Why Does ChatGPT Tell Customers to Visit Our Home-Service Business at a Private Address?

Where do assistants find a private address?

Google's service area guidance is direct. If you do not serve customers at your business address, remove the address from your Business Profile and enter only your service area. Profiles created before a business switched to service areas often keep the address visible for years.

Why do assistants tell people to "visit"?

• Address plus hours looks like a shop. Listed opening hours suggest a place with a door that opens.
• Categories can imply premises, such as "store" or "showroom" categories chosen for a mobile business.
• Copy on your site says "visit us" or "come and see us" out of habit.
• Nothing says otherwise. Few home-service sites state that there is no public premises, so assistants fill the gap with the most common pattern.

How assistants handle service areas generally is covered in why AI gets your service area wrong.

How can I check whether AI assistants expose my residential address when describing my new business?

1. Ask the assistants directly. In ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI features, ask: "Where is [business] located?", "What is the address of [business]?", "Can I visit [business]?" and "[Service] near [your street or neighbourhood]". Run each a few times, with web search where available.
2. Open every cited source and note which ones show the address.
3. Search the address in quotes on Google and Bing, with and without your business name.
4. View your Business Profile logged out, or from another account, to see what the public sees.
5. Check the registers: your company or business registration, and any licence lookup for your trade.
6. Check the main directories and data aggregators that supply local listings, since errors there spread widely.
7. Scan your own site, including page source, structured data, downloadable PDFs and old pages still live.
8. Set up monitoring. Google's Results about you tool helps you find, and request removal of, search results that show your contact details, including your home address.

Repeat the assistant questions after each fix. Search-based answers change as sources are corrected. Answers from model memory can lag, as covered in how long it takes ChatGPT to recognize a business address change.

How do you remove the address?

Work from the sources that feed the most other places:

1. Business Profile: remove the address and set service areas. Check that hours and categories match a business that travels to customers.
2. Registers: in the UK, change the company's registered office to a registered office service. Companies House lets you then apply to remove your home address from documents where it was used as the registered office, for £34 per document. An active company must change its registered office before applying. In the US, most states let you list a commercial registered agent address instead of your home on business filings.
3. Your website and markup: once the registered office has moved, show the new address wherever the law requires one. UK companies must show their registered office address on their website, and UK and EU businesses that sell or take bookings online must give the geographic address where they are established; for a business run from home, that rule can mean keeping an address on the site, so settle it before removing yours. Everywhere else, remove the home address, including from PDFs, and replace "visit us" wording.
4. Data aggregators and directories: update or hide the address, starting with the aggregators, then the main directories.
5. Google Search: use Google's process for removing personal contact information, which covers home addresses, for pages you cannot get corrected.
6. ChatGPT: if you trade as a sole trader, or the address is otherwise linked to you as a person, it is personal data. You can send OpenAI a privacy request to have it removed from outputs. How those requests work is covered in what the right to rectification means when ChatGPT gets business facts wrong.

What should your site say instead?

Give assistants a clear, repeatable statement near the top of your home, contact and about pages:

"We are a mobile [trade] serving [towns or areas]. We come to you. We do not have premises open to visitors. Book by phone on [number] or online."

Add a line to your questions section: "Can I visit your office? We work from vans and on customers' sites, so there is no office to visit. Call or book online and we will come to you." Clear statements like these give assistants something better to repeat than an address.

Do not replace your home address with a virtual office address on your Business Profile to look like you have premises. Google's guidelines exclude virtual offices, and customers who turn up there will not find you either.

Is this a safety issue as well as a marketing one?

Yes. A home address repeated by assistants can bring strangers to your door, including unhappy customers, and it tells people where your tools and vehicles are kept overnight. If there has been any threat or harassment, record it and include it in removal requests. Google's removal policy also covers pages that combine personal information with threats.

What might an illustrative case look like?

Consider an illustrative mobile dog groomer who registered a company at home and set up a Business Profile with the home address in the first week. Months later, a customer arrives at the house after ChatGPT gave the address and said the groomer was "open 9 to 5". Checks show the address on the Business Profile, the company register, two directories and the site's footer. The groomer removes the address from the profile and lists eight service areas. They move the registered office to a formation agent and apply to remove the home address from the earlier filings. They update the directories, show the addresses the law requires as set out in step 3, and replace the home address in the footer with the line "We come to you across [county]". Within a few weeks, search-based answers stop giving the address and say the business is mobile.

What do people ask about home addresses and AI answers?

Will removing my address hurt my local visibility?

Service-area businesses can still appear for the areas they list. A clear service-area setup is the correct way to show up for customers who need you to come to them.

Can I use a PO box as my address?

Not on a Business Profile, where Google does not accept PO boxes. On your website and some registers, a PO box or mailing address can be used for post.

How long until ChatGPT stops giving the address?

Search-based answers often change within weeks of the sources being fixed. Answers from model memory can take longer, which is why removing it from as many sources as possible matters.