Fix the questions before you ask anything
The check only works if every tool receives identical wording, so write the questions down first and do not improvise them in the chat window. Each question should name the business and ask for one fact, because a broad question such as "tell me about this company" lets a tool choose which facts to mention and hides the ones it would have got wrong.
Five facts cover most of what a customer needs before they act: when you are open, what you charge, where you are, what you sell and who you serve. The wording below is a template to adapt, and the exact words matter less than keeping them unchanged for every tool and every repeat.
| Fact | Question to ask, word for word | Where to find the true answer |
|---|---|---|
| Opening hours | What are the opening hours of [business name] in [town] on weekdays and on Sundays? | Your own contact page and your business profile |
| Pricing | How much does [business name] charge for [your main product or service]? | Your current price list |
| Location | What is the street address of [business name] and which suburb or town is it in? | Your contact page |
| What you sell | What products or services does [business name] provide? | Your home page and product pages |
| Who you serve | Which customers is [business name] for, and which areas does it serve? | The page where you describe your customers |
Ask several tools and keep a record
Use at least three different AI tools, including one that searches the web and one that answers from what it already knows, since the two can disagree about the same fact. Open a fresh conversation for every question so that an earlier answer cannot shape the next one, and ask each question three times in separate conversations. Repeating matters because the same tool can give different answers to identical wording, so a single reply tells you what one draw looked like and little more.
For each answer, copy the text exactly as given and note the tool, the date, whether it showed sources and whether it searched the web. Paraphrasing at this stage destroys the evidence, because the difference between "open until five" and "open around five" is the kind of detail you are checking for. A spreadsheet with one row per answer and a column for your verdict is enough.
Sort each answer into wrong, out of date or vague
An answer that differs from your records can differ in three ways, and they lead to different repairs. A wrong answer states something that was never true of your business, an out of date answer states something that was true once, and a vague answer avoids committing to the fact at all.
| Verdict | Test | Typical example |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong | No version of your business, past or present, matched it | A suburb you have never traded in, or a service you have never offered |
| Out of date | It matched your business at an earlier date | Last year’s prices, or an address from before you moved |
| Vague | It is true only because it commits to nothing checkable | “Hours vary, check their website”, or “a range of services” |
| Correct | It matches your records in every detail a customer would act on | The same hours, price and address you publish today |
The out of date test needs your own history, which is why a dated note of when you last changed each fact is worth keeping. The reasoning here is that stale facts usually come from a source that was accurate when published, whereas an invented fact has no such origin, so the two call for different searches. When a tool cites a page, open it and see whether the page itself carries the old fact.
Treat a vague answer as a finding and not as a pass. A customer who is told to check the website may do so, but the tool has still failed to carry the fact, and for a question about pricing or hours that usually means the facts are hard to find in a readable form on your own pages.
What to fix first
Order the repairs by what a customer loses when the answer is wrong. An incorrect closing time or address sends someone to a locked door, a wrong price creates a dispute at the counter, and a loosely described product range costs a sale nobody sees. On that reasoning, hours, location and price come before the description of what you sell and who you serve.
Within each fact, fix the sources you control before the ones you do not. Start with your own website, then the business profiles and directory listings you manage, and make every one of them state the same fact in the same words. Only then contact the owners of other sites that repeat the old version. Where several tools repeat the same wrong detail, an old public page is the more likely origin, and the post on what to do when AI describes your company wrongly explains how to trace an error to unclear pages, a retrieval failure or stored memory.
Leave vague answers until last unless they cluster on one fact. If every tool hedges on pricing, publish the price as plain text on a page that a crawler can read, because a figure that sits inside an image or an interactive widget may never reach the tool at all.
What the check cannot tell you
Nine answers per fact, from three tools asked three times each, is a small sample, and it shows what is likely to appear without measuring how often it appears across everyone who asks. A tool that gave the right hours three times may still give wrong ones tomorrow, and a tool you did not test may behave differently. The result also covers only questions that name your business, so it says nothing about whether you are mentioned when a customer asks for options without a name.
Corrections do not arrive on a schedule you control. Any tool that searches the web may reflect a corrected page within days, while an answer drawn from stored knowledge can lag for months, a gap described in the post on how long a website change takes to show up. Once you have fixed your pages, repeat the same questions in the same words on a fixed date and compare the new record with the old one, which is the only way to tell whether anything moved.