ChatGPT says wrong things about your company: how to correct them

Where wrong facts come from

An AI assistant answers from two sources: what the model learned in training, and pages its web search finds during the answer. Both can be wrong or out of date. OpenAI itself says search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect.

The most common causes:

• Old pages are still online. A sub page with last year’s price, an old address, an offer that no longer exists.
• Directories contradict the website. A different name, an old phone number, the wrong industry.
• Other sites describe you wrongly. An old newspaper article, a comparison portal, a review profile.
• Confusion with another company. A similar name, and AI mixes two companies up.
• Important facts are missing altogether. What is written nowhere, AI fills in from whatever else it finds.

We check this on ourselves too. In our fact check of 12 October 2026, two of the three AI services that answered warned of confusing anewera with a company of the same name. One service wrote that the operator was not clearly identifiable. On 14 October we changed the byline of every article and the details about the operator; the coming weeks will show whether it works.

What to correct first

Start with what you control. According to the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, wrong representations are easiest to correct where a company creates the content itself: on the website, in the business profile and in directory listings.

1. Your own website. Update or redirect old pages. Name, place, offer, prices and the company behind it in clear sentences, as high up as possible.
2. Google Business Profile and Bing. The same details as on your website.
3. Directories. local.ch, search.ch, industry directories and associations.
4. Other sites. Portals, review profiles and articles: ask for a correction where you can.
5. Being unmistakable. If a company has a similar name, say clearly on your website who you are: full company name, registered seat and commercial register, the same everywhere.

Also check that AI may read your corrected pages at all. According to OpenAI, sites that opt out of the OAI-SearchBot crawler are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.

The role of reviews and media coverage

A big one. A study by Chen and others (arXiv, 2025) found that AI search weighs independent third-party sources systematically and much more heavily than a brand’s own content. So what others write about you shapes the answer more than your own page does.

For local questions, reviews also count directly: Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that more reviews and positive ratings can improve the ranking. In our measurement on estate agents of 13 October 2026, 36 of 87 answers cited at least one comparison or listing portal.

The same goes for objections. One objection in our own fact check was that almost all sources about anewera came from ourselves. The answer to that is mentions by others: associations, trade media, portals, reviews.

How long it takes

It depends on the source:

Where the information comes from	When a correction shows
robots.txt and crawlers	OpenAI says its systems adjust in about 24 hours
Web search	Often within days to weeks, once the corrected page is read again
Training knowledge	Only with a new model version

Because answers vary, one look after the correction is not enough. Whether anything changed only shows in a comparison over many answers, with a margin of error.

How anewera checks your facts every week

Once a week we ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Claude directly: “What is your company?” and “What speaks against it?”. Then we compare the answers with your own facts: confirmed, wrong or not mentioned, each with the sentence from the answer. What that looks like is shown in the section What AI says about your company on our home page, on anewera itself.

The fact check is part of Analytics, from CHF 290 a month. In Managed we also correct the sources, from CHF 980 a month. The free AI check gives a first impression; why a company is missing from answers is explained in How does my company get recommended by ChatGPT?.