When ChatGPT has wrong information about your company, don’t argue with it in the chat. Find the source it’s repeating, fix that source, and re-run the same prompts until the answer changes. Most errors trace back to your own outdated pages, stale third-party listings or confusion with a company that has a similar name.
Common ways AI gets brands wrong
AI answers describe your company the way the web does, including the parts you forgot about. Each type of error points to a different place to look.
| Error | Example | Where it usually comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Outdated facts | Old pricing, a retired plan, a former CEO | Your old pages, PDFs and press releases; stale directory profiles |
| Wrong category | A payroll tool described as an HR consultancy | Inconsistent descriptions across your site and profiles |
| Missing or invented features | “Doesn’t integrate with Salesforce” when it does | Old comparison articles, reviews written before the feature shipped |
| Merged identity | Another company’s founding date or location attached to you | A similarly named company, a previously owned domain |
| Retired product shown as current | A product you sunset still recommended | Marketplace listings, reseller pages, old documentation |
| Damaging claims | A lawsuit, outage or acquisition that didn’t happen, or happened to someone else | Misread news, forum speculation, name confusion |
Write down the exact wording of each wrong claim; you’ll need it to trace the source and confirm the fix.
Tracing the likely source of the error
First, work out whether the engine retrieved the claim from the live web or recalled it from training; the fix and timeline differ.
Retrieved or remembered?
- Retrieved answers come with citations. ChatGPT shows sources when it searches the web, Perplexity cites by default, and Google’s AI Overviews link to the pages they draw on. Open each cited page and find the sentence carrying the wrong claim.
- Remembered answers come without sources, or with sources that don’t contain the claim. The model learned it during training, possibly from pages that no longer exist.
Run the same prompt in a fresh chat, with web search on and off where the product allows it, and in two or three engines. If the error always cites the same page, you’ve found your source. If it only appears when the engine answers without searching, it’s in the model’s memory, and the fix is slower.
Search for the claim itself
Put a distinctive phrase from the wrong answer in quotes and search Google and Bing. Then search your own domain with site:yourdomain.com plus the outdated term: the old price, the old product name, the former executive. When I run this exercise, the first source I find is often the company’s own site: an orphaned pricing page, a launch press release, a PDF data sheet nobody updated.
Log every error in one sheet. A hypothetical example row:
| Claim as stated | Engines showing it | Cited or suspected source | Source type | Owner | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Plans start at $19 a month” | ChatGPT, Perplexity | Old /pricing-legacy/ page | Own site | Web team | Redirect live, awaiting recrawl |
Fixing your own pages first
Your site is the one source you fully control. Fix it before emailing anyone else.
- Update or remove outdated pages. Old pricing, retired products and former team pages should be updated, redirected to the current equivalent with a 301, or removed. Don’t leave them live and unlinked; crawlers still find them.
- Fix old files. PDFs and data sheets on your domain get indexed and quoted. Replace or redirect them.
- Publish a plain fact page. Your About page should state, in plain sentences: what the company does, its category, who it’s for, when it was founded, who leads it, current products and the pricing model. Plain sentences are easier for a model to quote than taglines.
- Say what changed. If you renamed, rebranded, retired a product or changed pricing, say so explicitly: “Formerly known as X,” or “Product Y was retired and replaced by Z.” Silence leaves the old fact unchallenged.
- Mark up the entity. Add Organization schema with
name,alternateNamefor former names,url,logo,foundingDateandsameAslinks to your official profiles. Schema won’t correct an answer on its own, but it reduces ambiguity. The details are in what schema markup does for AI search. - Get the fixes recrawled. Request indexing for changed URLs in Google Search Console, submit them in Bing Webmaster Tools or through IndexNow, and make sure the corrected text is in the server-rendered HTML, not injected by JavaScript.
