What Does ChatGPT Say About Your Brand? How to Check It and Fix Wrong Answers

1. How often AI gets brands wrong

Both OpenAI and Google say it plainly. OpenAI's help centre warns that ChatGPT "can produce incorrect or misleading outputs" and that it "may express high confidence even in incorrect answers". Google's help page for AI Overviews says they "can and will make mistakes".

Two 2026 studies put numbers on it for brands:

Searchable groups false facts into three kinds: outdated details that were once true, mistaken identity where AI confuses one brand with another, and fabrication. Both studies come from companies that sell in this space, and Seer's covers a single brand, so treat them as a guide to scale. The lesson they share holds either way: a wrong fact does not have to be common to cost you, because it only has to reach the buyer who is deciding.

2. How AI decides what is true about your brand

An AI engine with web search does not answer a question about you from your homepage alone. Google's documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode may issue "multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources" to build one answer. OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" that it sends to search providers. The answer that comes back is assembled from several pages at once.

That has a direct consequence. When the sources agree, the engine has one version to repeat. When they disagree, it has to choose, and it does not always choose your website. Seer Interactive traced a claim about high account manager turnover at its agency to a single negative review from 2018, which the engines repeated over dozens of positive reviews. Neither Google nor OpenAI documents how its engine settles a conflict between sources, so the reliable course is to leave nothing to settle.

Our own data shows how much the other sources matter. In our ghost citations study of 6,601 AI answers, 74.4% of the mentions of the company named on 141 pages across 49 other websites came in answers that did not cite its own site. For a company that no other website in the data mentioned, the figure was 4.0%. The study measured whether a company was named. Whether the facts were right is a separate check, yet the pattern shows how much an engine relies on other people's pages for what it says about a brand. AI knew the first company from what others said about it. It knew the second only when it happened to read its pages.

So the question to ask is less "what does our website say?" and more "what do all the sources an engine might read say, and do they agree?"

3. How to check what ChatGPT says about your brand

Ask the questions a buyer would ask, in each engine your buyers use. Five questions cover most of what matters:

1. "What does [your brand] do, and who is it for?"
2. "How much does [your brand] cost?" or the pricing question that fits your business
3. "How does [your brand] compare with [your main competitor]?"
4. "Is [your brand] reliable? What do customers say about it?"
5. A category question that does not name you, such as "Which firms in Singapore do [your service]?", to see whether you appear and how you are described

Run each one in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews. In ChatGPT, run it with web search on and off: with search off, you see what the model learned in training; with search on, you see what it pulls from today's web, along with the sources it cites. Save every answer with the date, and run each question at least twice, because answers change between runs.

For every factual claim, write down three things: is it true, is it current, and which source did the engine cite for it. That last column is where the fix comes from.

If you want a first pass done for you, our free AI brand perception checker asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot about your brand and marks each factual claim as verified, unverified or false, in a report that arrives within 48 hours.

4. A five minute check if you think AI already gets you right

Many teams believe their brand is described correctly and only want to confirm it. These checks catch the problems that matter most:

A single fail is worth fixing. A fail repeated across engines usually points to one source they all read. A clean result is not proof. Searchable found that brands checking only two or three facts often found nothing wrong, while 75% of brands that reviewed 20 or more facts found at least one that was false.

5. Make your own site say one thing, everywhere

Inconsistency on your own site is the cheapest problem to fix and a common one. The homepage calls you a "design studio", the About page a "fit out contractor", the footer a "workplace consultancy". An engine reading three pages gets three answers.

• Write one description and reuse it. One or two sentences that state what you do, for whom and where, for example "commercial interior design and build for offices in Singapore and Hong Kong". Put it on the homepage, the About page and every profile you control.
• Keep one name. Use the same company name and spelling on every page, in your page titles and in your social profiles.
• Retire old facts. Remove or clearly date old prices, discontinued services and past office addresses. An outdated page that still ranks is a source.
• Let the engines read it. OpenAI notes that ChatGPT may not be able to get information from a website because of technical issues, paywalls or robots.txt preferences, and Google lists "ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure" among the basics for its AI features. A corrected page an engine cannot fetch changes nothing.
• Match your structured data to the page. Organization markup with your name, logo and official profiles in its sameAs field helps machines connect your profiles. Google says no special schema is needed for its AI features, and asks that structured data match the visible text, so treat markup as a mirror of the page and never a place for claims the page does not make.

