How Voice Assistants Read a Listing
Six Places Errors Typically Hide
Avoiding mismatched opening hours
The usual culprit is unverified claims, unobtrusively inherited from an old listing no one remembers creating. Disagreement between sources forces voice assistants to guess, and a guess is seldom favorable.
Local business records
Data flows outward from aggregators, therefore an error at the source reappears in places no one submitted to. Contradictory data across sources costs more in a dense market in a rural catchment than it does in a quiet one.
Companion pages
Listing Hygiene: A Working Routine
Avoiding a misplaced service area
Keep a change log; six months on, no one remembers which field was edited or why.
Location pages for fitness studios
Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected, and the same holds at scale.
The opening hours
Begin by pulling every existing record into one sheet before changing anything.
What to drop
Put plainly, verify by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory — and it seldom happens quickly.
Priorities: Where the First Hour Should Go
70% Fixing unverified claims 54% First pass 55% The short list 30% Correcting without drift
By contrast, where the agency of record has changed twice, expect thin descriptions somewhere in the profile. For the most part, once a contradiction enters the aggregator layer it tends to resurface months later, give or take a reporting cycle.