We asked five AI assistants about our own studio. They quoted prices we had changed the week before.

A studio ran 20 identical questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overview on 2026-10-24 and found the assistants named it in only 16 of 60 answers from the three repeat-tested tools, with 15 of those coming from queries that used its name. Asked job-description questions, the assistants almost never surfaced the studio, and several quoted stale prices, an old phone number, a wrong founding year and another business's reviews pulled from directory listings and old snapshots rather than the live site. The studio corrected listings on Yelp, Sortlist and GoodFirms and requested re-crawls of nine pages, noting nothing changes in answers until an assistant re-reads the page.

Twenty questions, five assistants, one day. Asked by name they found us; asked for the job they mostly did not; and what they said about us came from copies of us, not from us. On 2026-10-24 we asked five AI assistants the same twenty questions, five of them by name: the studio's or our own product's. Asked by name, they found us. Asked for the job, they rarely did. Several quoted prices we had changed six days earlier, an old phone number, a wrong founding year, and another business's reviews. None of it came from our live site, which was correct. It came from copies of us: directory listings and old snapshots. On 2026-10-24 we ran the same 20 questions we had asked on 2026-10-19 through ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, each in a temporary or private chat so that an account's memory could not answer for us. Fifteen described a job a business owner might search for, such as an agency in Sacramento for a CRM and an AI receptionist for contractors, or a CRM for sauna builders. Five used a name: the studio's alone, then with the city, with prices and with reviews, and our own product's, asking who built it. The same day we added Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overview, which no earlier run had included. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity named the studio in 16 of 60 answers, against 17 of 60 five days before. Fifteen of the 16 came from the questions that used our name: each of the three found us on all five. On the fifteen questions that described the job, ChatGPT named us 0 times, Gemini 0 times and Perplexity once, third of three. Google's AI Overview did best, naming us on two of them, first on one and second on the other. Copilot named us on none. As far as we checked it, the reason is plain: an assistant names the businesses a web search finds, and for those questions a search mostly found city pages, directories, and studios whose reviews show up in the results. ChatGPT quoted our price ladder as it stood before 2026-10-18, with an email address and a phone number we no longer use, and cited a page title our home page no longer carries: it was answering from an old snapshot of our own site. Copilot quoted the same old prices from a Yahoo Local listing, and gave a founding year of 2023 with a link to The Manifest; Gemini also said 2023. The studio has been on the US market since 2021. Gemini described an average rating on Clutch and what clients praise there, when Clutch held one review. And Google's AI Overview, asked for our reviews, answered with a remodeling contractor's rating, 4.9 out of 5 from 36 reviews, taken from an Instagram post in which we had reviewed that contractor's business. The live pages we checked that day were already correct. The wrong figures lived elsewhere. The Yahoo Local listing carried, word for word, the description we had once written on our Yelp listing, with the old phone number, and its quote button led to Yelp: it is fed from Yelp, so it changes when Yelp's feed changes and not before. The Manifest's own page, opened the same day, already said 2021, so the 2023 most likely came from an older copy of it. The Instagram post was ours and accurate; it was simply read as being about us. On Yelp we replaced the old description and history and changed the phone number; the number went to review and was showing on the public page by the end of the day. On Sortlist we corrected the founding year, the team size, the description and both contact details. On GoodFirms we corrected the same fields; the listing there has not been approved yet. The Instagram post got a new first line: "Free review of a local business we looked at. Not a review of Orium Studios." We asked Google Search Console to re-crawl 9 pages. Nothing was paid for. Yahoo Local has no separate free edit, so it waits for Yelp. None of this shows up in an answer until the assistant reads the page again. An AI assistant does not ask you about your business. It reads whatever copies of you it can find: directory listings, sites that republish those listings, old snapshots of your own pages, and your own posts read out of context. Fixing your website fixes one copy. If you changed a price, a phone number or an address this year, the old one is very likely still out there, and an assistant will repeat it with the same confidence as the new one. First, open each assistant you or your customers use in a private window and ask three things: your business name, your business name with the word prices, and your business name with the word reviews. Second, write down every source each answer cites, not just the answer. Third, open each source and compare it against what is true today: phone, prices, services, the year you started, the area you serve. Fourth, correct every listing you can log into, and for the ones you cannot, find what feeds them; a listing that copies another one is fixed at the original. Fifth, open your Google Business Profile and confirm the phone, hours, service areas and services. Then write down the date, and ask the same questions again in a few weeks. If my website is correct, why is the answer wrong? Because the assistant may not be reading your website. In our test the live pages were right on the day, and the wrong prices, phone number and founding year came from directory listings and an older snapshot of our own home page. The assistant repeats whichever copy it found, and it does not say which copy is out of date. How long until the assistants show the corrected details? We do not know yet, and nobody can promise a date. A listing has to be corrected, then read again by the search engine, then reach the assistant, and some listings wait on a feed from another site. The only honest way to find out is to ask the same questions again later and compare, which is what we will do. Do I need to pay a directory to fix a wrong listing? Not in our case. Every correction described here was made on a free plan, and no paid upgrade was bought. Some directories asked for an account or a verification step before allowing an edit, and those took longer, but none of them required paying to change a phone number or a description. Originally published on the Orium Studios blog: We asked five AI assistants about our own studio. They quoted prices we had changed the week before. https://oriumstudios.com/blog/ai-assistants-quoted-our-old-prices . Orium Studios is a studio in Sacramento, California, that builds websites, CRM systems and AI receptionists for US service businesses.