Assistants now describe local businesses to people in sentences, and they are frequently wrong about the details that matter: your hours, your service area, whether you handle a trade you dropped years ago. Nobody tells you this is happening, and almost no contractor has checked.
Ask it about yourself
The audit costs twenty minutes and needs no tools. Put your own business into an assistant and ask the things a customer would.
- Who are they, and what do they do?
- What areas do they cover?
- Are they open now, and do they do emergency work?
- Do they handle a specific job you do, and one you do not?
- What do people say about them?
- Who else nearby does this?
Write down what comes back. Then do it in a second assistant, because they draw on different sources and disagree more than you would expect.
What tends to be wrong
The errors follow a pattern, and most trace back to something stale rather than to the system inventing things.
An old address or phone number, usually because a directory somewhere still carries it. Assistants aggregate, so one neglected listing keeps a dead number alive.
Hours that are not yours, particularly around holidays, or an emergency service you offer that goes unmentioned.
Services you no longer provide, or trades you never did, often from an old page you forgot was published.
A service area drawn from your registered address, which is wrong for anyone covering a wide territory from one office.
Confusion with a similarly named business, which is more common than it sounds and occasionally attaches somebody else’s reviews to you.
Why the fix is rarely on your website
The instinct is to correct the website. That is usually not where it came from.
These descriptions are assembled from what is consistent across many sources: your Google Business Profile, directories, review sites, social profiles, citations you have forgotten. When those disagree, the system picks whatever appears most often, which is frequently the outdated version simply because it is repeated in more places.
So the correction is a consistency exercise. Fix the profile first, then the directories carrying the wrong details, then anywhere else your business is listed. It is dull work, it is the same work local search has always required, and it is now also what decides how you are described in a sentence.
Make the answers available to be found
Where your own site does matter is for the questions no listing answers.
Whether you charge a call-out fee. Which towns you actually cover, written out. Whether you take emergency work at night. What your minimum job is. If those exist as plain sentences on your pages, they can be picked up. If they live only in your head or in your office’s phone manner, no system can report them, and the answer given to a customer will be a guess or nothing.
Check it again after anything changes
New number, new premises, a service added or dropped, a change of hours, each takes time to propagate and some of it never does without being pushed.
Re-run the same questions a few weeks after any change. It is the only way to discover that one persistent directory is still telling people you close at five.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find out what AI says about my business?
Ask it, as a customer would: what they do, where they work, whether they are open, what people say. Repeat in a second assistant, since they use different sources and often disagree.
Why is the information wrong?
Usually because something stale is repeated across enough directories to look authoritative. These descriptions favour what is consistent, not what is current.
How do I correct it?
Not on your website first. Fix the Google Business Profile, then the directories carrying the old details. Consistency across sources is what changes the answer.
How often should I check?
After any change to your number, address, hours or services, and once or twice a year otherwise. Changes propagate unevenly and some listings never update on their own.
Where to start
Ask an assistant whether your business does a job you stopped offering. If it says yes, you have found a stale listing that is generating calls you do not want, and it has been doing so for a while.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our answer engine optimisation or book a strategy call.
