Quick answer
When an AI assistant repeats a wrong or outdated claim about your brand, find every answer that contains it, identify the sources it likely came from, correct those sources and your own pages, then rerun the same prompts to check the claim has stopped appearing.
Key takeaways
- Outdated claims often trace back to old pages, reviews or directories.
- Fix the sources you can control, then verify with the same prompts.
- Track repeated claims over time, since they can return.
How do you find wrong claims?
- 1Write prompts that ask directly about your plans, pricing, features and availability.
- 2Run them across platforms, several times each.
- 3Record every answer that contains a claim that is wrong or out of date.
- 4Count how often each claim appears, and on which platforms.
Where do wrong claims come from?
- Old pages on your own site that were never removed or redirected.
- Third party reviews, directories and articles written before a change.
- Inconsistent details between your site and your profiles.
How do you fix them?
- 1Update or redirect your own outdated pages.
- 2Ask the owners of third party pages to correct them where you have a relationship.
- 3State the correct fact plainly on a page that is easy to find.
- 4Rerun the same prompts after time has passed and compare.
Be realistic
Five kinds of wrong
Not every error is the same, and the fix depends on which kind you have. Sorting what you find into a few types makes the response faster and the reporting clearer.
| Type | What it looks like | Usual cause | First fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outdated | A retired plan, an old price, a discontinued feature | Old pages or third-party listings | Update or redirect the source and correct listings |
| Conflated | Facts from a similarly named company attached to you | Ambiguous name or thin identity signals | Make identity signals unmistakable on every profile |
| Missing | A real capability never mentioned | No page states it plainly | Add a clear statement on a crawlable page |
| Unsupported | A claim with no source anywhere | The model filling a gap | Publish the correct fact and see if it replaces the claim |
| Negative framing | You are described as expensive or limited without basis | Selective third-party coverage | Add balanced, sourced facts and seek accurate reviews |
Triage: what to fix first
Rank each error by how often it appears, how many platforms repeat it and how much damage it can do. A wrong price shown in most pricing answers is more urgent than an inaccurate detail that appears once. Errors that touch safety, legal claims or regulated topics should be escalated to the people responsible for them straight away.
An evidence log that stands up
Keep a record for every error so that you can show what happened and whether it changed. Each entry needs the prompt, the platform, the date, the full answer, the wrong statement, how many runs contained it, the sources shown and your best judgement of where it came from.
What to expect about timing
Do not promise a date. How quickly a correction shows up depends on how the platform gets its information. Where an answer is built from live retrieval, correcting the source page can change the answer within days. Where an answer leans on what a model learned in training, a correction can take much longer. Crawler settings also take time to apply: OpenAI's documentation says changes to its search crawler's robots.txt rules take about 24 hours to be reflected.
A verification routine
- 1After you fix the source, wait a sensible interval for recrawling.
- 2Rerun the exact prompts that produced the error, several times on each platform.
- 3Record the share of runs that still contain the wrong statement.
- 4Repeat weekly for a few weeks, since a corrected claim can return from another source.
- 5Close the item only when it stays gone across repeats and platforms.
Some things you cannot do
Can I ask an AI company to remove a claim?
Some platforms offer feedback channels, but the reliable route is correcting the underlying sources and measuring the result.
Should I contact the AI company?
Some platforms offer a way to report inaccurate answers, and it can be worth using for serious errors. It is not a substitute for fixing the sources, and it is slower and less certain.
What if the wrong claim comes from a site I do not control?
Contact the owner with the correct fact and evidence. If they will not change it, publish a clear, well-sourced statement on your own site and strengthen other independent sources that state it correctly.
Sources
- 1. OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers (Accessed Sep 2026)
Cite this page
BrandWater AI Research. (2026, 7 August 2026). When AI gets your brand wrong: finding outdated claims and fixing the sources behind them. https://brandwaterai.in/blog/when-ai-gets-your-brand-wrong
How we work
Figures are dated and linked to their sources. Where none exist we say so. Read our methodology and AI transparency pages.