You search for your company on Google.

At the top of the results, Google’s AI Overview describes your business.

There is one problem.

It is wrong.

Maybe Google says you operate in a city you left years ago. Maybe it describes services you do not offer. Maybe it mixes your company up with another business with a similar name. In more serious cases, the summary may attribute complaints, poor reviews, or other negative information to your business that actually belongs to someone else.

Google itself acknowledges that AI Overviews can contain inaccurate information and provides a feedback process specifically for responses that are inaccurate, biased, or otherwise problematic.

And this is already creating real problems for businesses. In August 2026, Business Insider documented several companies dealing with AI Overviews that mixed them up with other businesses, attributed unrelated complaints to them, or continued showing outdated location information.

So if Google’s AI Overview is saying something wrong about your business, you are not imagining the problem.

The harder question is figuring out what to do about it.

First, document exactly what Google is getting wrong

Before changing your website, submitting support requests, or rewriting content, document the problem.

Save:

• The exact Google search you performed
• A screenshot of the AI Overview
• The date you saw it
• The specific statement that is inaccurate
• Any sources Google cites alongside the statement
• The correct information
• A source that clearly supports the correct information

This matters because AI Overviews are generated in response to specific searches. Google says the system may issue multiple related searches and draw from different sources while generating its response. Different queries can therefore produce different answers and supporting links.

Search a few reasonable variations too.

For example, if the problem appears when someone searches:

reviews for ABC Company

also check searches such as:

ABC Company reviews

is ABC Company reputable

ABC Company complaints

ABC Company Florida

You are trying to determine whether you are looking at one strange response or a larger misunderstanding about the business.

Look at the sources Google is using

This is probably the most useful place to start.

AI Overviews often contain links associated with portions of the generated response.

Open them.

If Google says:

ABC Company has received frequent complaints about delayed shipping.

you want to know why.

Maybe the citation leads to:

• A review website
• Reddit
• An old article
• A directory
• Your own website
• A competitor
• A business with a similar name
• A page that does not actually support what the AI Overview says

Businesses interviewed by Business Insider described several variations of this problem, including Google apparently pulling reviews and information belonging to similarly named businesses and combining them into one summary.

Before deciding how to fix the problem, determine whether you can find the bad information Google appears to be relying on.

There are several different problems that can produce a wrong AI Overview

I would separate these into a few categories because the appropriate response is different for each one.

Your own website contains outdated or ambiguous information

This is the easiest situation to correct.

Maybe your About page still mentions an old location.

Maybe a service page implies that you offer something you stopped offering two years ago.

Maybe your old company name still appears throughout the website.

Maybe several pages describe the business differently.

Correct the underlying information first.

Google’s guidance for AI features still points website owners back to the same fundamental SEO practices used throughout Search. Google specifically recommends clear, reliable, people-first content rather than some separate set of special “AI optimization” techniques.

If your own website is ambiguous, Google has less reliable information to work with.

Your Google Business Profile contains incorrect information

For eligible businesses with a Google Business Profile, check it carefully.

Review:

• Business name
• Primary and secondary categories
• Address or service area
• Phone number
• Website
• Hours
• Business description
• Attributes
• Photos
• Other information Google has added or collected

Google allows verified businesses to edit their Business Profile information and notes that it may also update business information based on reports and other sources.

If Google is confused about something as fundamental as your location, phone number, or business category, I would make sure the Business Profile and website agree before looking for a more complicated explanation.

Another website contains outdated information about you

Maybe an old industry directory still lists your previous address.

Maybe a local newspaper article from 2019 describes a service you discontinued.

Maybe an association website uses your previous business name.

Maybe an old employee biography connects you to the wrong company.

You may not control those websites, but you can often contact the publisher and request a correction.

This becomes especially important when the same incorrect fact appears across several sources.

Google is confusing you with another business

This is one of the more frustrating situations.

