Where ChatGPT gets facts about your brand
ChatGPT answers about your brand come from three layers. Training data: what the model absorbed before its knowledge cutoff, which you cannot edit directly. Retrieval: live web results ChatGPT pulls when a question needs current facts, which you absolutely can influence. And third party sources: review sites, comparison articles, directories and news coverage the model treats as authoritative context.
Most wrong answers trace to the second and third layers. An outdated pricing page, a stale directory listing, or a comparison article from two years ago keeps feeding the assistant the old facts. Fix those and the answer usually follows.
The correction playbook, in order of impact
First, fix your own site. State the correct fact plainly, in text, on the page where an assistant would look for it: pricing on the pricing page, capabilities on the product page, hours and locations on the contact page. Assistants quote pages that answer directly.
Second, fix the third party layer. Find the sources the assistants cite when they get it wrong: run the question, note the citations, then correct the directory listings, review profiles and outdated articles behind them. This is usually where the stubborn errors live.
Third, publish the correction as content. A clear page that says what changed, for example new pricing or a renamed product, gives retrieval something fresh and specific to find. Then re-test the same questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity monthly, because each assistant updates on its own cycle. Aethon runs this loop as a product: our Action Engine maps each wrong answer to the exact source feeding it. If you want the baseline done for you, request a free AI visibility audit.
What not to waste time on
Do not spam feedback buttons expecting a fix: thumbs down reports help the platform, but they do not correct your brand facts. Do not chase the training data: you cannot edit what a model already absorbed, and retrieval outruns it anyway. And do not stop at one assistant: a fact corrected in ChatGPT can stay wrong in Perplexity or Gemini for months if their sources differ. The full picture is covered in our guide to why AI has wrong information about your business.
