The AI says you're closed. You're not.
Asking an AI assistant which local business to use went from rare to routine in a year. The answers are often wrong — and in testing, wrong about small businesses far more often than big ones. The good news is that most people check — and your website is one of the places they look.
A year ago, almost nobody asked an AI assistant where to get their boiler fixed, which café does a decent flat white, or whether the bike shop round the corner is open on Sundays.
Now nearly half of people do.
An industry survey of 1,002 US adults this year found that 45% had used an AI tool to get a recommendation for a local business — up from 6% the year before. Among people aged 30 to 44 it was 64%. AI assistants are now the third most common way people find a local business, behind only the two biggest platforms and ahead of the review sites that small businesses spent a decade learning to manage.
Earlier this month we wrote about AI answering people’s questions instead of sending them to your website. This is the next step: AI is now deciding who they go to.
The answers are often wrong
The trouble is what those answers say.
A firm that sells monitoring for exactly this problem tested what AI tools say about real businesses — so treat the figures as a vendor’s, not an independent study’s — and the pattern was hard to miss:
- 64% of UK high-street retailers it tested had at least one false fact in an AI answer about them.
- A wrong postcode turned up in roughly one answer in ten.
- Across 165 London businesses, 93% had something missing or wrong.
The common errors are the boring, costly ones: the wrong postcode, the wrong hours, a service you don’t offer, and — the one that stings — saying you are closed when you are not.
And the part that matters for this blog’s readers: in that London test, 50% of smaller firms got false facts, against 32% of larger ones.
Big companies have their details repeated, consistently, in thousands of places. A small business has a website, a listing or two, a social page last updated in 2023, and an old directory entry with the address from before the move. When the AI assembles an answer from that, it picks up whichever version it finds — and there is no alert that tells you it has.
The one piece of good news
The same survey found something reassuring: 88% of people who use AI for this then check the answer — looking at the sources or reading reviews before they go.
So people don’t simply trust the machine. They use it to make a shortlist, then they verify.
Which means the most important question is not what does the AI say about you? It is when someone checks, what do they find? — and one of the places they will check is your own website.
If your site says, plainly and clearly, that you are open until six on Saturdays at 14 Mill Road, the person who was told you’d closed down gets the right answer. If your site is vague, out of date or missing, the wrong answer stands.
Why mismatches are the real enemy
One of the most common reasons AI tools describe a business wrongly is that the business describes itself in more than one way.
Your website says you close at 5:30. Your listing says 5. A directory from three years ago says you’re on a different street. A social page still shows the summer hours. None of those is malicious; all of them are you. But a system piecing an answer together has no way of knowing which is current — so it guesses, or blends them, or decides you’ve moved.
The fix is not clever. It is consistency: the same hours, address and phone number, spelled the same way, everywhere you appear — with your own website as the version that is always right.
The fair question
devkoi can’t change what an AI assistant says about you, and it doesn’t manage your listings on other platforms. Those you update yourself, wherever they live.
What it does build is the page people check. Hours, address, phone and services as plain text on every page — and changed the moment they change, by sending a message rather than by finding time to log in somewhere.
What to do this week
1. Ask the machines about yourself. Open two or three AI assistants and ask, the way a customer would: “Is [your business] in [your town] open on Sunday?” “What does [your business] do?” Write down every wrong answer.
2. Make your website the version that’s always right. Hours, full address with postcode, phone number, as text — not in an image, not only in the footer of one page.
“Put our opening hours, full address with postcode and phone number on every page, as text.”
3. Make every other listing match it exactly. Same hours, same spelling of the address, same phone number. Go through each listing you can find and bring it into line with the website.
4. Say what you do — and what you don’t. “Services we don’t offer” is one of the most common errors. A clear list fixes it.
“Add a services list: we do servicing, repairs and e-bike conversions. We don’t sell new bikes.”
5. If you’ve moved or changed hours, say so on the homepage. One line, dated. It is the sentence that contradicts every stale copy elsewhere.
“Add to the homepage: ‘Since May 2026 we’re at 14 Mill Road — the old Station Street shop has closed.’”
6. Check again next month. Corrections take time to show up in AI answers. Repeat step 1 every few weeks until the wrong answers stop.
The internet used to send people to you and let them make up their own minds. Increasingly, it now makes up their minds first — from whatever it can find.
You can’t control what it says. You can make sure that when someone checks, and most people do, the place they check is clear, current and right.