What to do when AI gets your golf course wrong

The short answer: find out where the wrong information came from, correct it there, and then report the answer. AI tools repeat what they find on the web: an old page on your own site, an outdated listing, or a review from three seasons ago. Once the source is fixed, the answer usually follows. Reporting the answer without fixing the source rarely holds.

Step 1: Find the source

Ask the same question again and look at the sources. Perplexity lists them under every answer. ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode show links when they searched the web. You can also ask directly: “where did you get that dress code?”

If no sources appear, the tool probably answered from what it learned in training rather than from a live search. That information is older and changes more slowly. Fixing the sources still helps, because the next search-based answer will use them.

The usual culprits

Your own old pages. A 2023 rate PDF that's still online, an events page from two summers ago, or a dress code page nobody updated after the policy changed. These are the most common source and the easiest to fix.
Business listings. Hours, phone numbers, and amenities on Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yelp, or TripAdvisor that were set years ago.
Tee-time marketplaces and golf directories. These often copy a course description once and never refresh it.
Old reviews and articles. “The restaurant is great” stays on the web after the restaurant closes.
A course with a similar name. If the answer mixes your course up with another one, the tool isn't sure which is which. That's a consistency problem, covered below.

Step 2: Fix it at the source

Your website first. Update the page, and remove or redirect pages that are out of date rather than leaving them up. Add an “updated” date to policies and rates so the current version is easy to identify.
Your listings. Correct Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and Apple Business Connect. Claim any directory or marketplace listing you haven't claimed, and update its description.
Reviews. You can't edit someone else's review, but a short, factual owner reply (“We've allowed walking every day since 2025”) sits right next to it and gets read too.
Name confusion. Use your full course name and town the same way everywhere, link your official profiles to each other, and add GolfCourse structured data to your homepage with your address and official profile links. That gives the tools one consistent set of facts.

Step 3: Report the answer

Each tool has a feedback option on its answers: the thumbs-down in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and the feedback link on Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Say exactly what's wrong and what's right, and link to the page that shows the correct information. Feedback is worth sending, but treat it as a backup to fixing the source, not a replacement.

Step 4: Check again in a few weeks

Answers that come from a live search can change once the corrected pages are crawled again, which often takes days to a few weeks. Answers drawn from training data take longer. Re-ask the same question in a fresh chat. If you test a fixed set of questions every month, you'll see the correction land. The method is in how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your golf course.

Preventing it next season

Most wrong answers trace back to information that was right once and never updated. Keep one page on your site as the official version of everything a golfer needs before a round, review it whenever a policy or season changes, and update your listings at the same time. The full checklist is in how golfers find courses in AI search, and how to show up.

If your course has a free guide on maps.golf/courses and something on it is out of date, let us know and we'll correct it.