Your company might share:

• A similar business name
• The same acronym
• A similar domain
• A previous business name
• A founder’s name
• A service category
• A geographic connection

with another organization.

Google’s own structured data guidance specifically describes organization markup as something that can help Google understand an organization’s details and disambiguate it from other organizations.

This is where clearly establishing who you are across your website becomes particularly valuable.

The sources look correct, but the AI Overview reaches the wrong conclusion

This can happen too.

Google may have accurate source material available and still generate an inaccurate summary from it.

Google openly states that AI Overviews can make mistakes.

In that situation, there may not be one incorrect webpage that you can simply edit.

You should still strengthen the information you control, but you should also report the inaccurate AI Overview directly to Google.

Report the inaccurate AI Overview to Google

Google provides feedback controls directly on AI Overviews.

At the bottom of the overview, you can select the thumbs down option. Google says that when an overview is inaccurate or otherwise problematic, you can then choose Report a problem, select the appropriate category, and provide additional details. The submitted feedback includes the recent query and its search results.

You can also access feedback through the three-dot menu on the AI Overview.

I would be specific.

Avoid:

This is wrong.

Instead explain:

The AI Overview states that ABC Company operates in Tampa, Florida. ABC Company relocated to Jacksonville, Florida in 2023 and no longer operates in Tampa. The current location is confirmed on our official website and Google Business Profile.

If the Overview appears to be confusing you with another company, explain that too:

The complaints cited in this response refer to ABC Services LLC in Texas. Our company is ABC Services Inc. in Florida. These are separate businesses.

Give Google something concrete to evaluate.

Make your website extremely clear about basic business facts

When the problem involves business identity, I would review the website from the perspective of a system trying to figure out exactly who the company is.

Can it easily determine:

• Your official business name?
• Whether you use another commonly recognized name?
• What your company does?
• Where you operate?
• Which locations are real locations?
• Which areas you serve?
• Who owns or operates the company?
• Which website is official?
• Which social profiles belong to you?
• How customers contact you?
• Whether you are affiliated with similarly named organizations?

Do not hide important business information inside clever marketing language.

If your homepage only says:

Changing the way the world experiences tomorrow.

that may be great brand copy, but it does very little to explain what the company actually is.

Somewhere prominent on the site, say what the business does in normal language.

Review your Organization structured data

For an organization, I would also review the structured data on the official website.

Google says Organization structured data can help it understand administrative information about the business and distinguish the organization from other entities. Recommended properties can include information such as:

• name
• alternateName
• url
• logo
• telephone
• address, when applicable
• other identifying organization information

This is especially worth checking when Google seems confused about:

• Your business name
• An abbreviation
• A similarly named company
• Your official website
• Your logo
• Your contact information

Structured data should accurately represent information that is actually true about the business.

I would not start adding fictional addresses, irrelevant categories, or other markup simply because you want Google to associate something with the company.

The goal is clarity.

Check your website name signals too

If Google appears confused about the company’s name, check how the name is represented throughout the homepage.

Google says its site-name systems can look at several sources, including:

• WebSite structured data
• og:site_name
• The page title
• Headings
• Other homepage text
• References to the site elsewhere on the web

Google recommends using the preferred site name consistently and supports an alternateName in WebSite structured data when a business is commonly known by another name or abbreviation.

That does not guarantee an AI Overview will immediately change.

It does give Google’s systems clearer information about the entity behind the website.

Check for contradictions across your own website

This is something I would take seriously.

Suppose your homepage says:

Serving Northeast Florida

Your About page says:

Serving Central Florida

An old location page says:

Proudly serving Tampa Bay

Your footer lists Jacksonville.

Your schema says Orlando.

Your Google Business Profile says St. Augustine.

A human can sometimes figure out the history.

An automated system now has several different answers available.

Search the site for old:

• Addresses
• Phone numbers
• Employee names
• Company names
• Service areas
• Product names
• Service descriptions
• Acquisitions
• Ownership information
• Office locations

Also check PDFs, old press releases, employee biographies, blog posts, and location pages.

