Why your listings are wrong on 12 sites you've never heard of

Google isn't the only place people find restaurants. Apple Maps drives every iPhone user. Waze routes drivers past you. TripAdvisor still owns tourist search. Bing powers Alexa. And every one of them has a different version of your address, phone, and hours.

**Why the data gets fragmented:** 1. **Data aggregators.** Factual, Foursquare, Neustar Localeze, and Data Axle sell business info to hundreds of downstream sites. If your data was wrong in one aggregator five years ago, it's still wrong on 40 sites today. 2. **User-generated edits.** Anyone can suggest a change on Google, Apple, and Yelp. If a customer thinks your hours changed, they can edit it. 3. **Old ownership records.** If your restaurant used to be a Chinese place in 2011, that history is still cached somewhere.

**Why it matters:** - Wrong hours = a bad review waiting to happen. - Wrong phone = the call goes to your neighbor. - Wrong address = a delivery driver at the wrong door. - Mismatched data = Google demotes your local ranking because your NAP (name, address, phone) is inconsistent across the web.

**The fix:** Correct your data at the source — the aggregators — not one site at a time. That's what a proper listings service does: one submission, ~32+ directories cleaned in sync, monitored weekly for regressions.

You could do this yourself. It'll take you 15 hours and you'll have to redo it every quarter. Or you get it done once and stop thinking about it.