AI Is Describing Your Brand Wrong. Here’s How to Fix It.

A while back, I checked what AI was saying about WellTeenMD.com, a medical practice whose site I built. The answer was confident, fluent, and wrong. It had the practice’s locations muddled — describing where it operates in a way that didn’t match reality. To a parent searching for care near them, that error isn’t small. It could send them to the wrong place, or past the practice entirely.

My first instinct was the one everyone has: how do I tell the AI it’s wrong? There’s no button for that. You cannot call ChatGPT and file a correction. So I did the thing that actually works. I stopped trying to fix the answer and fixed the source. I built a dedicated page on the site for each city the practice serves — Van Nuys, Woodland Hills, and the rest — each one plainly stating that the practice covers that specific area. Then I waited. The next time the assistant refreshed what it knew, the answer corrected itself.

That’s the whole playbook, and it’s worth understanding why it works, because the instinct to “contact the AI” wastes the time you should spend on the fix.

Why AI gets brands wrong in the first place

An AI assistant doesn’t store a verified file on your business. It generates a description on the spot from whatever it has read about you across the web. When that information is thin, ambiguous, or contradictory, the machine doesn’t stop and say “I’m not sure.” It fills the gap with the most plausible-sounding answer and delivers it with total confidence. That’s called confabulation, and it happens exactly where your own information is unclear. WellTeenMD.com’s locations got garbled because no single page said, plainly, “we serve Van Nuys.” The AI had to guess, and it guessed wrong.

Which points straight at the fix: remove the ambiguity at the source.

The three sources to correct

1. Your own website — with a dedicated page for the fact that matters. This is the first place the AI looks and the one you fully control. Don’t just mention the correct information in passing; give it a page of its own. For a service area, that means a page per city, each one unambiguous about that location. For a product line, a page per product. A machine trusts a clear, focused page far more than a fact buried in a paragraph, and a dedicated page is the strongest signal you can send about what’s true. This alone fixed WellTeenMD.com.

2. Your structured data. Structured data is the behind-the-scenes code that labels each fact for a machine: this is the business name, this is the address, this is the service area. It’s the difference between hoping the AI infers a fact correctly and handing it the fact in the format it trusts most. If AI keeps getting a specific detail wrong, marking it up in structured data is the strongest correction you can make.

3. Your third-party listings. The AI cross-checks you against outside sources — directories, review sites, your profiles elsewhere. If one of those still carries the old or wrong information, it can keep feeding the error even after you’ve fixed your own site. Track down the stale listing and correct it, so every source the machine reads tells the same story. (This is also why third-party sources carry so much weight.)

How long it takes

Not instantly. The AI has to re-read the corrected sources before its answer changes, which usually takes days to a few weeks depending on how often it refreshes. The correction is a course change that takes effect on the next pass, not a live edit. Make the fix once, cleanly, and let it propagate rather than checking obsessively.

Check it on a schedule

Once you’ve been wrong once, it’s worth a monthly habit: ask the assistants what they say about your business, and read it as a customer would. What they get right, you earned by being clear. What they get wrong is your next fix — and now you know exactly how to make it. (Here’s how to check what AI can see about your brand.)

Zillah Bahar is the founder of COLAClear and writes about getting found by AI at GetDiscoverable.io.