The incorrect information may still exist somewhere you forgot about.

Make important corrections explicit

Sometimes removing an old sentence is enough.

Other situations benefit from stating the new fact clearly.

For example:

ABC Company is based in Jacksonville, Florida and serves customers throughout Northeast Florida.

Or:

ABC Company was previously known as XYZ Company. The business changed its name in 2024.

Or:

We do not provide residential roofing services. ABC Company exclusively serves commercial properties.

This can be especially useful when there is a specific point of confusion that keeps appearing online.

You are giving search systems a clear statement rather than expecting them to infer the correction from the absence of old information.

Search for the incorrect statement itself

If Google’s AI Overview says something strange about your company, search for the wording or underlying fact.

Suppose it says:

ABC Company closed its Orlando location in 2022.

Search:

“ABC Company” “Orlando”

or:

“ABC Company” closed Orlando

You may discover an old directory page or article feeding the confusion.

Likewise, if the Overview attributes a specific complaint to you, search distinctive language from that complaint.

You may find that it actually belongs to another company.

This is sometimes the fastest way to work backward from the generated answer to the source of the problem.

Check third-party business profiles and directories

For local and regional companies in particular, business information tends to exist in many places.

Check prominent profiles where your company appears, including relevant:

• Industry directories
• Professional associations
• Social profiles
• Review platforms
• Local directories
• Chamber listings
• Manufacturer or dealer directories
• Partner websites

You do not need to obsess over hundreds of obscure directory listings.

I would start with the sources that actually appear in Google results for your business name and the sources associated with the inaccurate AI Overview.

Those are the ones we already know Google can see.

Do not manufacture positive information to fight the bad result

A wrong AI Overview can make people panic.

That is not a good reason to start publishing dozens of nearly identical articles saying how trustworthy your company is.

Google’s current guidance for generative AI search explicitly recommends useful, original, non-commodity content and warns against simply creating material that restates what is already available elsewhere.

If there is an information gap, fill it with useful information.

For example, if customers regularly search:

Is ABC Company licensed?

and your licensing information is difficult to find, create a clear page or section explaining it.

If there is confusion about which states you operate in, clearly document your service area.

If people confuse you with another similarly named organization, make your identity clearer.

Solve the information problem.

Request recrawling after meaningful website changes

If you correct important information on your website, make sure Google can actually find the updated page.

For important pages, you can use URL Inspection in Google Search Console to request another crawl.

Google notes that changes can take time to be recrawled and processed. For site-name changes, for example, Google says processing can take anywhere from several days to several weeks depending on how frequently its systems crawl the pages involved.

An indexing request does not guarantee that an AI Overview will change immediately.

It can help Google discover that the source material itself has changed.

Do not assume one corrected search means the problem is gone

This one is important with generative search.

Check the problem again later and use several relevant searches.

Businesses interviewed about inaccurate AI Overviews have reported cases where the answer improved and later reverted, or where similar searches continued producing inconsistent information.

I would keep a simple record:

Query
ABC Company reviews

August 10
Incorrectly attributes reviews for another company.

August 14
Correct.

August 21
Correct.

Then test related queries.

You do not need to spend every morning searching for yourself.

For a serious reputational error, you should know whether the correction is sticking.

What if the AI Overview is citing negative reviews that really are yours?

That is a different situation.

An unfavorable summary is not necessarily factually incorrect just because the business disagrees with it.

If Google’s sources genuinely contain customer complaints about your business, repeatedly reporting the Overview as false is unlikely to address the underlying information.

Look at what Google is actually citing.

If the summary exaggerates, removes important context, or makes an unsupported factual claim, report the specific problem.

If the source information itself is accurate, the larger issue may be reputation management rather than correcting a factual error.

What if Google is citing a source that is wrong?

Try to correct the source.

Suppose an industry directory says your company operates in Miami even though you moved to Jacksonville three years ago.

Updating your website helps.