Correcting third-party listings, directories and wikis
Next, work through the sources you don’t control, starting with the ones your error log shows engines citing.
| Source | How to correct it |
|---|---|
| Google Business Profile, Bing Places | Claim the listing and edit it directly |
| LinkedIn, Crunchbase, app marketplaces | Update through your admin access or claimed company profile |
| G2, Capterra and other review platforms | Claim the vendor profile; update category, features and pricing |
| Industry directories and partner listings | Email the listing owner with corrected text ready to paste |
| Articles and comparison posts | Email the editor or author with the specific error and a source |
| Wikidata | Edit the item with references, disclosing your affiliation |
| Wikipedia | Post an edit request on the article’s talk page; don’t edit your own article |
A few rules that make this work:
- Ask for a correction, not a rewrite. An editor will fix “pricing starts at $29, not $19; here’s the pricing page” in minutes. They’ll ignore a request to make the article more favorable.
- Respect Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guideline. Disclose your connection, propose the exact change on the talk page and cite independent, reliable sources. Your own press release rarely counts.
- Answer old reviews, don’t fight them. You can’t edit a customer’s review, but a public vendor reply noting that the missing feature now exists puts the current fact on the same page.
- Keep the description identical. Use the same category and one-sentence description on every profile. Five slightly different versions make the model guess.
Disambiguating from similarly named companies
Merged identities are the hardest errors to spot. Signs you’re being confused with someone else: the wrong founding year or headquarters, products you’ve never sold, or another company’s news attributed to you.
- Pair your name with your category. Use “Acme, the payroll software for restaurants” consistently in your homepage title, About page, profile descriptions and press boilerplate. The category becomes part of how the web refers to you.
- Strengthen distinct identifiers.
sameAslinks, a Wikidata item listing your official website, and consistent founders and founding date give engines unique facts to separate the two companies. - Add one factual line. A short “Acme is not affiliated with Acme Industrial, the equipment supplier” on your About page or FAQ gives retrieval a neutral sentence that resolves the confusion.
- Claim your knowledge panel. If Google shows a knowledge panel for your company, claim it and suggest corrections. It’s the clearest way to tell Google which entity is yours.
- Check your domain’s past. If you bought your domain from a previous business, old content about that business may still be tied to it. Look it up in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Using feedback channels and what to expect
Every major assistant lets you flag a bad answer. Treat that as a signal, not a correction request.
| Channel | What it does | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT thumbs-down and feedback | Sends the response and your note to OpenAI | No confirmation and no guaranteed change for your brand |
| Google AI Overviews feedback | Sends feedback on that overview to Google | Can help with clear errors; the underlying sources still matter more |
| Google knowledge panel suggestions | Proposes edits to the entity’s panel | Carries more weight once you’ve claimed the panel |
| Perplexity and Copilot feedback | Flags the answer | Retrieved answers change mostly when sources change |
| Correcting the bot in a chat | Changes that one conversation | Other users still see the original answer |
For damaging false claims, such as a lawsuit or breach that never happened, document the prompts and answers with dates, report through the platform’s legal or feedback route, and involve counsel. Keep fixing the sources in parallel.
Monitoring until the answer changes
A correction only counts when the answers change, so measure it the same way every time.
- Build a correction prompt set. For each logged error, write two or three prompts that trigger it, such as “What does [brand] cost?” and “Is [brand] the same company as [other brand]?”
- Run them on a schedule. Weekly while fixes are in flight, monthly after. Use fresh sessions and record the answer text, not just “right” or “wrong.”
- Score each claim per engine. Wrong, partly corrected or correct. Note which sources are cited now.
- Close the loop. When an error persists after its source is fixed, look for a second source you missed.
Set expectations with typical ranges, not promises. Answers built from live retrieval often shift within days to a few weeks of the source being corrected and recrawled. Claims a model memorized in training can persist until a newer model version is released, which can take months. The full tracking setup is in how to track your brand in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
Before calling an error closed:
- Own pages updated, redirected or removed, and recrawled
- Most-cited third-party sources corrected, or corrections requested
- Category and description identical across profiles
- Disambiguation line and schema in place, if name confusion was involved
- Correct answer seen in at least two consecutive runs on each engine
This correction work is a standard part of how I run GEO and AI search visibility: find what engines believe about a brand, then fix it at the source.
Get it built
If AI assistants are describing your company wrong and you can’t tell where it’s coming from, I can trace it and fix it. Start with a Growth Audit, $1,500 fixed and credited if we continue. See pricing or get in touch.