AI assistants answer questions about businesses by reading websites, directories and profiles. For a small business that means your hours, your service area and your prices are being repeated by something you never spoke to.
Short answer
An AI assistant answering a question about your business reads whatever it can find, which usually means your website, your directory listings and your profiles. It cannot ask you for clarification. Making the important facts unmistakable and consistent is the only practical way to influence what it says.
Almost always the practical things. Whether you are open, whether you cover a particular town, what something costs, whether you handle a specific job, and how to get in touch with you today.
These are exactly the facts that tend to live in awkward places on a small business site. Hours inside an image, a service area described only on a map, prices mentioned once in a paragraph halfway down a page.
Anything an answer engine cannot read, it either omits or reconstructs from somewhere else. The somewhere else is often an old directory listing, which is how a business ends up being quoted with a phone number it stopped using.
Your own site first, where it is readable. Then business profiles and directories. Then anything else that mentions you, including news, review sites and pages published by suppliers or trade bodies.
None of those sources is weighted in the way you would choose. A stale listing on a busy directory can outweigh a current page on a quiet site, particularly when the two do not obviously contradict each other.
That is why our page on consistent business details matters more than it looks. Agreement across sources is the strongest signal you can send about which facts are current.
Put hours in text, not in a graphic. Put the phone number in text, not in a button image. Name the towns you serve in words rather than relying on a map that carries the information only visually.
Then state the same facts in structured markup, so there is no interpretation required at all. Our page on schema markup covers the business type and the fields worth completing.
Check the result by reading the page with styling turned off. If a fact disappears when the design does, it was never in the content, and nothing reading your site will ever have seen it.
Every item below is something customers ask assistants about routinely. Each one should appear in plain text on your site, in the same form everywhere it appears, and in your structured markup where a field exists for it.
It happens, and there is no correction form. The usual cause is a stale source rather than a misreading, which is good news because stale sources are something you can find and fix.
Start with listings you control, then contact the ones you do not. Old profiles from a previous owner, a previous address or a rebrand are the most common culprits and the most damaging when quoted confidently.
Then make sure your own site states the correct fact unmistakably and recently. A current, clearly dated page is the strongest counterweight available to you, even though nothing makes that outcome certain.
Publishing an email address in plain text invites automated collection, which is why we route everything through a contact form on this site and recommend the same to customers.
A form is also easier for an assistant to describe accurately. Use the contact form on their site is a clean instruction, while an address scraped from a page may be out of date or wrong in a way nobody notices.
Whatever route you publish, monitor it. The commonest failure we see is a contact form nobody checks, which turns a working site into a dead end for every enquiry it generates.
Less than you might expect, and it raises the cost of sloppiness. The facts that were always important are now repeated by systems that cannot ask you whether they are still true.
So the work is unglamorous. Text instead of images for anything factual. The same details everywhere. A contact route that works. A review date so a reader can judge the age of what they are looking at.
That work also serves customers, screen readers and search engines. It is one of the few areas where doing the right thing for a machine is exactly the right thing for a person as well.
Find the source. Usually it is a stale directory listing or an old profile rather than your own site. Correct the listings you control, ask the others to update, and make sure your site states the current hours in plain text.
We route enquiries through a contact form instead, because published addresses are collected automatically and attract spam. A monitored form is easier to describe accurately and easier to keep working over time.
If the prices are in text, they can. If they are in an image or a downloadable file, often not. Where you publish prices, put them in the content and say clearly what they include and what would change them.
You can restrict some crawlers through your robots file, and the effect varies by product. Blocking also removes you from answers customers are actively asking for, so consider carefully before treating it as a default position.
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