Business Insider found similar cases: a property manager in Idaho whose firm was merged in the AI summary with a similarly named company that had closed years earlier, and a consultancy labelled a scam on the strength of an old Reddit thread about an unrelated app.

What makes this different from the usual “Google got something wrong” complaint is the shape of the answer. A list of ten blue links gave a business room to exist in position four while a bad review sat in position two. One AI summary does not. It reads as a verdict, most people do not scroll past it, and there is no obvious button marked “this is about a different company.”

Where the wrong information is actually coming from

Before you can fix anything, you need to know which layer produced the error. In practice there are four, and they have completely different repair paths.

Your Business Profile. Name, category, hours, address, service area, phone. This is the layer you control most directly and the one most small businesses have half filled in.

Review text on Google itself. Reviews attached to your profile, including ones left by mistake on the wrong listing.

Third-party pages. Directories, aggregators, old listings, forum threads, review sites you have never signed up to, and roundup articles that mention you in passing. This is where most of the genuinely damaging errors originate.

Entity confusion. Google has decided your business and another business are the same thing, or that a review about a different company belongs to you. This is the hardest one, and it is what hit The Plastics Shed.

Most people jump straight to complaining about the AI. The AI is usually not inventing anything. It is faithfully summarising sources that were already wrong, and doing it with more confidence than those sources deserved.

What you can actually correct

Start with the things that have a real mechanism behind them, in this order.

1. Fill in the Business Profile properly. Not the minimum. Every field, including the description, the service list, the attributes, and the categories. A sparse profile leaves the model reaching for outside sources to answer basic questions. You can edit your Business Profile directly from Search or Maps once you are verified.

2. Report the specific AI Overview. There is a thumbs down and a “report a problem” option on the overview itself, and you can submit feedback on an AI Overview with a written explanation. Be specific. “This is wrong” does nothing. “This summary attributes reviews from a different company with a similar name to my business, my correct profile is X” gives a human reviewer something to act on.

3. Flag misattributed reviews individually. If reviews on your own listing are clearly about another company, report each one rather than reporting the listing.

4. Fix the source pages you can reach. Directory listings with an old address, an aggregator that has your business under a defunct trading name, a partner site with wrong opening hours. These are boring and they are usually the real cause. Work through the first three pages of results for your business name.

5. Publish a page that answers the question directly. If the bad summary is about your reliability, refund policy, or whether you are still trading, put a clear, plainly worded page on your own site covering exactly that. Models prefer a direct, unambiguous answer over an inference from scattered mentions.

What you cannot correct

This is the part most guides skip.

You cannot force a correction on a timeline. The cases in the reporting took weeks, and there is no service level attached to any of these reports. You cannot remove a legitimate negative review from a third-party site just because the AI weighted it oddly. You cannot stop a self-promotional roundup article from being cited instead of your own site. And you cannot get money back for ads that ran alongside a summary that was harming you, at least not on current evidence.

There is also no way to check your work reliably. AI Overviews do not fire for every query, they vary by device and location, and the summary you see is not necessarily the one your customer sees. Testing means checking the same query several times, on different devices, and ideally asking someone outside your area to try it.

The boring part that actually matters

If your business name is close to another business name in the same country, you have a structural risk here, not a one-off incident. A café called The Green Door in one city and a nightclub called The Green Door in another will get confused eventually. So will two consultancies with the same founder surname.

The defence is unglamorous: be the most complete, most consistent, most machine-readable version of yourself across every place that mentions you. Same legal name, same address format, same phone number, same category language. Consistency is what lets a model separate you from the other one. Every place you are described differently is a place the confusion can start.

Most small businesses do not have a reputation problem. They have a data consistency problem that only becomes a reputation problem once a model summarises it.

When this is not worth your time

If the incorrect summary appears on a query nobody searches, leave it. Chasing corrections on low-volume brand variants will eat days and change nothing. Check your actual search terms first. If the wrong answer only appears when someone types your business name plus a word no customer would ever use, it is noise.

Equally, if you are a small local business and the error is minor, opening hours off by an hour, an old category, fix the profile and move on. The weeks-long escalation path is for summaries that genuinely misrepresent whether you are trustworthy or still trading.

What is worth doing this week, regardless: search your own business name, on a phone, logged out, and read what the AI says about you. Most owners have never done it. Some of them are about to find out why their enquiries dropped.

This is the kind of monitoring mark8ng.ai is being built around: knowing what machines are saying about you before a customer tells you, and fixing the source instead of arguing with the output.

Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy before making compliance decisions.

The post Google’s AI Is Describing Your Business Wrong. Here Is What You Can Actually Correct. appeared first on Mark8ng.com.