Updating the directory removes another conflicting signal.

For third-party sources you cannot edit directly, contact the publisher and request a correction when appropriate.

Then document the request.

If Google continues citing clearly outdated information after the source has been corrected, you have a much stronger case when submitting feedback because you can explain that the cited source itself has changed.

What if Google provides no obvious source for the incorrect statement?

Then work outward.

I would check:

1. Your website
2. Google Business Profile, when applicable
3. Organization and WebSite structured data
4. Search results for the incorrect fact
5. Major directories and review sites
6. Similar businesses that Google might be confusing with yours
7. Old versions of your business information still published online
8. The sources attached to related AI Overview searches

If the factual information is consistently correct everywhere you can find it, submit feedback and continue monitoring.

Sometimes the problem really is in the generated response rather than in an obvious source document.

Google acknowledges that this technology can make mistakes.

A real example of how serious this can get

This issue is already affecting businesses in ways that go well beyond a wrong phone number.

Business Insider recently profiled an online retailer whose AI Overview described customer feedback as overwhelmingly negative and referenced complaints about delivery and customer service. According to the business owner, those complaints actually belonged to other companies. After repeated feedback submissions, the Overview eventually improved.

Another company reported that Google was mixing it with similarly named property-management businesses, including a company that had closed years earlier and businesses located in other states. The summary improved after work on the company’s web presence and feedback to Google, but the incorrect information reportedly returned at times.

That is why I would treat a significant AI Overview error as an actual search visibility problem rather than an amusing AI glitch.

A prospective customer may see that summary before they ever reach your website.

What I would do first

If Google is showing incorrect information about your company, I would work through the problem in this order:

1. Capture the exact query and incorrect AI Overview.
2. Open every source associated with the incorrect statement.
3. Determine whether Google is using bad information, confusing two companies, or generating an unsupported conclusion.
4. Correct inaccurate information on your own website.
5. Review your Google Business Profile when applicable.
6. Review Organization and WebSite structured data.
7. Look for outdated third-party sources appearing in searches for the incorrect fact.
8. Request corrections from important third-party sources when possible.
9. Use Google’s AI Overview feedback tool and clearly explain the factual error.
10. Request recrawling of materially updated pages.
11. Monitor the exact query and several close variations to see whether the correction holds.

That gives you something considerably more useful than repeatedly clicking thumbs down and hoping for the best.

Can you force Google to change an AI Overview?

No.

There is currently no setting in Search Console where a business owner can edit the text of an AI Overview.

Google provides feedback tools, and website owners can improve the information available to Google’s systems, but Google ultimately generates the AI Overview. Google also states that there are no special technical requirements or separate AI-specific optimization techniques required for inclusion in AI Overviews. The underlying Search and SEO fundamentals still apply.

That means the practical goal is to give Google’s systems the clearest and most consistent version of the truth you can.

Then report specific generated errors when they occur.

The bigger issue is figuring out why Google believes the wrong thing

When an AI Overview says something incorrect about a business, changing one sentence on the homepage may solve it.

Other cases are more complicated.

You may discover:

• Old business information across several websites
• Conflicting location information
• Incorrect structured data
• A similarly named company
• Reviews belonging to another organization
• An old company name still widely referenced
• A third-party website publishing inaccurate information
• Weak or ambiguous information on the official website
• An AI-generated conclusion that is unsupported by its own citations

Those situations require some investigation.

The most useful question is:

What evidence is Google seeing that could lead it to this answer?

Once you understand that, you have a much better idea of what you can correct.

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Google’s AI Overview says something wrong about your company?

Document the result first.

Then trace the information back through the sources Google is using, your website, your business information, and other places where Google may be learning about the company.

Kismet Creative Co. helps businesses investigate search visibility problems where Google appears to be misunderstanding, misrepresenting, or using outdated information about a website or organization.

Talk to Kismet About Your Problem

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Written by Joey Zuccarini
COO at Kismet Creative Co.