Last night my team finished a one-time audit for a wellness clinic. Twenty-one pages on their site, eleven articles, and the Google listing. The site itself was in good shape. Links worked, pages loaded fast, every photo had a description.
Then we looked at what the rest of the internet says about them. That is where the real problems were — and it is why I now think every owner should check what the internet says about your business, not just what their own website says.
The phone number nobody answers
Bing publishes a phone number for this clinic. It is not on their website. It is not on their Google listing. It is a number from somewhere in their past that nobody there picks up.
That matters more than it used to. ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot pull their business facts from Bing. So when someone asks an AI assistant how to reach this clinic, the assistant can hand them a dead number — confidently, with no warning.
The owner had no idea. Why would he? He has never typed his own business name into Bing. Nobody does.
- Your website is the one surface you control. It is also the one you check.
- Google, Bing, Apple Maps and the AI assistants all hold their own copy of your business facts.
- Those copies drift. Old numbers, old addresses, old prices stay frozen in place.
Why do AI assistants get my business details wrong?
Because they learned them at a point in time, and nothing tells them you changed.
This clinic raised its prices months ago. The website says the new price in eighteen separate places. There is not a single old price left on it. And yet three different searches came back quoting the old, lower price.
The first explanation we reached for was that search engines had not re-read the site yet. That turned out to be wrong, and my researcher said so plainly rather than letting it stand. Google's own search snippet quotes the new price correctly. The old number is not sitting in a document anywhere — it is sitting in the assistants' memory of a version of the site that no longer exists.
You cannot fix that by editing your website again. You fix it by making sure every other place that lists you says the right thing, loudly and in more than one spot.
The two-names problem
Here is the one that surprised me most, and I think it is very common.
Google lists this business under one name. The website is branded with a different name. The Google version of the name appears on none of the twenty-one pages of the website.
To a human, it is obviously the same clinic. To a search engine or an AI assistant, those are two weakly connected things — and that is probably why wrong prices and even a wrong postcode keep surfacing. The machine is stitching together two half-pictures.
You do not need to rebrand to fix this. You need both names to appear together, in public, so the connection is written down somewhere a machine can read.
What to actually check this week
Set aside thirty minutes. No tools, no agency, just you and a browser.
Search your own name in three places
Google, Bing, and one AI assistant. Not your website — your business name. Read what comes back as if you were a stranger.
Check every number and address
Phone, address, hours, prices. Compare what each platform says against what is true today. Write down anything that does not match.
Look at what your listing is missing
This clinic's Google listing had no services and no prices on it at all, under one very generic category. Every competitor nearby had a more specific category. That is free to fix and it was the single highest-value thing on our list.
Ask the questions your customers ask
We ran the five questions a real buyer would type. The clinic came up first for "where can I find this near me" — and did not appear at all for "does this hurt" or "is this safe". It owns the where questions and loses the what questions.
That is useful. It tells you exactly which article to write next.
The part that costs you money
Everything above is housekeeping except one thing: the dead phone number.
A wrong price is embarrassing. A missing service list is a lost opportunity. A phone number that rings nowhere is a customer who decided to call you, tried, and gave up — and you will never know they existed.
Check what the internet says about your business. The surfaces you do not control are the ones quietly answering your customers.