Ask the AI about your café by name, then check every fact it gives

Which questions to ask about your own café

Ask what your staff hear at the counter and on the phone, with the café's name in every question. Ten or so is enough for a first check, and the same ten give next month's check something to compare against. Write them down first, so the wording does not drift between assistants. The facts they test are the ones on the café industry page.

• "is [café name] open right now" and "what time does [café name] close today", asked at an hour when you know the answer
• "is [café name] open on sunday morning"
• "is [café name] open on [the next holiday]"
• "where is [café name] and which entrance do i use"
• "does [café name] have oat milk", or whichever milk your customers ask about
• "does [café name] have gluten free or vegan options"
• "can i work on my laptop at [café name]" and "does it have wifi"
• "how expensive is [café name]"
• "is [café name] still open or did it close"

One question per new chat, in each of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Paste every answer into a document with the date and the assistant's name, and keep any link it gives. With web search on, an AI assistant reads pages to answer; OpenAI's crawler documentation names ChatGPT-User as the fetcher that opens a page when a user asks about it. A cited page is the shortest path to where a wrong fact lives.

The checklist, fact by fact

Mark every statement about the café in every answer as one of four things. Right. Wrong, meaning it was never true. Stale, meaning it was true once. Hedged, meaning the answer declines to say or tells the person to check. This is fact-checking in its plainest form, and the table lists what a café answer can contain, what to check each fact against, and where a wrong version can survive on your own pages and listings.

Two rows deserve a closer look. "Closed for good" is the costliest wrong fact a café can carry, because the person asking does not come at all, so check it first and in every assistant. And hours are a fact per day, not a single line: a café open until six on weekdays and until three on Sunday has two facts to check, and an answer can get one right and the other wrong.

Wrong, stale or hedged: each points somewhere different

A stale fact is the easiest to trace. Something that was true once is still written somewhere, and the fix is to find that copy: search your own site for the old hours or the dropped drink, then read each listing named in the table's third column.

A fact that was never true anywhere needs a different reading. If the answer cites no page, or the cited page does not say it, the model may have filled a gap: a hallucination. A café with no wifi policy on its site is one an answer can guess about, and the remedy is a sentence on the right page. When AI gets facts about your business wrong explains both causes, and why a gap filled from training data does not clear the day a page changes.

Treat a hedge as a question about your sources. An answer that says the hours may vary and suggests calling ahead is your cue to look: do your sources disagree, or does none of them state the hours? Put your site, your map listings and the review platforms side by side. If they agree and the answer still hedges, check that the hours on your site are text a crawler receives, not an image or a widget.

Correcting what you find, starting on your own site

Fix the copies you control first, starting with your own site, the one source where every word is yours. Across all 40 trades in our audit of 9,483 small business websites (September 2026), 43.1% of the sites were inconsistent about who and where they are on their own three main pages, before any listing was counted. Check the site before you blame a listing.

1. Give each fact one home on the site: the hours on the visit or contact page, the menu on the menu page, the laptop policy beside the seating, with other pages linking there instead of repeating it.
2. Delete or update each stale copy: last season's drinks page, the holiday banner, the PDF from opening day. A page other sites link to can stay, saying that the item is gone until next season.
3. Put dates in the text where facts change: "menu updated [date]", "hours from [month]". A reader, person or machine, can then tell which copy is current.
4. Make each map listing match the site, holiday hours included; Google's guidelines for a Business Profile ask for the real name, the real address and accurate hours.
5. Check the status on every listing. A listing marked closed during a renovation stays closed until someone changes it.
6. Update each delivery app's menu the same day as the site, or take the link to it off your pages.
7. Ask the same questions next month and compare the answers fact by fact.

Typing a correction into a chat changes that conversation and nothing else; the correction belongs in the sources. And a correction on a site the crawlers cannot fetch reaches no one: 7.2% of the audited sites served a crawler a challenge page instead of the site, and the crawler access check shows whether yours is one of them.

A record that makes next month's check quicker

Keep one line per fact, not per answer. When the same wrong closing time turns up in three assistants, it is one problem with one source, and one line holds it.

date checked:  [YYYY-MM-DD]
question:      is [café name] open on sunday morning
assistant:     [ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity]
fact stated:   [what the answer said, copied]
verdict:       right | wrong | stale | hedged
source cited:  [URL, or none]
old copy at:   [the page or listing that still says it]
fixed on:      [YYYY-MM-DD]
recheck on:    [date of next month's check]

The fixed-on date matters more than it looks. An answer may not change on the day the page does, and nobody outside the operator can say when it will. The date lets you read next month's answer against the change you made, rather than guessing whether it has had time.

When to check outside the monthly routine

Run the check again after any change a customer would notice: new hours, a new season's menu, a milk added or dropped, a move, a renovation, a new name or owner. Ask the holiday question a week or two before each holiday, while there is time to fix a listing. Ask the still-open question after any closure, however short, since a closed flag on a listing stays until someone removes it.

A monthly reading with a fixed panel is a different job with a different purpose, set out in measuring a café's AI visibility; this check asks only whether what is said is true. If you would rather have a first pass done for you, the free visibility check does one with Claude, run by a person and returned in writing within 48 hours.