Why Is Google's AI Overview Wrong About My Business?

Cover photo by T on Unsplash

You searched your own business name, or your main service and city, and the AI Overview at the top of Google gave the wrong phone number, hours you stopped keeping two years ago, or a location you closed. A customer who trusts that box can call a dead number or drive to a locked door.

This post covers AI Overviews, the AI-written summary at the top of some Google Search results: where a wrong claim about your business usually comes from, how to correct it at that source, and what Google’s feedback button does, from Google’s help pages read on November 2, 2026. Getting linked in the first place is the post on getting into an AI Overview.

Why is Google’s AI Overview wrong about my business?

It is easy to read the box as Google stating a fact it has checked. It is not that. An AI Overview is text written by Google’s AI from pages Google has found, shown with what Google’s Search Central page AI features and your website calls supporting links. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to be one of those links, and Google’s systems decide which eligible pages to draw on. Google does not publish how.

So the summary is only as current as what it reads. If your website still has a page for an office you closed, or a directory still lists the phone number you had in 2022, the AI can find it and repeat it.

Two patterns are especially confusing. When old and new facts sit side by side (new hours on your profile, old hours on your contact page), the summary may pick the old one. When a roofer in Dallas and a roofer in Tulsa share a name, the AI can blend the two into one answer.

Why is Google AI wrong so often?

Google does not claim otherwise. Its Search Help page on AI Overviews says, in those words, “AI Overviews can and will make mistakes,” and asks people to “send feedback to Google if something doesn’t look right.”

What nobody outside Google can tell you is how often it happens. That help page gives no error rate, and a figure from an outside test measures that tester’s searches, not the ones about your business. The useful question is narrower: what does the Overview say about you, for the searches your customers run, and where did it get it?

Where did the wrong information come from?

Start with the Overview itself. Click each link shown with it and read the page, looking for the wrong sentence. Because the summary is built from what Google read, the wrong claim often matches text on one of those pages, sometimes word for word.

Do this in a private browser window, signed out of Google. Write down the search you typed, the date, and exactly what the Overview said. Overviews can change from one search to the next, and you will want the exact wording when you report it.

If none of the links has the wrong fact, check the places it usually lives:

Source	What it looks like in the Overview	Where to look
Your Google Business Profile	Wrong hours, phone, address, category or services	Every field in the profile, including values you do not remember entering
Your own website	A closed location, a dropped service, an old phone number	Old location and service pages, the footer, the contact page, PDF menus and price lists
Directories and data aggregators	An old address or phone number	Search your business name with the old number or address in quotes
Review text	A service you do not offer, or no longer offer	Recent reviews that name a service by name
A business with a similar name	Another city, another owner’s hours or reviews	Search your name with “reviews” or with a nearby city

On the profile, remember that Google Maps lets the public suggest edits to a business, so a wrong value can appear on your profile without anyone on your team typing it.

Two illustrations of the mechanism (not real cases): a Dallas roofing company closed its Fort Worth office last year, but the Fort Worth page is still on its website and still indexed. The Overview may describe two locations, because the website still says there are two.

A Denver dental practice stopped offering clear aligners. The service is gone from its website but still listed in its Business Profile’s services, and several reviews praise it. An Overview that names the practice for “clear aligners in Denver” is repeating sources that are out of date.

Owners describe the same patterns in public. A January 2026 thread on r/GoogleMyBusiness is about AI giving misinformation about a business’s location. A May 2025 thread on r/smallbusiness reports Google search showing the wrong phone number and services for a business, and a January 2026 thread there asks other owners whether Google’s AI has ever shown wrong or outdated info about their business. These are individual accounts, not a measure of how common the problem is.

How do I correct it at the source?

One fix for each source, in the same order as the table.

