AI search engines give accurate, up-to-date facts about a business — address, hours, pricing, leadership — so prospects can rely on what ChatGPT or Perplexity says.
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Expert: 5W Public Relations / Columbia Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Industry researchers (5W Hallucination Index; Tow Center study) AI search engines routinely get basic facts about real businesses wrong. Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism tested 1,600 queries across eight AI search engines and found more than 60% of responses contained factual errors — ChatGPT Search answered incorrectly on 67% of test queries and Perplexity on 37%, largely by confidently repeating what bad source pages said. The 5W Hallucination Index (May 2026, by 5W Public Relations) asked AI models 25 core business questions per brand and found 20% of answers contained material errors — meaning one in five prospects may hear a false fact about a company (address, hours, pricing, leadership). Errors trace to four causes: stale training data frozen before a business moved or rebranded, bad source pages the engine trusts, entity confusion between similarly named companies, and zombie directory listings that persist long after the information dies. The fix is a source-correction workflow — audit what each engine says, correct the pages it cites, publish crawlable corrective content, file in-product feedback, and monitor until the answer flips — not a complaint form. Source: https://subscribepr.com/blog/how-to-fix-wrong-ai-information/
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