Your website states the current facts, yet an AI assistant describes your company from an old directory profile or a review written two years ago. AI assistants use review sites and your website for different parts of an answer, so the fix starts at the page an assistant cited for the wrong detail. Correct that page, and point the correction at your website as the reference.
None of the provider documentation reviewed for this guide ranks review sites above brand websites, and Google describes its AI features as retrieving pages through its normal Search ranking systems. This guide covers how AI assistants choose between review sites and your own pages, why a corrected website can leave old answers in place, and the five steps that correct a conflicting description.
Key takeaways
- Where answers come from: Google's AI features ground answers in pages retrieved by its Search ranking systems and run related searches, called query fan-out, to gather more.
- What review sites cover: Chrome's AI store summaries draw on Google Shopping and popular review websites for customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns.
- What your website does: it is the reference every correction points back to, with one stable page per important fact.
- First step: save one wrong answer with its citations, then open the cited page and find the sentence behind the error.
Where do AI assistants get their information about your company?
AI assistants build an answer from the pages they retrieve for the question. Google says its AI features rely on its core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date pages, then run concurrent related searches, which it calls query fan-out, to fetch more. Your website is one of those pages, next to reviews, directories and press.
The source that shapes a sentence depends on what the sentence says. A question about customer service pulls in review content, while a question about a current feature pulls in documentation. Google's Chrome store-review feature shows the pattern at small scale: its AI summaries use data from Google Shopping and popular review websites to describe customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns.
The path from a buyer's question to a named brand runs like this:
Which source answers which kind of question?
Each kind of claim has a source best placed to support it. Official documentation carries current features and policies, original reviews carry customer experience, directory profiles carry category and location, and dated reporting carries company news. Matching the claim to its source tells your team where a correction belongs.
The table below maps each kind of claim to the page that can correct it and the person who owns that page.
| Claim in the answer | Best reference | Check before acting | Who corrects it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current feature or policy | Your official product page | Version, region, eligibility | Product or web team |
| Customer experience | The original customer review | Date, context, product version | Customer team, by response |
| Category or location | Directory profile plus your official details | Vendor-entered or outdated fields | Profile owner |
| Company news | Original reporting plus your dated announcement | Republishing, historical context | Communications team |
A third-party domain makes a platform independent, and each claim on it still needs its own check. A directory can hold a description the company submitted itself, and a press page can repeat an announcement word for word, so two sites can carry a single original source.
Why does a corrected website still leave old answers?
Updating your website changes your website, and every other page keeps its wording until its owner edits it. Recrawling also takes time: Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and a crawl request does not guarantee inclusion. An old answer can therefore outlive a correct page.
Three profiles repeating one old category count as one error copied three times. Picture a company whose website describes its current product correctly while three directory profiles still show last year's category. Each profile is a correction task with its own owner, and the website is the reference each request cites.
Three situations produce stale descriptions, and each points to a different check:
What role does your own website play?
Your website is the reference every correction points back to. Keep one stable page for each important fact, stating its scope and the date it took effect, so a profile owner or a journalist can verify a correction in one click. Google's AI features retrieve web pages like yours directly, so the same page serves both jobs.
A useful reference page carries three parts:
A reference page earns corrections from the people who control other pages. Independent publishers decide what they change, and historical reporting stays accurate for its date, so correction requests work best when they keep that context and ask for a clarification.
How to correct a conflicting AI description step by step
Start from the answer your buyers see, trace the wrong detail to the page it came from, and give that correction to the person who can make it. The five steps below turn one wrong answer into an assigned task with a check at the end, and they work for any assistant that shows its sources.
- Save the answer. Record the exact question, the assistant, the date, the search mode and every citation shown, and keep the full response.
- Open the cited page. Find the passage behind the wrong detail, compare it with your reference page, and mark the citation as supporting, contradicting or silent on the claim.
- Classify the problem. Separate an outdated field, a historically accurate report, a customer opinion and a misread passage, and note when several pages copy one upstream source.
- Assign the correction. Give the profile owner the field, the replacement and your reference URL, give communications the evidence for a publisher clarification, and give the web team any conflicting page of your own.
- Check twice. Reopen the corrected page, rerun the saved question under the same conditions, and record "page corrected" and "answer corrected" as separate results.
A genuine customer review belongs in a different workflow from a wrong product field. Respond to the review with context or explain what has changed since it was written, and keep correction requests for statements that are out of date. That separation keeps your requests credible with the publishers who receive them.
Where does an audit + fix plan fit?
An audit + fix plan does the tracing work across the five major engines at once. MentionShare runs your buyers' real questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. The report shows who gets recommended instead of you and what the engines get wrong about you, then hands you a prioritized list of fixes.
Every finding is checked by a person before it reaches the fix plan. A one-off audit covers five buyer questions across all five engines and arrives in about three business days. The pricing page lists the plans, our audit methodology explains how each question is run, and the sample report shows the full deliverable page by page.
An audit is a snapshot of one period, and publishers and engines keep the final say over their own pages and answers. Your team still owns the website edits, profile updates and publisher requests, and the fix plan tells each owner exactly what to change and why.
Find the page behind the wrong answer
Get your audit
The takeaway
Whether AI assistants trust review sites more than your website depends on the claim, so communications teams get further by working both. When the wrong detail sits on your own site, fix it there first; when it sits on a profile or an article, send the owner your reference URL and a precise replacement. Start today by saving one wrong answer with its citations and opening the first cited page.
Frequently asked questions
Which review sites and directories do AI assistants trust most?
It depends on the question and the engine. None of the provider documentation reviewed for this guide publishes a ranking of review sites or directories, so the useful check is practical: look at the sources the assistants cite for your category and your buyers' questions, then verify the specific claims on those pages.
Why does ChatGPT get my business information wrong?
An AI assistant repeats what its sources say, so a wrong detail traces back to a page that still carries it: an old profile, an outdated article, or a forgotten page on your own site. When an answer shows no citations, the detail can come from the model's training data, which was also drawn from public pages.
Do Google reviews affect AI answers?
Yes, for some kinds of answer. Google's Chrome store-review summaries draw on Google Shopping and popular review websites to describe customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns. For questions about features or policies, official documentation is the stronger reference, so reviews and your own pages each matter for different claims.
I changed some text on my pages. Why isn't it updated in search results?
Google has to recrawl the page first, and crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. A recrawl request through Search Console helps discovery without forcing an immediate update. When an AI answer draws on a different, external page, that page also needs its owner to correct it.