Hi everyone,
AI is answering questions about your business before anyone reaches your website: whether you are open, what you sell, whether you are worth the drive.
Sometimes it gets you wrong, and sometimes it leaves you out.
Recently someone searched Google for Anna Mae’s Bakery by name. The AI summary at the top of the results said the business was officially closing on July 31.
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It was not closing and has no plans to.
The owner, Amanda Herrfort, found out when someone sent her a screenshot of the search result. “That’s when I panicked,” she told CBC News.
What went wrong was a name
Google had confused Anna Mae’s Bakery and Restaurant in Millbank with a different Anna Mae’s in Illinois that genuinely is closing. Two businesses, one shared name, one generated sentence, and a closing date attached to the wrong one.
Nothing on her website or her Facebook page said she was closing. The claim existed only in the summary at the top of the results, which is the first thing most people read and the last thing they think to question.
Google says the vast majority of its AI summaries meet its bar for helpfulness and accuracy, and across billions of searches a day, that is probably true. It is not much comfort when the wrong one is about your business.
This is not really a bakery story
Is there another business with a name close to yours?
A franchise, a regional chain, a business two states over. That was enough to merge two businesses into one answer.
Would you know if AI started answering questions about you incorrectly?
Not your address or hours, which you can see and control, but your prices, your services, whether you are still open.
What I would check this week
Search your own business name and read the AI answer all the way through. Not the map listing. The paragraph above it.
Ask what a customer would actually ask. Is this business still open? What does it charge? Is it any good? Who is better?
Make sure your own site and profiles state the basics plainly. That does not prevent a mix-up, but it gives the machine better material to work from.
Getting left out is the harder problem
Anna Mae’s at least found out. A wrong answer is loud, and sooner or later somebody forwards you the screenshot.
Getting left out makes no sound. A buyer asks ChatGPT which company they should use, you are not in the answer, and nothing about it ever reaches you.
Nobody screenshots an answer you were not in.
That is the one we built a tool for. Give us your domain, and we run the questions buyers in your category actually type through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, then send you:
How many of those answers name you, and how many leave you out
Which competitors got named instead of you, and how often
Whether your own site is being cited as a source at all
Every question we asked, so you can run them yourself and check us
It also asks about you by name as a control, which separates two different problems: AI not knowing who you are, and AI knowing you perfectly well and recommending someone else anyway.
It will not audit every claim AI makes about you, which is what the list above is for. It answers whether you are in the conversation at all.
Three fields and about a minute, and we email you the report. Name up to five competitors, or leave it blank, and we compare you against whoever AI names most in your category, which is usually the more revealing list.
Most owners are surprised by what comes back.
Talk soon,
Iulia Vasciuc
CEO, ScaledOn
P.S. Herrfort’s own takeaway is the best line in the story: “Don’t just read what AI is telling you at the top.” Worth passing to your team.
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