Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity about a local business and the answer can be confidently wrong. In July 2026 Searchable released two sets of tests of all three tools. In the first, 13,365 questions about services, contact details, size and founding dates were asked about 165 London businesses and the answers were compared with Companies House records and official profiles: 93% of those businesses had at least one basic fact that was wrong or missing. Half of the smaller businesses received at least one false fact, against 32% of larger companies. In the second test, more than 72,000 questions about UK high street retailers produced at least one false fact about 64% of them; one in 16 answers was incorrect, and wrong-postcode errors occurred at a rate of one in 10 even when the prompt specified the town. The typical errors were businesses described as closed when they were trading, services they do not offer, and wrong addresses. Perplexity was inaccurate in 10% of cases in the retail data, against 5% for Gemini and 4% for ChatGPT.
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Expert: Chris Donnelly, Co-founder, Searchable The errors follow the thickness of a business's online footprint. Searchable co-founder Chris Donnelly told Retail Focus: "For a smaller bricks-and-mortar retailer, if their online visibility mostly centres around its website and a Google Business listing, that's a relatively thin trail of information for AI systems to learn from and to represent in their answers." That matches the split in the test data - half of the smaller businesses got at least one false fact, versus 32% of larger ones. The structural problem is that an AI answer collapses a Google Business Profile, a website and reviews into a single written answer that the customer reads as fact. Traditional search still pointed customers at those sources, where they could see and weigh them for themselves, and it left a trail: impressions and clicks in Search Console, rankings that fluctuate across trackers, and a traffic dip someone investigates. An AI answer leaves none of that. There is no location-level report that tells a business its hours were stated wrongly or that it was described as closed, so the error lives in text the owner was never shown until a customer acts on it. Google's documentation does state that AI responses may include mistakes, and individual AI Overviews carry a feedback link, but that is a correction path rather than proactive monitoring: it only works if someone notices the error first. The exposure is growing. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey found 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or similar tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, while SOCi's Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommended only 1.2% of more than 350,000 locations it analysed - and in Whitespark's analysis AI Overviews appeared in 15% of direct local-intent searches but 92% of informational ones. Fixing a source today also does not automatically update the answer, so testing with a fixed list of questions and re-checking is the only way to know what customers are being told. Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-answers-about-your-locations-are-often-wrong-check-before-customers-do/582205/
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