AI Has My Hours, Address or Phone Number Wrong: Trace the Source and Correct It

Customers arriving at an address you left

Wrong contact details are the most expensive small error in AI search, because the customer has already decided to hire you. They just cannot reach you. The engine sounds certain, the customer believes it, and the call goes to a disconnected line or a competitor's lobby. Owners usually learn about it secondhand, from an annoyed customer or a confused delivery driver.

• Gemini or Google's AI Mode says you close at five when you close at seven, so evening callers never try.
• ChatGPT gives a phone number you dropped when you changed carriers.
• Siri reads out last year's holiday hours, or none at all on the holiday.
• Copilot lists the suite you moved out of, or the address of your old warehouse.
• Perplexity shows hours that match an old Yelp listing nobody at your company remembers creating.

Each engine above reads business details from a different place, so one wrong answer rarely means one wrong listing. Before you edit anything, put your main customer questions through our free AI visibility check and save what each engine says, with the date. That record tells you which sources to chase and proves later that the fix worked.

Which listing each engine copies your hours from

This is the table to keep open while you work. It shows where each engine is known to pull business details, from the companies' own documentation where they publish it and from credible reporting where they do not.

Two patterns follow from the table. Google's engines lean on one listing you fully control. The chat assistants lean on the open web, which includes pages you do not control, so you have to find them. Our guide to entity optimization explains why engines trust details that agree across many sources.

Where stale details hide, in the order we usually find them

Correct the record, one source at a time

Do these in order. The early steps fix the sources the most engines read; the later ones mop up.

1. 1

   Write one master record

   Legal or trading name exactly as you want it said, street address with suite, one main phone number, regular hours, holiday hours for the next twelve months, website URL and primary category. Every edit below copies from this document, character for character.

2. 2

   Fix the Google Business Profile

   Edit it in Search or Maps. Google reviews edits before they go live. Add the upcoming holiday hours while you are there.

3. 3

   Decide what Google's robot callers hear

   AI Mode can have Google call businesses to check prices or availability, and Google may update your profile from those answers. Brief whoever answers the phone, or turn the calls off in Business Profile under Advanced settings, "Google automated calls and text messages".

4. 4

   Update Apple Business and Bing Places

   Apple Business replaced Apple Business Connect on April 14, 2026 and is free. Bing Places now lives at bing.com/forbusiness and can import your Google listing; check every imported field rather than trusting it.

5. 5

   Bring the website into line

   Footer, contact page, location pages and the LocalBusiness structured data, all matching the master record and visible in the page HTML. Retire or redirect pages that mention the old address. Our structured data guide covers the markup.

6. 6

   Chase the cited pages

   For each wrong answer that links a source, correct that source: claim the Yelp page, email the directory editor, ask the association to update its member list. Fixing the page the engine quoted fixes the answer at its root.

7. 7

   Flag the bad answer where you saw it

   Use Report a problem on a Google AI Overview, the thumbs-down in Gemini or Claude, the Report option under a Perplexity answer, and Report an Issue in Apple Maps. Feedback alone rarely fixes it, but it costs a minute.

How long corrected hours take to reach the answers

A Business Profile edit tends to be the quickest route into Google's own answers, because Gemini and AI Mode read the listing directly, though Google's review of the edit comes first. Apple, Bing and Yelp update on their own schedules, which none of them publishes. Pages you fix on your own site wait for the next crawl. Answers given from a model's memory change last of all, when the engine retrains, which can take months and which nobody outside the company controls.

Since no engine publishes a timetable, use a checking rhythm of your own. Ours looks like this:

• Check Google's AI answers a week or so after the profile edit is approved.
• Check Siri, Copilot and Perplexity after a few weeks, and again a month later.
• Test with the exact questions you saved at the start, so the before and after compare fairly.
• Expect stragglers. A copy of the old number on some forgotten page can resurface months later, which is why the next section exists.

If the stale detail is not contact data but an old price, a discontinued service or last year's menu, the cause is usually content rather than listings. That has its own walk-through: AI cites old information about my business.

Moving, rebranding or changing hours without breaking AI answers

Most wrong-detail problems start with a change that was announced in one place. The fix is a change routine, written down before the next move or schedule change, so it does not depend on whoever happens to remember.

That last item got easier this year. Since June 8, 2026, GA4 can link to Google Business Profile and report calls, direction requests and website clicks, so a sudden fall in calls after a change shows up in the same dashboard as your web traffic. On sites built with Athena CMS, the Hestia agent keeps hours, phone, address and services matched across the site and listings, holiday hours included, and drafts each change for your approval.

When a wrong phone number is worth calling in help

Most owners can fix this alone in an afternoon with the steps above. Call for help when you have several locations, when you moved or rebranded and the old details keep resurfacing, or when one engine stays wrong a month after every source is corrected. For the voice side, our walk-throughs for Siri giving wrong business hours and a wrong phone number in Google Assistant go deeper, and the map pack audit checks your Google listing against nearby rivals.

A free GEO audit compares your listings, site and structured data, runs your questions through the engines and returns a fixed monthly quote. Listing cleanup is part of our local marketing and SEO programs, which start at $625 a month; GEO pricing explains the range. Once the record is clean, AI visibility monitoring catches the next drift. Other problems live on the AI search fixes hub.