1. Your Business Profile. Sign in and check each field against the real business: name, address, phone, hours, categories, services, service area and description. Change anything wrong, including a value someone else suggested. Google’s help page says businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local results, and its AI features page lists checking that your Business Profile information is up to date among the fundamentals that continue to be worthwhile. For a section-by-section walkthrough, see a Google Business Profile guide for contractors.
2. Your website. Update the wrong page or take it down. If the old page has a replacement (the Fort Worth page, now served from Dallas), send the old address to the new one with a 301 redirect, so visitors and Google land on current facts. Then, in Google Search Console, paste the page’s address into the inspection bar to run URL Inspection, and click Request Indexing, the step Google describes in Ask Google to recrawl your URLs.
3. Directories. Correct the listing on the directory itself, usually by claiming it as the owner. Google cannot change a listing on someone else’s site for you. Start with the ones that come up when you search your name with the old phone number in quotes.
4. Reviews. You cannot edit a customer’s review. Reply publicly with the correct fact, for example: “Thank you, [name]. We stopped offering clear aligners in 2025, and we are happy to refer you to a practice that does.” Report a review only if it breaks Google’s prohibited and restricted content policy, never because it is out of date.
5. A same-name mix-up. Make your homepage and contact page say who and where you are in plain text: your full business name, city and state, street address or service area, and phone number. Use the same words on your Business Profile.

The profile is the source that drifts when hours or numbers change and nobody updates it. If you keep those facts in several places, vaza.ai’s Google Business Profile management lets you update hours, service areas, phone numbers and website links on the profile from one dashboard, so that source stays current when something changes.

How do I report a wrong AI Overview to Google?

As of November 2, 2026, Google’s Search Help page on AI Overviews describes these steps:

1. At the bottom of the Overview, find the thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons.
2. Click thumbs down. Google says to use it if you found the overview “unhelpful, inaccurate, biased, or otherwise problematic.”
3. Click Report a problem and choose the category that best describes the issue.
4. Add details in the text field, which Google recommends. Say what is wrong and what is right: “This says we are open Sundays. We are closed Sundays. Our hours are on our Business Profile and on our contact page.”
5. Click Submit.

Google says the feedback you submit “includes your most recent search query and its search results.” You can also reach feedback from the three-dot menu at the top right of each Overview.

What it does, in Google’s words: “Your feedback helps us improve AI Overviews for everyone.” The page does not say a specific Overview will be corrected, removed or reviewed, or how soon. Treat feedback as a report, not a repair: the source fixes above are what change the pages the AI reads.

AI Mode, Google’s separate conversational search, is documented differently. Its help page names only thumbs up and thumbs down: “we encourage you to give feedback through thumbs up / thumbs down so we can continuously improve.” It does not describe a Report a problem step, so do not expect the same screens there.

If an Overview says something false and damaging, that is a legal question, not a feedback one. Google has a separate legal removal request process. Use it, and talk to a lawyer about whether it applies. This post is not legal advice.

How long does it take for Google to fix it?

It depends, and nobody can give you a date. Google’s help pages on AI Overviews give no timeline for feedback, and no one outside Google, vaza.ai included, can tell you when a particular summary will change.

What it depends on is mostly the source. A fix on your own website counts once Google recrawls the page, which Request Indexing asks for but does not schedule. A directory listing changes when that directory updates it and Google reads it again. And the next Overview may draw on different pages altogether.

So check rather than wait. Once a week, run the searches you wrote down, in a private window, and compare the Overview with your note. If the wrong claim is still there, open its links again: there may be a second source you missed.

How do I stop it happening again?

A wrong Overview about a business can start as an old fact left behind somewhere. Four habits close the gaps.

• Keep the facts identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services and service area should read the same on your website, your Business Profile and your main directories.
• Update in a set order when something changes. New hours, a new number or a dropped service: change the Business Profile, then the website (the page, the footer, the contact page), then the directories. Put a reminder in your calendar a week later to confirm each one.
• Retire pages properly. When you close a location or stop a service, update or redirect its page the same week, instead of leaving it indexed.
• Look at what the Overview says once a month. Pick five searches (your business name, your name with your city, and your top three services with your city) and write down what you see. It is the same method used to check what AI says about you with repeated searches.