Vendor testing found AI chatbots returned at least one false fact about 64% of retailers, from wrong postcodes to claiming open businesses are closed. Smaller businesses get it worst. If you have physical locations, the fix starts with an audit.
A wrong answer from AI does not look like an error to your customer. It looks like your business, and they act on it.
AI does not just answer confidently. It answers wrongly, and about the most basic facts of your business. In a vendor-run test shared with Search Engine Journal, AI chatbots returned at least one false fact about 64% of the retailers checked. Wrong postcodes. Invented services. Businesses declared closed that are open.
The errors are not small. In 15% of cases where the wrong location was given, the AI put the shop 20 miles or more away. Around one in 15 website answers pointed to a dead link, a lookalike or a different business entirely. A customer following that answer never reaches you, and never knows it was the machine that misled them.
Smaller businesses cop it worst. Half of the smaller retailers got at least one false fact, against 32% of the larger ones. The big players have more third-party sources feeding accurate information into the models. Thin online presence means a thin trail, and AI fills the gaps with confident nonsense.
Why it matters
More people are asking AI where to go, what is open and who does what before they leave the house. If the answer is wrong, the cost is a customer who drove to the wrong place, gave up, or picked a competitor the machine described correctly. You never see it happen. There is no bounce report for a visit that never started.
For Australian local businesses this is a quiet leak. You can have a perfect Google Business Profile and still be misdescribed inside an AI answer that pulled from stale or scattered sources.
Share of retailers about which AI chatbots returned at least one false fact in vendor testing, from wrong postcodes to claiming open businesses were closed.
What to do about it
Audit yourself the way a customer would. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI answers for your address, hours, services and website. Do it for each location.
Write down every error. Wrong postcode, wrong hours, missing or invented services, wrong link. That list is your fix-it brief.
Tighten the sources AI reads. Consistent name, address and phone details across your site, Google Business Profile, directories and maps give the models a clean trail to learn from.
Kill the conflicting listings. Old addresses, duplicate profiles and outdated third-party entries are where the wrong answers come from. Hunt them down.
Recheck on a schedule. AI answers drift as sources change, so this is not a one-off. Baseline it and look again each quarter.
You spend real money getting found. Letting a chatbot send those people to the wrong postcode is the cheapest leak to plug and the easiest to ignore. Check what it says about you before your customers do.