What to do when Google AI Overviews states a wrong fact about your company

An overview summarises pages, so a wrong fact about you almost always exists on a page you can find. Open the linked sources, locate the error, correct it where it lives, and then make sure nothing else you control still says the old thing.

Step one: open the sources

The overview links what it used. Read each one. In most cases the error is plainly there: an old price, a service you stopped offering, a location you left, a figure from a listing that no longer matches your site.

If none of the linked pages contains it, the summary may have combined two pages badly, such as your name and a competitor's price taken from the same comparison article. That is worth knowing, because the fix is different: you need a clearer page of your own stating the correct fact for that exact question, so that there is no gap for the mix up to happen in.

Step two: fix it where it lives

On your own pages, correct it and put a visible date next to the fact. Dated facts are easier to trust and they tell the next reader which version is current.

On somebody else's page, ask. Directories, listing sites and publishers usually have a route for corrections, and a short message with the correct value plus a link to your page stating it works more often than people expect. Keep a dated copy of the page as it stands before you write, because pages change and you may need to show what it said.

Step three: kill the contradictions

This is the step that actually changes outcomes. If your website says one price and a marketplace listing says another, a summariser has to pick, and it may pick against you or describe you vaguely to avoid the conflict.

Make a list of every place your key facts appear. The following seven cover nearly all of it, and the last two are the ones people forget.

• Your own website, including old pages nobody links to any more.
• Marketplace, app store and reseller listings.
• Directories and review site profiles.
• Social and professional network company pages.
• Old press releases and wire coverage.
• Partner and reseller pages describing you, which are often years old.
• Your Google Business Profile, which feeds a lot of Google surfaces and is usually the oldest thing on the list.

Get them to agree. This is dull work and it is the highest value hour you will spend on this problem.

A worked example

Here is the version we have on record, and its cause is the one to check first on your own site. On 6 August 2026 the pricing page for clawlaw.in, our sister company, rendered its prices only after scripts had run. What a crawler received contained no prices at all. So the prices the assistants quoted had come from an app store listing instead of from the company's own site. The page looked complete to anybody opening it in a browser.

That is the mechanism behind most wrong facts. Once your own statement of a fact is unreadable, whether because it appears only after scripts run, or only inside an image, or only inside a PDF, every other page on the web is free to be the authority on it. One of them will be, and it is usually the one that is out of date.

The same programme produced the second half of the lesson on the same day. The website and the app store listing carried different plan names and different prices for the same product, and ChatGPT noticed the contradiction and said so in its answer. An unreadable fact and a contradicted fact are two different failures, and they often sit on the same company's pages at the same time.

So the fix runs in this order. Put the fact into the page as plain text, each item with the date it became true, and keep any picture beside that text rather than instead of it. Update the listing so it matches word for word. Update your Google Business Profile. Write to any competitor whose page still carries the old version, expecting that to be the slowest step. Leave old news coverage alone, because it was true when it was published and arguing with old news is not a good use of anybody's time.

Then check your work the way a crawler would. Fetch your own page in a form that shows you the raw HTML, and search that text for the fact. Once it is in there, recheck the overview weekly.

Step four: help it find the right version

Publish a page built for the question that produced the error, answer it plainly in the opening lines, and make sure it is indexed and readable without scripts. You are not arguing with the summary. You are giving it a better source.

Do not publish a page about the error itself. A page headed "what Google gets wrong about us" is a page about Google, and it will be the most quotable thing on your site for the wrong reason.

What you cannot do here

You cannot edit an overview, and there is no queue where a correction is processed with a timescale attached. The feedback control under the summary is worth using and it is not a fix.

You cannot make a publisher update an old article, and you should not expect news coverage that was accurate at the time to be changed.

You cannot verify the outcome from a report, because Google includes overview performance inside overall Search reporting rather than separately. Your record is your own sheet.

And you cannot be promised a schedule. Corrections are picked up on no fixed timetable, different engines update at different times, and anybody promising you a turnaround is guessing.

What to expect

Re-check weekly and record what you see rather than relying on memory. Because this feature works over Google's index, the ordinary search results usually change before the overview does, so use the search results as your early sign that the correction has been crawled.

Expect the wrong fact to reappear occasionally even after it looks fixed. That almost always means one more copy is still out there, not that the correction failed.

Common questions

How long does this take?

There is no published answer. The order is predictable: your page changes immediately, Google recrawls, the ordinary results change, and the overview can follow. Anybody who gives you a number of days is inventing it.

Does the feedback link under the overview help?

Use it, and do not wait for it. Google does not publish what happens to individual reports. The page is the part you control, so the page is where the work is.

What if the wrong fact is on a competitor's page?

Ask for a correction in writing, with the correct value and a link to your own page stating it, and keep a dated copy of what the page said. If they do not act, make your own version the better source: plainer, dated, and on the page a buyer actually lands on.

Why does the overview still show the old fact when search results show the new one?

Because they update on different rhythms, and because the overview may still be drawing on a source you have not corrected. Check the linked sources again. Often one of them has quietly stayed the same.

Is a wrong fact worse than not appearing at all?

Usually yes. Being absent is a missed opportunity. Being present with a wrong price or a missing capability gives a buyer a reason to stop, and you never hear about it. Fix accuracy before you chase visibility.

Do I need to do this again for each engine?

The source work is shared, so correcting the page and removing contradictions helps everywhere at once. What differs is how quickly each engine reflects it. Use an engine that always retrieves live as your fastest confirmation that the fix has landed.

What to do first

Search the wrong fact as an exact phrase in quotation marks, today, and list every result. Then check one thing on your own site that people almost never check: whether the correct version exists as text rather than inside an image or a PDF. That single check explains a large share of these problems.