Google may soon describe your business using your oldest page.

01What was spotted

On 17 September, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google was testing a change to the panel that appears when somebody searches for a local business by name. Instead of the usual box of address, hours and reviews, the top of it carried a label saying AI Overview, a few lines of summary written by Google’s AI, and a button to carry on asking questions in a chat.

It was first posted on LinkedIn by Ben Fisher, and Barry Schwartz, who runs Search Engine Roundtable, was able to see it on his own business listing on a phone.

It is a test. Google has not announced it, and the report did not say which countries it was showing in, so I do not know whether it has reached UK listings. Google tests a great many things that never arrive, so treat this as a warning rather than news.

02The detail that matters

Schwartz said the summary of his own business was mostly right, but it described part of what the company does using content that was out of date. He was fair about it. The AI had not made anything up. It had read his company website, and the website was old.

That is the useful bit for a small business, and it is true whether or not this particular test ever reaches the UK. When a machine writes a description of you, it does not know which of your pages you still stand behind. It reads them all and treats them as current.

03Why old pages are suddenly a bigger problem

An out of date page used to be a minor embarrassment. Somebody had to search, find it, click it and read it before it could mislead them, and most people never did.

A summary at the top of your listing skips all of that. The old fact is lifted out of the page it was hiding on and put in front of a person who is about to ring you, in Google’s voice rather than yours. Nobody reading it can tell it came from a page you wrote in 2019.

Assistants like ChatGPT already work this way. This test is Google doing the same thing in the most valuable spot it has, the box people see when they search for you by name.

04What to look for on your own site

You do not need any tools for this. Open your website, go through every page in the menu, then go through every page that is not in the menu, which is often where the trouble is. If you are not sure what those are, search Google for site: followed by your web address and it will list what it knows about.

Read each one as if you were a stranger deciding whether to call.

• Services you no longer offer, or now offer differently.
• Prices that have changed, including old "from" prices.
• Opening hours, holiday closures or seasonal notices that have passed.
• Towns or areas you no longer cover.
• Staff, qualifications or memberships that are no longer true.
• Old news posts that announce something as if it were happening now.

05Fix it, or take it down

For each one you find, there are only two good answers. Update it so it is true today, or remove it. If you remove a page that other sites link to, point its old address at the closest current page so visitors do not hit an error. That is called a redirect and it is a one line job.

Do the same for your Google Business Profile description and services list, since that is the other obvious thing a summary would draw on. If your listing and your website disagree, you are leaving it to a machine to pick one.

What I would not do is rewrite everything in the hope of influencing an AI. Nobody outside Google knows exactly what this summary reads or how it weighs it. The only safe aim is that everything you have published is true.

06Whether this is worth your time

If your website was built recently and you have kept it up to date, probably not. You will look through it, find nothing, and that is a fine result.

If your site has been running for years, has been rebuilt once or twice, or has a news section nobody has touched since it was set up, it is worth the hour now. That stays true whether Google ships this or quietly drops it, because people and assistants are already reading those pages.