What Should I Do If ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews Give Conflicting Information About My Business?
TL;DR: Conflicting hours, addresses, or phone numbers across AI engines almost always trace back to conflicting source data — one engine is pulling from a fresher or different source than the other. Find and fix the underlying data at the source (GBP, your website, or a data aggregator), not the AI output itself, then give each engine time to re-crawl and re-index — usually days for Perplexity, one to three weeks for ChatGPT and Google.
The claim
No AI assistant invents your business hours from nothing — each one sources from a mix of your website, Google Business Profile, Bing/Apple listings, and (for search-grounded tools like ChatGPT's browsing mode and Google AI Overviews) live web crawls. When two engines disagree, it means they're drawing from two different snapshots of your data — often because one source was updated and another wasn't, or because a crawler cached an older version of your page.
The evidence
The most common causes of cross-engine conflicts, ranked by how often they show up in practice:
| Cause | Example | Which engine is usually "right" |
|---|---|---|
| GBP updated, website not updated (or vice versa) | Holiday hours changed on GBP, old hours still in website schema | Whichever source was updated most recently and consistently |
| Aggregator lag (Data Axle, Localeze) feeding stale data to Bing/Apple, which feeds some AI tools | Old address still shown on a directory that hasn't synced in months | GBP, if it's your primary managed source |
| Crawl caching — an AI engine's last crawl of your site predates a recent change | You updated your site's footer hours last week; an engine's cached copy is a month old | The current live version of the source, once re-crawled |
| Genuinely different underlying facts across platforms | Yelp lists old phone number, GBP has the new one, neither updated together | Whichever number actually rings your business — fix the wrong one everywhere |
| AI hallucination with no clear source | Rare, but happens when info is thin or ambiguous entity-matching occurs | Neither — this needs more authoritative, structured content to anchor the correct facts |
How to fix a cross-engine conflict
- Confirm what's actually correct — check your own calendar/POS system, not memory, especially for hours that vary seasonally.
- Update the single source of truth first: Google Business Profile, since it feeds Google AI Overviews/AI Mode directly and is a heavily weighted source for other engines too.
- Update your website's visible text and schema markup (
LocalBusinessJSON-LD) to match exactly — down to formatting, so automated parsers don't see it as a mismatch. - Push the same correction to Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, and any aggregator feed (Data Axle, Foursquare, Neustar Localeze) so stale copies stop circulating.
- Trigger a re-crawl where possible — request re-indexing in Google Search Console for your website, and know that browsing-enabled AI tools (ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity) typically pick up fresh page content within days, while non-browsing model knowledge lags further behind.
- Re-check in 1-3 weeks by asking each engine directly, or running an automated weekly AI visibility scan that checks all four engines side by side so you don't have to manually prompt each one.
FAQ
Which source should I trust as the "master" record? Treat Google Business Profile as your master for hours, address, and phone — it's the most heavily used and most frequently re-crawled source across AI engines, so fixing it first has the widest impact.
Why does Perplexity update faster than ChatGPT? Perplexity is built around live web retrieval for nearly every answer, so it re-crawls sources more aggressively. ChatGPT blends web browsing with its underlying trained knowledge, which updates on a slower cycle even when browsing is enabled.
Can I force an AI engine to re-check my info immediately? Not directly — there's no "submit for re-crawl" button for most AI assistants. The fastest lever you have is making sure the correct data is live and consistent everywhere, then waiting out each engine's normal refresh cycle.
What if the conflict is about something subjective, like "best" or "most affordable," not a fact? That's a different problem — it's about relative ranking, not data accuracy, and is driven by reviews, pricing signals, and content depth rather than a source correction.
How do I catch these conflicts before a customer does? A weekly AI visibility scan across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — like BookRails runs — surfaces exactly this kind of mismatch automatically instead of you finding out from a customer who showed up at the wrong time.
By Pinal Dave Last updated: August 4, 2026