Somebody is standing outside your door at half past four on a Tuesday. Your website says you close at five. The listing on their phone said four. The door is locked, and they are not going to email you about it.
The frustrating part, for the operator, is that both pieces of information came from you. One of them is just older, or was entered once by somebody in a hurry, or was quietly amended by a stranger who thought they were helping.
This is about why that gap opens, how to close it, and where the options genuinely run out.
What this is, and who it is for
For anyone running a business with a physical door, a counter, a studio or a stall, who has found that the information about them on the internet does not agree with itself.
It is also, indirectly, for anyone using this register, because a contradiction between two sources is something we notice during a check and it changes what we can publish.
Which source a customer actually looks at first
Think about the shape of the moment rather than the technology. Somebody is deciding whether to set off. They are usually holding a phone, usually already moving, and the thing they want is not really your hours. It is directions, plus a quick reassurance that the trip is worth making.
A map surface answers all of that in one place. It gives the route, the hours and the phone number in a single view, and it needs no typing. Your website answers one of those things well and the others only if you built them in. So the map tends to be where the decision happens, and the website tends to be where the decision gets confirmed later, or not at all.
We are describing a mechanism here, not a measurement. We are not going to tell you what proportion of your customers check which surface first, because that would need a study we could name, open and read the method of, and we do not have one. What we can say without a measurement is narrower and still useful: the surface that requires the least effort at the moment of deciding is the one most likely to be consulted, and for a journey to a physical place that is usually a map.
If you want the answer for your own business rather than for businesses in general, it is available and it is not a survey. Ask the next few people who come in where they found your hours. That is a small sample and it is about you, which is the more useful of the two things.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable but simple. The version of your hours that you control least is often the version that gets acted on.
Where the discrepancy usually comes from
Almost never from anything dramatic. The common causes are dull, and dullness is why they persist.
- The listing was set up once and never revisited. Often years ago, possibly by somebody who no longer works with you.
- Hours changed and only one place got updated. The website is the one you think of, because it feels like yours.
- Seasonal hours were entered as permanent ones. Or permanent hours were entered during a season and never reverted.
- The same information exists in five places and only three were on the list. A website, a listing, a social profile, a booking page, a supplier's stockist page, a trade association page.
- Something inherited a default. A field left blank gets filled with an assumption, and an assumption on a public page looks exactly like a fact.
- A page rebuild dropped a detail. Contact details and hours are frequently the casualty of a redesign, because they live in a corner nobody assigns to anybody.
- A closure was announced in one channel only. Usually the one with the fewest readers.
None of these require anybody to have been careless. They require only that information lives in more places than one person can hold in their head.
Third-party edits and suggestions you never made
There is a second category, and it upsets people more.
On many platforms that hold business information, people other than the operator can propose changes to it. Members of the public, data suppliers, automated processes reconciling one dataset against another. Sometimes a change is applied without the operator being meaningfully consulted.
One platform documents its handling of this publicly, so we will describe that one and no others. Google's Business Profile Help, published by Google and retrieved on 6 September 2026, states that Google "gathers info from different sources, like user reports and licensed content", and that if sources report a profile's information to be incorrect or outdated, Google may update the profile. Its page on how business information is sourced lists four inputs: publicly available material including crawled web content, licensed third-party data, contributions from users — which the page says includes business owners — and Google's own interactions with a place. The same page says that somebody who believes a profile is inaccurate can "suggest an edit or flag it for removal", which is the mechanism by which a stranger's opinion about your hours enters the system.
The same help set documents the operator's side of it. Editing your own business information on Google requires verifying the business first, by phone or text, email, live video call or a posted code. Where reports of inaccurate information do lead to a change, the page on profile edits says the owner receives a notification and an alert in the profile editor. Edits submitted by an owner are reviewed before they appear — the page gives a usual figure of up to ten minutes and an outside figure of up to thirty days — and may not be approved where the accuracy cannot be confirmed. And one sentence is worth reading twice, because it is the limit of the whole arrangement: "You can't manage all Google updates through your Business Profile."
We are not going to describe any other platform's policy from memory. They differ, they change, and a confident description of the wrong one is worse than no description. Open the current help pages of whichever surfaces carry your details, and write down the date you read them.
The general problem is describable without any of that:
- A public record about your business can be changed by someone who is not you.
- Whether you are told depends on that platform's own policy, and not every change on every surface produces a notice you will see.
- The change may be well intentioned and still wrong, because the person making it had partial information.
- Correcting it depends on a process you do not control and whose outcome you cannot rely on.
- The corrected version can drift back later, because whatever produced the original change may still be running.
What to do about it is behavioural rather than technical. Check the listings you know about on a schedule you will actually keep, treat a check as a small routine task rather than a project, and record what you found so you can tell drift from your own forgetfulness.
One thing not to do: never submit information you know to be false anywhere, including as a test of whether a system notices. It ends up believed, it ends up copied, and it ends up being the version somebody acts on.
Choosing one source of truth, and making the others follow
The fix is organisational.
Pick one place as the master copy. Ideally somewhere you control outright. If you have a website, that is usually it. If you do not, a shop with no website covers the alternatives, and the choice of master matters more than which one you choose.
Write it down once, properly. Full trading hours including the exceptions. The business contact routes. What you actually sell. How somebody buys or books. Where to attend, if there is somewhere the public is invited to attend. The one-page business fact sheet sets out exactly these fields, and it is free and ungated.
