What to do when Google shows the wrong information about you

A customer rings, faintly annoyed, to say they drove over on Sunday and you were shut. You have never opened on a Sunday in your life. You look at your own listing and there it is, in Google's own typeface: Sunday, 10am to 4pm. Nobody at your business put that there.

This happens more often than owners realise, and the first reaction is always the same — someone has hacked something. Almost nobody has. Business information on Google comes from several places at once, and only one of them is you.

Where the wrong information comes from

Public suggestions. Anybody looking at your listing can propose an edit to your hours, address, phone number or even whether you've closed down. Some of these go live automatically. Most come from people being helpful, a few from people being careless, and occasionally from a competitor.

Other sources on the web. Google cross-checks your details against directories, old listing sites and your own website. If a directory from 2017 still carries your old address, that's a vote for the old address. If your website footer says one thing and your listing says another, something has to give.

Machine guesses. Some details are inferred rather than stated — the area you seem to serve, the category you seem to belong to, sometimes hours guessed from patterns. These are usually close and occasionally wildly wrong.

And, frequently, you. Half the wrong information owners find was entered by someone at the business years ago and never revisited. That's the least dramatic explanation and the most common one.

Fix the listing first, then everything feeding it

The instinct is to go straight into the profile and correct it, and you should — that takes two minutes. But if you only do that, it often comes back, because whatever suggested the wrong detail is still out there suggesting it.

So do it in that order. Correct the listing. Then spend half an hour finding what disagrees with it.

Search your business name signed out, three pages deep. Search your phone number on its own, which finds listings that don't carry your name properly. Check your own website, including the footer and the contact page, which is where old addresses hide longest. Check any directory you ever signed up to, plus the two or three you didn't and that built a page for you anyway.

Write down everything that's wrong. Then fix the ones you can control and report the ones you can't.

When you cannot get it changed

Sometimes you correct a detail and it reverts within days. That means something is outvoting you, and there are three usual culprits.

A directory with a lot of authority still carries the old detail. Your own website contradicts your listing somewhere you've forgotten. Or members of the public keep suggesting the same edit, usually because something in the real world genuinely looks that way — a shared entrance, a sign left up by a previous tenant, a unit number that doesn't match the postcode.

There's a support route for disputed information, and it works, slowly. In the meantime, the most effective thing you can do is make every source you control say exactly the same thing, in the same words, right down to whether it's "Street" or "St".

"Permanently closed" is the emergency

Most wrong details cost you a few enquiries. This one costs you everything, because a business marked as closed effectively disappears from the map and from search.

It happens through a suggestion — sometimes malicious, more often a confused customer who couldn't find the door. If you ever see it, treat it as the one thing to drop everything for. Go into your profile, mark the business as open, and contact support the same day rather than waiting to see if it sorts itself out.

The way to catch it early is to look at your own listing regularly, which almost nobody does. Once a month, on a phone, signed out, takes ninety seconds.

The underlying problem is that your details live in thirty places

Here is the thing that makes all of this recur. Your address, your hours, your phone number and the area you cover exist in your listing, your website, four directories, two social profiles, an old booking platform and the signature on your invoices.

They were all correct on the day you set them up. Then you changed your mobile, or moved unit, or stopped doing Saturdays, and you updated the two you could remember. Everything else quietly became a source of wrong information, and each one is now telling Google something different about you.

That disagreement is worse than any single wrong entry. When the sources conflict, a search engine has to pick, and when an AI app is asked whether you're open on a Saturday it has the same problem with less patience. Conflicting facts don't make you look inconsistent — they make you look uncertain, and uncertain businesses get left off the shortlist.

This is precisely what we built hailera around: one set of details and answers that you write and check yourself, published as an agent so your website and the apps people ask read the same version rather than piecing one together from whatever they can find. The cheaper half of that fix costs nothing, though. Keep a single note with the exact wording of your name, address, phone number, hours and service area, and work through the list whenever one of them changes.

A routine that keeps it from rotting

Make a list, once, of every place your business details appear. Fifteen minutes with the searches above will find most of them, and the list stops being a mystery forever.

Then attach the update to the change. When your number changes, the list comes out that day rather than when somebody rings the old one. It is deeply unglamorous work and it prevents the single most avoidable way small businesses lose customers.

Today: look at your Google listing on a phone, signed out. Check the hours, the phone number and the address against what's actually true. Then check your own website footer says the same thing.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.