You have probably checked what Google shows for your business. Have you checked what ChatGPT says? Or Gemini, or Perplexity, or the assistant built into a phone?
A growing number of your customers ask an AI assistant before they ever open a map. If the assistant tells them you close at 5 when you close at 7, or cannot find you at all, you lose that customer quietly, and you never see it happen. The good news: checking what AI says about you takes about ten minutes, and it is worth doing.
Why this is worth ten minutes
AI assistants answer from the information they can gather about you across the web. That means they inherit whatever is wrong, outdated, or missing in your listings, and they state it with total confidence. Checking their answers is the fastest way to see your business the way a modern customer sees it, before that customer decides you are closed or not worth the call.
How to check, step by step
Open ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. You do not need paid versions. In each one, ask the questions a real customer would ask. Run these:
- The direct lookup. “What are the hours for [your business name] in [your city]?” Then try “What is the phone number and address for [your business name]?” This is the fastest way to catch a wrong detail.
- The reputation check. “Is [your business name] in [your city] any good?” See what it says, and whether it even has enough to answer.
- The category test. “What is the best [your category] near [your neighborhood or city]?” This is the big one. If your competitors get named and you do not, that is a customer you are losing at the moment of choice.
- The follow-up. Ask “How do I contact them?” or “Are they open now?” and see whether the details it gives are actually yours and actually right.
Do this in more than one assistant. They pull from different sources, so one can be right while another is wrong.
What to look for
As you go, watch for four failure modes:
- Wrong details. An old phone number, a former address, last season’s hours. These are the most damaging, because they look authoritative.
- “I could not find much.” If the assistant hedges or says it has limited information, your business does not have a clear, consistent presence for it to trust.
- You are not mentioned. On the category question, if competitors appear and you do not, the assistant did not consider you a confident answer.
- A different business. Sometimes the assistant blends you with a similarly named business, or a duplicate listing of yours. That is a data problem you can fix.
Write down what each assistant gets wrong. That list is your to-do list.
Why AI gets it wrong
It is almost never that the assistant dislikes you. It is that the information it found was inconsistent or stale. When your name, address, phone, hours, and categories disagree across Google, Apple, Bing, and the directories that feed them, the assistant either picks one at random, hedges, or skips you for a business it is more sure about. We go deeper on this in how AI assistants decide which business to recommend.
What to do about it
You cannot edit an AI’s answer directly. What you can do is fix the sources it reads from, so the next time it looks, it finds one clear, correct version of your business:
- Correct your details on Google, Apple Maps, and Bing, and make them match exactly.
- Hunt down the stale copies and duplicate listings sitting in directories you forgot about.
- Keep it that way, because one moved location or changed number can put you right back into “the sources disagree” territory.
That last part is the hard one. Fixing every source by hand once is a long afternoon. Keeping them all in agreement forever, as details drift, is the actual job.
This is what LocalBasics does. You set your name, address, phone, hours, and categories once in a single protected record, and it stays accurate and consistent across the places AI assistants read from, monitored for life, on a one-time payment. It does not write the AI’s answer for you. It makes sure that when the AI looks you up, it finds the truth instead of three conflicting versions.
Common questions
Do I need a paid AI subscription to check? No. The free versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot are enough to see what a customer would see.
How often should I check? Every few months, and any time your hours, phone, or location change. Those are exactly the moments things drift.
The AI got my info wrong. Can I report it? You can, but the durable fix is correcting the underlying sources, because that is where the assistant got the wrong answer in the first place.
What if the AI does not mention my business at all? That usually means your presence is thin or inconsistent. A complete, matching set of listings gives the assistant something solid to work from.
The bottom line
Your customers are already asking AI about local businesses like yours. Spend ten minutes finding out what it says, write down what is wrong, and fix it at the source. Being the answer an assistant gives is not a trick. It is the result of having one accurate, consistent version of your business everywhere it looks.