Friday, eight in the morning, Tampa. A woman at the wheel asks the assistant in her phone: "What time does Tampa Pasta House open, and where is it?" The assistant answers with confidence: an address, a schedule. She drives there. It's a pizza place, a different restaurant with different owners. Curtis, our AI, is that voice in her phone. He didn't mean to lie. He just had nothing to read.
📬 What we actually tested
On October 16, 2026, around 8 a.m. Tampa time, we took our own sample restaurant, Tampa Pasta House, and asked two mainstream assistants the same thing: the opening hours, the address, whether it's open right now, and where the information came from.
The restaurant's page says very little about that. It gives "Tampa, FL" with no street, and one line from its Google Business Profile: "Open for dinner tonight, 5–10." There is no weekly schedule, no street address and no phone number.
The score: 0 full matches out of 2.
Mistake one: ChatGPT. It never found our restaurant. It answered about a pizza place with a similar name: that place's street address, and its hours from a delivery app, Monday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Only on our second question did it say the address belonged to that other restaurant, not one it could verify as Tampa Pasta House. Then it gave that restaurant's phone number "for confirmation before visiting." By then, our driver is parked outside the pizzeria.
Mistake two: Gemini 3.8 Flash. It found our page and our channels, and said honestly that this is a "demonstration business": "Address: None." Then it added what the page never says: "Lunch Service: Thursday – Saturday," "Mondays: Closed," and "a 14-table trattoria in the Seminole Heights neighborhood." It got the evening hours, 5–10, right. The days around them it filled in itself.
Both said the restaurant was closed right now. Both were right, but the first one was right about the wrong restaurant.
An empty line on your listing doesn't stay empty. AI fills it, with someone else's data or with data it makes up.
🗂 One card instead of a pretty answer
The useful thing that came out of the run is a five-line card. Every venue should have it on its page, so an assistant has something to read:
- Hours for each day of the week, in words, including the day you're closed.
- Street and number, or a plain "no street address."
- A phone number, or a single "message us" button.
- One line for today: what's on right now (ours: "Open for dinner tonight, 5–10").
- One sentence about who you are, such as "a family fresh-pasta restaurant in Tampa," so the AI doesn't merge you with a pizzeria that shares half your name.
Here is our own case. Tampa Pasta House had lines 3, 4 and 5: message buttons for Messenger and Telegram, tonight's dinner line, and "a fresh-pasta trattoria in Tampa." Lines 1 and 2 were empty. Those two gaps got filled with someone else's hours, someone else's address, a lunch nobody serves and a day off nobody takes. Line 5 was there, and one assistant still answered about the pizzeria.
🛠 How to repeat it without code
- Open your page or your Google card as a stranger would, and write down what's there: an address? hours for each day? a phone number?
- In ChatGPT, with no files attached, ask: "What are the opening hours and address of <your business> in <city>?" Then ask: "Is it open right now? Where did you get this information from?"
- In the Gemini app, ask the same in one message, and ask it to name its sources with links.
- Mark every line of each answer: matched, someone else's, or made up.
- Write down the date, and ask the same questions again after you fix the page: assistants take a while to reread it.
🧾 What it cost, and the limits
The run cost $0 beyond subscriptions we already had. The sample is one business, two assistants, one morning; two questions to ChatGPT and one combined question to Gemini 3.8 Flash. ChatGPT was asked from our company account, which already had earlier chats about this restaurant. Gemini 3.8 Flash was asked through the command line, from an empty folder. We didn't measure Perplexity, Claude, the Gemini app, or voice assistants. The "after the fix" half is still ahead: the same questions, in the next part.
✅ Before you trust an assistant with your hours
- ☐ Ask it yourself, as a customer would, and check every line against your own page.
- ☐ Write your hours for each day in words, not just "open now."
- ☐ Give your street and number, or say plainly that there isn't one.
- ☐ Say who you are in one sentence, so you're not merged with a namesake next door.
- ☐ Check whose phone number the assistant gives before your customers dial it.
- ☐ Check again after any edit to your listing: two days later, not an hour later.
Next part: the second half of the experiment. We fill in the two empty lines and ask the same assistants again.
Your turn: what does your assistant say right now to "what time do you open?" Have you checked?