Keep a list of every place that copy has been repeated. This is the part almost nobody has, and it is the part that makes the rest work.
Change the master first, then work the list. In that order, every time. It is dull and it is the whole method.
Date it. Write the date you last reviewed each destination next to it. Then a stale entry is visible rather than assumed.
If you want the hours question specifically, hours as a promise goes further into stating them in a form that survives contact with reality, and shopfront basics collects the rest of the groundwork.
An audit you can run in fifteen minutes
Set a timer. This is meant to be finished, not perfected.
- Search for your own business name. Write down every page in the results that purports to describe you, including ones you did not create.
- Add the ones you already know about that would not show up in that search: a booking page, a supplier's stockist list, a trade body page, a marketplace profile.
- For each one, note four things: hours, address or location description, business phone or contact route, and what it says you sell.
- Mark every disagreement with your master copy. Do not fix anything yet. Just mark it.
- Sort into two piles: things you can change yourself, and things you cannot.
- Fix the first pile now. It is usually most of it and it usually takes minutes.
- Write the second pile down with the date, and move to the next section.
Run it again in a few months. The second run takes a fraction of the time, because you already have the list.
If the audit turns up a listing you never created at all, how to get removed from a directory that scraped you covers the escalation ladder.
What to do when you cannot correct a listing you do not control
Sometimes there is no route. The platform does not respond, the process does not resolve, or the change reverts.
What still works:
- Make the master copy unambiguous. If somebody does eventually check the authoritative source, it should settle the question in one line, not require interpretation.
- Say it where the customer is about to act. Hours on a booking confirmation. Hours on the answering message. Hours on a sign at the door, which is the one surface no remote editor can touch.
- Keep a dated record of every correction you attempted. It is what turns "they got it wrong" into something you can demonstrate.
- Accept that some of it will stay wrong. Then reduce the cost of it being wrong, by making it easy for somebody to reach you before they set off.
What is not worth doing is spending your week on it. The information you control, kept current, is worth more than a long campaign against information you do not.
How a discrepancy affects our own check
A contradiction between sources is a signal in our procedure, and it does not resolve in the operator's favour by default.
When our checker finds two versions of your hours, our position is that we do not know your hours. We do not average them, we do not prefer the newer-looking one, and we do not choose the one on your own site simply because it is yours. We publish nothing we did not verify on a date, so an unresolved contradiction produces a null field and the entry says the detail is not published.
Where the contradiction is about something more substantial than hours, such as what the business does or whether it is trading at all, the check result is changed rather than alive, and a person re-reviews the entry against the entry bar. The mechanics of that are in how we read conflicting sources when we check and in our method.
Two things that follow, both worth knowing in advance. A business whose public information disagrees with itself is harder for us to describe, and sometimes the honest outcome is that we describe less of it. And a contradiction that suggests the business may have stopped trading is not treated as evidence of closure — that requires a much higher threshold, set out at how we confirm a shop has closed.
Fixing a discrepancy is also one of the fastest ways to stop looking abandoned to people who have never met you. Signals that make you look closed covers the rest of them.
In Plain English
Your information exists in more places than you are keeping track of, and the places you control least are often the ones people act on.
- Somebody deciding whether to visit wants directions and reassurance in one view, which is usually a map surface rather than your website.
- Most disagreements are dull: one place updated, four not. Some come from outside you entirely — Google's own help pages describe user reports and licensed data as inputs to a business profile, and say that not every update of that kind can be managed from the profile.
- Pick one master copy, write it down properly once, keep a list of everywhere it has been repeated, and change the master first.
- Run a fifteen-minute audit: search yourself, list what you find, mark disagreements, fix what you can, record what you cannot.
- Where you cannot correct a listing, make it cheap for a customer to check with you before setting off.
- When we check you, a contradiction means we publish nothing rather than pick a side.
More on the physical side of all this, including what we can and cannot establish about a place, is at real places, checked.
Sources
Each entry below is recorded in the source ledger under the identifier shown.
- S-025 · Google updates to a profile — Understand Google Updates On Your Business Profile, Google Business Profile Help. https://support.google.com/business/answer/3480441 Retrieved 2026-09-06. Supports: that Google gathers information from sources including user reports and licensed content, that it may update a profile when sources report the information to be incorrect or outdated, and that not all such updates can be managed from the profile.
- S-026 · Where profile information comes from — Understand How Google Sources & Uses Info In Business Profiles & Local Search Results, Google Business Profile Help. https://support.google.com/business/answer/2721884 Retrieved 2026-09-06. Supports: the four listed inputs — publicly available and crawled web content, licensed third-party data, user contributions including from owners, and Google's own interactions with a place — and that a person can suggest an edit or flag a profile for removal.
- S-027 · What happens to an edit — Understand What Happens To Your Business Profile Edits, Google Business Profile Help. https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038311 Retrieved 2026-09-06. Supports: that owner edits are reviewed before appearing, the stated review times of usually up to ten minutes and sometimes up to thirty days, that changes may not be approved where accuracy cannot be confirmed, and that an owner is notified when reports lead to a change.
- S-028 · Verification requirement — Verify Your Business On Google, Google Business Profile Help. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7107242 Retrieved 2026-09-06. Supports: that editing business information such as name or hours requires verifying the business, and the listed verification routes of phone or text, email, live video call and posted code.
Check your own site against the floor → the minimum viable shopfront