Your Business Described Wrongly by a Machine

Ask, and read carefully

Ask a few of these tools what they know about your business by name and location.

Read the answer for accuracy rather than for whether it sounds impressive, which it will.

Look specifically for the address, the services, the hours, the owner's name, and anything about how long you have been operating.

Most businesses find at least one thing wrong, and some find several.

Where the errors come from

• An old directory listing never updated.
• A previous address still published.
• A service you dropped still on a page.
• Confusion with a similarly named business.
• Your own site being out of date.
• Nothing: it invented a plausible detail.

The fifth is the most common and the most fixable. A page you forgot about, listing a service or an address from four years ago, is being read and repeated faithfully, which makes this your problem rather than the tool's.

Trace before correcting

Since correcting the tool is not usually available and correcting the source is.

For each error, search for the wrong detail itself and see where it appears.

An old address will usually turn up in three or four places: a directory, an old listing, a supplier page, and frequently your own site's footer or a page nobody has opened in years.

That list is the actual job, and it is finite.

Fix your own site first, since that is the source with the most weight and the one entirely under your control.

Then work through the external ones, most of which have a correction route.

A worked example

A business asked a few tools about themselves and found their previous address given confidently, along with a service they had stopped offering in 2019.

Searching the old address turned up seven places: two directories, an old association listing, a supplier's customer page, an archived news item, and two pages on their own site.

The service came from a page on their own site that was no longer linked from the menu and had been forgotten.

They fixed their own pages, corrected the four directories that had a route, and left the archived news item alone.

Two months later the descriptions had improved in some tools and not in others, which is the realistic outcome.

The exercise was worth doing for the site fixes alone.

Expect it to take time and be uneven

Since these systems refresh at different rates.

Some reflect current information within weeks, some are working from material collected months or years ago and will not change until they are updated.

So the correct expectation is that fixing the sources improves things gradually and unevenly rather than immediately.

That is frustrating and it is the only route available.

Recheck twice a year rather than repeatedly, since watching it weekly produces nothing but irritation.

Some errors are worth a direct correction

Where the route exists.

Your local listing can be corrected directly and is the most influential single source, so that is always the first stop.

Several tools now have a feedback route for reporting a bad answer, which is worth using for anything materially wrong even though the effect is uncertain.

Where something states a fact about you that is damaging rather than merely stale, that is worth escalating rather than treating as a data problem.

Keep a record of what you reported and when, since a pattern of unaddressed reports is useful if it becomes a bigger issue.

The confusion case is different

Where you are being mixed up with another business.

That happens with similar names, shared addresses, or a predecessor at your premises.

The remedy is the identity work rather than corrections: consistent naming, a clear about page, and distinguishing details published in your own words.

Where another business genuinely shares your name in another region, adding your location to how you describe yourself everywhere helps considerably.

This one is slow and it does improve with consistent effort.

Check what a customer would conclude

Which is the reason any of this matters.

People are asking these tools for recommendations and for background before contacting a business.

A description saying you are in a town you left, or offering a service you stopped, produces a wasted enquiry or a lost one.

That is the same cost as a wrong listing has always had, arriving through a new route.

So this belongs with the other places your details appear rather than being treated as a novel problem.

The same check applies to your staff

Worth extending, since businesses are frequently described through the people in them.

Ask about the owner or a named member of staff as well as the business, particularly where somebody has a professional registration or appears in your marketing.

Errors there are more awkward than a wrong address: a wrong qualification, a former employer, or confusion with somebody of the same name in another field.

The sources are usually a stale profile on a networking site, an old association listing, or a bio written for a conference eight years ago.

Those are all correctable by the person concerned in an afternoon, and nobody looks at them because nobody has had a reason to until now.

The counter-case

This may not be worth much attention yet.

Few customers currently choose a local trade this way, and the volume is small compared with search and recommendation.

The tools also change quickly enough that today's error may resolve itself without you doing anything.

And a business with an accurate listing and a current site is doing everything that is actually available.

Ask what is said about you, trace each error to its source, fix your own pages first, and recheck twice a year.

The exercise

1. Ask two or three tools about yourself.
2. Note every wrong detail.
3. Search the wrong detail to find sources.
4. Fix your own site first.
5. Correct your listing.
6. Work through the directories.
7. Recheck in six months.

Step three is what turns this from a complaint into a task, since almost every wrong detail is being repeated from a source you can find and most of them you can change.

The version of this you can control directly is covered in a listing edited by somebody else.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.