Why AI assistants describe my business wrong

When ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google’s AI features get your name, location, services or ownership wrong, the cause is usually not a secret “GEO score”. It is almost always that the systems that ground answers cannot see a clear, consistent, crawlable picture of you — or they see several pictures that disagree.

Checked against vendor documentation on 13 October 2026. We only list causes we can source. Fixing them does not guarantee correct answers; assistants still decide what they say.

1. AI search crawlers cannot read you

If the bots that build AI search indexes are blocked in robots.txt (or by a CDN/firewall “block AI bots” rule), those systems never get your current pages.

OpenAI: sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers (they can still appear as navigational links).
Anthropic: disabling Claude-SearchBot prevents indexing your content for search, which may reduce visibility and accuracy in search results. Disabling Claude-User stops retrieval when a user asks Claude to fetch a page.
Google Search generative AI: pages must be crawlable and indexed (and eligible for a Search snippet) to appear as supporting links in AI Overviews / AI Mode. Google also lists “ensure crawling is allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure” among the usual best practices.

Sources: OpenAI bots · Anthropic crawlers · Google AI features · Google AI optimization guide

How to check: our AI crawler guide and the free check both look at whether AI search bots are disallowed.

2. You have no clear About / entity page

Assistants that ground on the web need a place that states who you are in plain text: legal name, trading name, what you do, where you are, how to contact you.

Google’s Organization documentation says homepage or About markup can help Google understand administrative details and disambiguate your organization. Recommended signals include name, legalName, url, address, phone, email and sameAs profile URLs.
Google’s AI-features guidance still says: put important content in textual form, and keep Business Profile / Merchant Center details up to date where they apply. Structured data is not required for generative AI Search features — but a missing About page leaves little for any system to quote.

Sources: Organization structured data (Google) · Google AI features

How to check: paste your About page into the free check; it looks for visible business facts and Organization/WebSite JSON-LD.

3. Conflicting facts across the web

Google says its generative AI features on Search can show what is being said about products and services across the web, including blogs, videos and forums, and that AI systems look at a variety of sources. OpenAI and Anthropic search bots index public pages; they are not limited to your homepage.

So if directories list an old address, a press page uses a former company name, or a social profile still says “freelance designer” after you incorporated, an assistant may mix those sources. Markup on your site helps machines read your site; it does not rewrite every other page about you.

Sources: Google AI optimization guide (mentions / multi-source framing) · crawler roles above

Honest limit: vendors do not publish a checklist titled “conflicting NAP causes wrong ChatGPT answers”. The mechanism we can verify is multi-source retrieval. Cleaning your own pages and high-signal profiles is the controllable part.

4. Stale pages still in the index

Google’s generative AI guide describes retrieval-augmented generation that relies on core Search systems to fetch relevant, up-to-date pages for fresher answers. Its structured-data quality guidelines also say to provide up-to-date information. If your live site is correct but an old “Services” URL, PDF or mirror still ranks and gets retrieved, answers can lag.

Sources: Google AI optimization guide (RAG / freshness) · General structured data guidelines

Practical steps that stay inside vendor advice: update or remove outdated pages, use normal redirects/canonicals, keep Business Profile details current, and allow recrawl time after changes.

5. Markup that does not match the visible page

Google’s AI-features best practices say structured data should match the visible text on the page. The general structured-data guidelines forbid marking up content that is not visible to readers, and say misleading or non-representative markup can make rich results ineligible.

Wrong JSON-LD (old phone in schema, different legal name than the About heading) does not “hack” AI answers into correctness. It adds another conflicting signal.

Sources: Google AI features · General structured data guidelines · examples in our structured data guide

6. You opted out of Google’s Search generative AI features

Search Console has a Search generative AI control. Excluding your site prevents your content from appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and related generative features (including as grounding links). That is intentional absence, not a “wrong description” — but it looks the same to you if customers ask Google AI and never see your site.

Source: Search generative AI control (Search Console Help)

What this page does not claim

That an llms.txt file fixes wrong descriptions. Google Search does not use llms.txt for visibility or rankings (llms.txt guide).
That Organization schema is required for AI Overviews / AI Mode. Google says it is not.
That fixing these issues will make ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity describe you correctly. No vendor we checked sells that guarantee, and neither do we.

A short self-check

Are AI search bots allowed (and not blocked by the CDN)?
Does one About (or home) page state legal name, what you do, address/contact, in ordinary HTML?
Do directories and social profiles match that page?
Are old service pages or PDFs removed or redirected?
If you use JSON-LD, does it match the visible text?

Run the free AI-readiness check