [your business] in [your town]?” and “what does [your business] sell?”. If it’s still wrong, ask it where it got that. It will often name the source, and that’s the next listing to fix.
Make these match, word for word
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Business name
One spelling everywhere, no extra keywords stuffed in.
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Address and phone
The same format on every listing.
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Regular hours and holiday hours
The fact assistants get wrong most.
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Website link on every listing
Points every source back to the page you control.
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What you do, in one line
Stops assistants guessing from your category.
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Year founded, if you mention it
Old directory entries love to get this wrong.
Check it yourself in five minutes
- 1
Open ChatGPT in a private (incognito) window, so it isn't shaped by your own history, and ask: “best [what you do] near [your town]”
- 2
Ask the same question two more times, worded a little differently. Answers change from one ask to the next, so one try is not a verdict.
- 3
Write down who gets named, in what order, and what it says about each. Then ask it directly about your business by name and check every fact: hours, address, what you sell.
- 4
Do the same in Perplexity and Claude if you can. The businesses that show up everywhere are the ones whose facts are clear in the places all of them read.
Questions
Can I ask ChatGPT to correct my information?
Telling it in a chat doesn’t change what it tells the next person. The fix is correcting the sources it reads.
How long does a correction take to show up?
There’s no fixed time; every source updates on its own schedule. That’s why we re-ask every week and show you when the answer actually changes.
ChatGPT says I’m closed, and I’m not. What do I do first?
Check your Google Business Profile and Bing Places for a “permanently closed” or “temporarily closed” flag or missing hours. Those are the most common causes.
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