Why ChatGPT might be telling your customers you’re closed
Your Google listing can be perfect and customers can still get the wrong hours, because AI tools don’t only read Google.
What we found
On 26 Oct 2026 we compared five Klang Valley cafes’ Google listings with their pages on Burpple, the food review site. Every Burpple page we found was unclaimed by the cafe, and every one disagreed with Google about which day the cafe is closed.
| Cafe | Old Burpple page says | Google says |
|---|---|---|
| A bakery-cafe in KL | Closed Mondays (two pages, one at an old address) | Open daily, 8am–5pm, new address |
| A bistro | Closed Mondays, shuts at 8pm | Closed Tuesdays, dinner until 10pm |
| A cafe-bakery | Open Mondays from 8:30am, different phone number | Closed Mondays and Tuesdays |
| A neighbourhood cafe | Closed Mondays, opens 10am | Open daily from 8am |
| A specialty coffee bar | Closed Wednesdays | Open daily, 8am–6pm |
These pages aren’t buried. When we searched “[cafe name] opening hours” on Brave Search, the Burpple page appeared on the first page of results for all five. For one cafe, two other old pages near the top also had it open on a day it’s closed.
How an old page ends up in an AI answer
When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude “Is this cafe open on Monday?”, the tool usually searches the web, reads a few pages and writes a summary. ChatGPT’s search sends the question to search partners, and OpenAI names Microsoft as one (OpenAI Help Center). Claude’s web search uses Brave’s index (Formative Digital), the same search engine where we saw these pages.
Directories and listing sites make up a large share of what these tools cite. In a study of local questions, directories and aggregators were the biggest single source type in OpenAI’s answers (Yext, 2026; US data, so Malaysian results may differ). An old, unclaimed page is exactly that kind of source.
To be clear: in this check we didn’t capture an AI tool repeating these five mistakes. We’re showing where the wrong facts sit, not claiming any assistant said them. But it does happen. In an earlier test, one AI tool told us “some older listings report a temporary closure” for a KL cafe that was open.
Why it costs you
A customer who reads “closed on Monday” doesn’t call to check. They go somewhere else, and you never find out. Answers also vary from tool to tool: the same Yext study found four AI tools picked the same top local business only 4% of the time. So a wrong fact on one page can reach some customers and not others, which makes it hard to notice.
What to do this week
- Start with Google. Check your hours, holiday hours and open status on your Google Business Profile. Google isn’t always right either: for one of the five cafes, its Instagram bio listed later hours than Google.
- Search your own hours the way a customer would: “[your cafe] opening hours”. Note every page on the first page of results that’s wrong.
- Claim or correct those pages. Burpple, directories, Facebook, Tripadvisor. For old blog posts, a polite email asking for an update often works.
- Use the same wording everywhere: name, address, phone and hours, written the same way on every page you control.
Not sure what AI says about you?
We’ll check what ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI, Claude, Perplexity and Grok tell people about your cafe, find the old pages behind it, and send you one page of fixes. 3 free scans this October.
Claim a free AI Scan