It's Thursday, a little after five in the morning. Someone in Tampa is planning dinner and asks an AI assistant three ordinary questions about a family restaurant: when it's open today, how much the lasagna is, and whether it's open right now. The assistant answers all three in seconds, calmly and with confidence.
Two of the three answers weren't about that restaurant at all.
We ran exactly this check on Tampa Pasta House. It's our sample business: it lives on our demo pages, not on a street, which makes it a clean test of what an assistant does when there is very little to read.
📬 What we actually tested
On October 15, 2026, between 5:01 and 5:08 a.m. ET, we asked three questions, word for word, in a fresh chat:
- "What are the opening hours of Tampa Pasta House in Tampa, FL today?"
- "How much does the lasagna cost at Tampa Pasta House in Tampa, FL?"
- "Is Tampa Pasta House in Tampa, FL open right now?"
We planned four assistants. Two answered: ChatGPT (free app, web search on) and the Gemini app (Auto mode). Claude asked us to sign in, and Perplexity stopped us at a security check, so we didn't ask them. That's 6 answers out of the 12 we planned.
Hours: 0 of 2 matched. One assistant gave the hours of a different restaurant with a similar name, found on a delivery app. The other described a "pop-up" with lunch and dinner days and no hours at all. Our sample restaurant opens on Thursdays at 5 p.m.
Lasagna price: 0 of 2 matched. Both named $16.99, taken from that other restaurant's delivery menu. On our demo page, the lasagna bolognese is $24.
Open right now: 2 of 2 matched. Both said it was closed, which at 5 a.m. was true.
Sources: 3 of 6 answers named one, and all three pointed to the delivery app. Our demo page was named in 0 of 6.
The assistant didn't leave a blank. When it couldn't find our restaurant, it found one with a similar name.
🗂 Why it went this way
We then read our own demo page the way an assistant would. The price is there: lasagna bolognese, $24. The opening hours are not there as numbers. There's no street address. And the page carries no restaurant markup, the small block of structured data that tells a machine "this is a restaurant, these are its hours, this is its menu."
So the assistant had a name, a city and almost nothing else. A delivery listing with a similar name had hours, an address and prices. It took what it could read.
The "open right now" answers came out right for the same reason they could have come out wrong: at 5 a.m., almost every restaurant is closed.
🛠 How to repeat it without code
- Open a fresh chat in the assistant your customers are most likely to use. Use a temporary or signed-out chat if you can.
- Ask the same three questions, word for word, with your business name and city.
- Write down the time and whether web search was on. Answers change by hour, place and account.
- Compare each answer with what's actually true today: your hours, one real price, open or closed.
- Note which source the assistant named, if any. That's the page it actually read.
🧾 What it cost, and the limits
Our check took about ten minutes and $0 on free plans. Doing it yourself costs the same.
The sample is small: two assistants, three questions, one morning, one city. Answers can be different an hour later or in another account. We didn't measure Claude, Perplexity, voice assistants or AI answers in search results. And our restaurant is a sample business, so a real one with years of reviews and a website may come out differently. That's what the next parts look at.
We repeated the three questions later the same morning from a second, paid account with web search on. There, ChatGPT found our demo page, read the hours (5–10 p.m.) and the price ($24) correctly, and said plainly that the restaurant is a demo. The Gemini app in the second account still named the other restaurant's $16.99. Same questions, different account, different answer: the data the assistant can read decides.
✅ Before you trust what an assistant says about you
- ☐ Ask the three questions about your own business this week, and write down the answers.
- ☐ Put your hours on your website as plain numbers, not only in a picture of a menu.
- ☐ Put your street address and phone number on the same page.
- ☐ Check that your Google Business Profile shows the same hours as your website.
- ☐ Search your business name on delivery apps and review sites, and see who else comes up with a similar name.
- ☐ Fix one wrong fact you found before you check anything else.
Next part: an assistant gives the wrong hours. Whose hours were they?
What did an assistant tell you about your own business, and was it true?
