A roofer I work with had four different phone numbers attached to their business online. Google had one. Houzz had another. Bark had a third. A contractor directory I’d never heard of had a fourth.
They’ve had the same number for two years. One of those four wasn’t a number they’d ever used. Some data aggregator pulled it from an old record and spread it to a handful of sites. We still don’t know where it came from.
This happens constantly with local businesses. You set up your Google Business Profile once, maybe years ago, and move on. Nobody audits every listing. There’s always something more urgent.
Here’s how the wrong number gets out there: there’s a whole layer of the internet built on scraped and aggregated business data. Directories like Yelp, Houzz, BBB, Bark, Nextdoor, and dozens of trade-specific sites pull information from each other and from data brokers. Those brokers compile records from Secretary of State filings, Yellow Pages archives, permit records, and old business registrations going back years. If your number ever changed, or if a single data entry error crept in anywhere along the line, that bad number copies itself to sites you’ve never visited and probably never think about.
The failure mode is quiet. A customer finds the wrong number, calls it, gets nothing, and moves to the next name on the list. You never know the call happened. No missed call notification. No voicemail. Just a customer who moved on.
This is part of what’s called NAP consistency: Name, Address, Phone. When those three things match everywhere your business appears, directories and Google’s systems trust your information. When they don’t, you get fragmented listings, and sometimes a customer who couldn’t reach you and assumed you’d gone out of business.
The most important places to check are the platforms that actually drive calls. Start with Google Business Profile and your Yelp listing, then Apple Maps, Bing Places, and Facebook. After that, hit the trade directories for your industry: BBB, Angi, Houzz, Bark, and Nextdoor are the ones that come up most often for contractors and service businesses in San Antonio.
Search your business name in quotes on Google and look at the contact information on every listing that appears. You’re looking for any phone number that isn’t your current one.
When you find a wrong number, most platforms have a claim or correction process. Google and Yelp are fairly straightforward. A few older data broker sites require you to create an account and submit a correction, and some of those corrections take a few weeks to propagate through their downstream partners. But once you fix the original source, the errors tend to follow.
While you’re in there, check the business name and address too. An old suite number, an inconsistent abbreviation in the street name, or a zip code that’s off by one digit can cause the same quiet failure. Directories use name and address to match records across their databases. Inconsistencies get treated as separate businesses.
The whole check takes about 15 minutes. Worth doing once a year, and worth doing immediately if your phone number has ever changed or if you moved locations.
One way to catch these faster going forward: set up a Google Alert for your business name. You’ll get notified when new listings appear, and you can catch errors before they spread.
If you’d rather not hunt through every directory yourself, request a free visibility audit and we’ll check your phone number, address, and hours across the listings that matter, then send you the list of what’s wrong and where.
Lex Stewart runs Good Company AI, a local SEO and AI services firm in San Antonio. Questions? I’m easy to find.