6. Make what other sites say match it

This step covers most of what an engine reads about you. In Seer Interactive's study, the brand's own website was the only source that came up every time, at over 35% of all citations; the rest came from more than 9,000 other sources. List every place outside your site that describes you: Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories, review platforms, industry associations, marketplace listings, press coverage, comparison articles and community threads.

Then build a simple table with one row per fact (name, description, services, prices, locations, founding date, leadership) and one column per source. Mark every cell that disagrees with your current version. That table shows you exactly where the wrong answers come from.

1. Fix the sources you control first: your profiles and listings, the same day.
2. Then the sources the engines cited: the column from your check in section 3. Ask each publisher for a correction and give them the evidence. Directory and review platforms usually have an update process; editors usually respond to a polite, specific request.
3. Then add consistent new sources: accurate listings on the comparison pages and associations that cover your category. More independent pages that agree leave an engine fewer conflicting versions to choose from.

For brands with a community footprint, the same applies to Reddit and Quora threads that describe you; our guides to Reddit SEO and Quora SEO cover how to take part honestly.

7. Similar names, rebrands and old facts

A company with a similar name. If an engine mixes you up with another company, make the difference explicit where engines look: a short line on your About page stating what you are, where you operate and that you are not affiliated with the company of the similar name, checked with your legal adviser before it names them. In directory listings, state the distinguishing facts plainly (category, location, website) and leave the other company's name out, so the two names do not appear together more often. Keep your sameAs links pointing only to your own profiles, never to theirs. A wider spread of accurate pages about you also helps the engine tell the two apart.

A rebrand. Engines learn a name from many sources, and those sources update slowly. Keep a clear "formerly [old name]" line on your About page and in your profiles for as long as old articles still use the previous name, update every profile you control on the day of the change, and ask the most cited third party pages to update theirs. Dropping every mention of the old name at once makes it harder for an engine to connect the two.

Old prices and retired services. Publish the current version on a dated page, and say plainly what changed. A page that states "we stopped offering X in 2025" gives an engine something to cite against the older source.

8. Accuracy and sentiment are different checks

An answer can be accurate and still unfavourable. Accuracy asks whether the facts are right. Sentiment asks how the engine frames you: as a leading option or a budget fallback, with praise or with a list of complaints.

When the tone is negative, look at the sources behind it. Engines usually repeat what reviews and community threads say, so a recurring complaint in the answer often traces back to a recurring complaint on a review site. The fix there is operational before it is digital: address the cause, respond publicly where the complaint lives, and give satisfied customers an easy way to leave a review.

9. What you cannot fix directly, and how long the rest takes

There is no form for a business to correct ChatGPT. OpenAI's privacy policy gives people a right to correct their own personal data, and the same policy notes that ChatGPT's output may not be "the most factually accurate"; neither offers a business a way to edit what the model says about a company. Google lets anyone flag an AI Overview: click the thumbs down, then "Report a problem". Feedback is worth sending, but it is not a fix. The fix is the sources.

How fast a correction shows up depends on where the wrong fact came from. Seer Interactive's study gives a useful split:

Rerun the same questions after every fix and once a month after that, and keep the dated answers. The record shows you which fixes worked and gives you evidence if a publisher needs persuading.

10. Want someone to check it for you?

Start with the free brand perception report from section 3 if you have not run it yet. If it shows claims you need to correct across several sources and markets, book a 30 minute call with our team. Making a brand's description consistent across its own pages and the sites that discuss it is part of how we run answer engine optimisation for clients: The Novastacks Methodology checks brand entity consistency in the audit and tracks it after every cycle, alongside AI mentions and citations.

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