A prospect opens a call by asking why you discontinued a service you still sell. They did not read your site. They asked an assistant, and it answered with conviction.
A prospect opens a call by asking why you discontinued a service you still sell. Nobody told them that. They asked an assistant before the call, and it answered with total confidence — wrong price tier, wrong service list, a city you left two years ago. You spend the first ten minutes of a sales conversation correcting a machine that is not in the room.
The instinct is to treat this as a curiosity, or to go looking for a support form to file a correction. Neither helps. An assistant describing you wrong is not a bug report you can file — it is a description of what the open web currently says about you, compressed and restated. The fix is upstream, in the sources, and it is closer to distribution work than to reputation management.
Why the answer is wrong in the first place
Assistants answer from two things: what they absorbed during training, and what they can retrieve at the moment of the question. Both lag reality, and they lag it differently. Training data is a snapshot of a web that has since moved on. Retrieval is current but shallow — it reaches whatever is easy to fetch and parse, which is rarely the page you most want read.
So a wrong answer usually has a boring cause. Something stale is still live and still crawlable. An old press mention, a directory listing nobody updated, a partner's page describing a partnership that ended, a cached version of your own pricing from before the change. The assistant is not inventing; it is repeating the loudest consistent signal it can find. When your own site is the quietest voice in that set, it loses.
Find out what is actually being said
Before changing anything, get the current answers on the record. This takes an afternoon and it is the only part of this you cannot skip.
- Write down the ten questions a buyer would actually ask before contacting you — what you do, what it costs, who it is for, where you operate, how you compare to the obvious alternative, whether you serve their situation.
- Ask each one in the assistants your buyers use, in the phrasing they would use, and save the full answers as text. Not screenshots you will never re-read — text you can diff in three months.
- Mark each answer as correct, stale, or invented. Stale and invented need different fixes, and conflating them wastes the most time.
- For every wrong claim, find the source. Search the specific wrong detail — the old price, the dropped service, the wrong city — and see which pages still assert it. Usually two or three pages explain the whole problem.
- Note which answers cite nothing at all. An answer with no source behind it is a gap in the record, not an error in the model.
That last distinction matters more than it sounds. If an assistant says something wrong because a stale page says it, you have a cleanup job with a clear endpoint. If it says something wrong because nothing authoritative says anything, you have a writing job, and no amount of correction requests will substitute for publishing the answer.
Fix the sources, in the order that pays
The work sorts itself by how much control you have. Start where control is total and move outward.
- Your own pages first. Make the correct answer explicit, in plain sentences, on a page whose purpose is that question. Facts buried in a PDF, rendered only by JavaScript, or implied by a pricing table without words around it are facts that travel badly.
- Kill or redirect your own stale pages. An outdated service page that still ranks is competing with your current one for the same question, and an assistant has no way to know which of your two answers you meant.
- Then the listings and profiles you control but forget — directories, professional bodies, marketplace profiles, your own social bios. These are cheap to fix and they are quoted more than their quality deserves, precisely because they are structured and easy to parse.
- Then third-party pages you can influence: partners, past clients, publications that covered you. A short, specific email asking for one factual correction works far more often than people expect, because you are offering accuracy, not a favour.
- Leave the pages you cannot influence for last, and accept that some will stay wrong. The goal is to make the correct version overwhelmingly the most common and best-sourced, not to achieve unanimity.
Write the answer where the answer can be lifted
There is a particular way of writing that survives this process, and most marketing copy does not have it. An assistant restating your position needs a sentence it can lift without context. "Plans start at a fixed monthly fee with no setup charge" survives being quoted. "Flexible pricing tailored to your goals" does not — it carries no information, so it gets replaced by whatever number a third party guessed at.
The same applies to scope and to fit. State what you do not do, who you are wrong for, and where you operate, in words rather than in implication. Negative statements are unusually durable in this context because they resolve ambiguity that would otherwise get filled in with a guess.
Dates and specificity do real work
When two sources disagree, something has to break the tie, and recency is the tiebreaker most available. A page that says when it was last reviewed, and describes the current state of things in the present tense, is easier to prefer than one that floats free of time. This is not a trick — it is just making your page the easiest correct thing to cite.
What to expect, and what not to
Nothing here produces a same-day correction. Training snapshots do not update on your schedule, and retrieval will keep reaching a stale page until that page stops existing or stops being the best available source. Expect the retrieval-driven answers to improve first, because they follow the live web, and expect the deeply baked-in claims to persist longest.
Which is why the honest version of this work is a recurring check, not a project. Re-ask the same ten questions on a fixed cadence, diff the answers against your saved text, and treat a newly wrong answer as a signal that something stale came back or something new got published about you. A quarter is a reasonable interval for most businesses; monthly if you just changed pricing, positioning, or service lines.
The part that is actually strategic
It is tempting to file all of this under housekeeping. It is not. An assistant is increasingly the first thing that describes your business to a buyer, and it does so before you get a chance to. That makes the accuracy of the public record a distribution channel, with the same claim on attention as any other channel — and unlike most channels, the work compounds, because a clear, well-sourced answer keeps getting quoted long after you wrote it.
The businesses that handle this well are not the ones with the most content. They are the ones whose answers to the obvious questions are unambiguous, stated in their own words, on pages that are easy to reach and hard to misread.
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