When AI gets your shop wrong

Published 6 November 2026 · 4 min read

An old price, “no returns”, “doesn't ship abroad”: assistants repeat what they read. How to find the wrong claims about your shop and fix them.

A buyer asks ChatGPT whether your shop delivers to Germany. The answer says you don't ship abroad. You have shipped there for two years. The buyer doesn't write to check. They buy somewhere else, and you never hear about it.

Wrong answers about a shop tend to take a few familiar shapes. An old price. A longer delivery time than you offer. “No returns.” “Doesn't ship abroad.” Doubt about whether a product is in stock. Or your shop mixed up with another one that has a similar name.

Where the wrong facts come from

An assistant repeats what it reads. Before answering, ChatGPT runs its own web searches and reads the pages that come back. OpenAI says the review summaries it shows come from public websites, and answers often cite marketplaces, comparison sites and lists. Not all of those pages are yours, and not all of them are current.

So a 2023 listing on a comparison site with an out-of-date price, an old marketplace offer that promised delivery in 5–7 days, or a blog post about a different shop with a similar name can all turn up in an answer as a fact about you. Your own site can be the source too: a returns policy nobody can find, or a delivery table that exists only as a picture.

There is no switch

ChatGPT has no setting where a shop writes what it should say about itself. You change the answer by changing what it reads. That is slower than a switch, but every page you correct is also correct for the people who read it.

Find the wrong claims yourself

1. 1 Open a fresh chat and ask about your shop by name, the way a buyer would: “Does [your shop] deliver to Germany, and how fast?”, “Can I return shoes to [your shop]?”, “How much is [product] at [your shop]?”, “Is [product] in stock at [your shop]?”
2. 2 Ask each question in at least three fresh chats. Answers vary from run to run, and one wrong answer can be a fluke. The same wrong claim three times is a pattern.
3. 3 Write down every wrong claim word for word, with the sources linked to the answer. The source is where the fix goes.
4. 4 Fix each one at its source (the list below).
5. 5 Make the correct fact easy to find on your own site.
6. 6 Ask the same questions again in a few weeks. Pages have to be read again before an answer changes, and you can't choose when that happens.

Where the fix goes

• Your shipping and returns page. Plain words, written as text: which countries, how many days, what it costs, how long a buyer has to send something back and who pays for it. Link it from the home page, where people and robots both find it.
• Your product pages. Price, availability and delivery time written on the page as text, and the same as everywhere else.
• Old listings. Update or close offers on marketplaces and comparison sites you no longer look after. A forgotten Allegro offer with a two-year-old price still speaks for you.
• Your Google Business Profile, if you have one: opening hours, address, website and a short description that matches your site.
• Out-of-date articles. Write to the author, point to the wrong sentence and give the correct fact with a link to where it's stated. A short, polite note with the evidence gets further than a complaint.
• A mix-up with another shop. Put your full company name, your town and what you sell on your about page and in your site's footer, so pages about you are easy to tell apart from pages about them.

If assistants doubt your stock on products you do have, check the page's hidden text too. In our own test, a “sold out” box that a shop template hides on every page was enough for ChatGPT to tell buyers to contact the shop before ordering.