A hair salon has been closed on Mondays since the spring. The website says so, and so does the Google profile. Apple Maps still shows Monday 9 to 6, so does the trade directory, and one Monday in October a customer who checked on her phone the night before stands in front of a locked door. She does not call, she goes somewhere else. This article is about the most inconspicuous details a business has: name, address, phone number and opening hours. The industry calls keeping them identical NAP consistency and mostly treats it as a ranking factor. More important is a mechanism few owners know about: Google and Apple change these details when users report something and check the change against public sources, first of all your website. When the opening hours on Google are wrong, the cause is therefore often not in the profile but on your own site. Below: how often customers run into wrong details, how a change gets into your profile, which places really count, what happens with holidays, a move or a new number, and how to set one source everyone believes.
How often do customers run into wrong business details?
More often than most owners think. The local SEO provider BrightLocal surveyed 1,138 consumers in the US in September 2023; the Local Business Discovery & Trust Report was published on 11 October 2023. 56 per cent come across incorrect information about a business at least once every few months, 35 per cent at least once a month. 26 per cent turn up at a business too early or too late at least once a month because the opening hours online were wrong. And 62 per cent would avoid a business if they found incorrect information about it online. A wrong address costs trust with 46 per cent, a wrong phone number with 45 per cent.
Two caveats belong here. It is a US survey, and we have not found a comparable public survey for Germany or Austria. And BrightLocal sells tools that maintain exactly these listings, so it is measuring the value of its own category. The direction is still plausible, because it requires no technology, only a locked door. Anyone who has made the trip for nothing does not check more carefully next time; they check somewhere else.
Why does Google change your opening hours without asking you?
Because Google does not take the data from you alone. In its own help page on Google updates to your Business Profile, Google says it "gathers info from different sources, like user reports and licensed content". If someone suggests an edit, in certain cases you are notified and then have four days to accept or reject it. The decisive sentence follows straight after: "If you don't respond within 4 days, Google may automatically publish the update if it is supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website." In the profile editor, such fields are shown in blue.
Apple works to the same pattern. The Apple Business help explains that customers can report directly from your place card when a location shows as open but is actually closed. Apple reviews these reports and edits the place card. In its guide to location attributes, Apple also requires that, whenever possible, the hours on your place card match the hours published on your official website.
Taken together: Google and Apple treat your website as the reference. If it still shows the old Monday, every new detail in the profile is a claim against your own site. If Monday is right there, every wrong user report has a source against it. Your website is therefore not one of many places to maintain; it is the one where the dispute is settled.
Which places really count?
Not all equally, which is good news for anyone without time for eighty directories. For its Local Search Ranking Factors study, Whitespark regularly surveys local search specialists. The 2026 edition, published on 6 November 2025, is based on the assessments of 47 experts on 187 factors. These are estimates, not measurements, but the order is revealing. "Business is open at time of search" ranks fifth for map results. Name, address and phone number on the website matching the Google profile ranks 15th. Consistent details on Google Maps, Bing Maps and Apple Maps follow at 28th, consistent listings on key directories at 63rd, on data aggregators at 85th.
The order follows the distance from the search. What the searcher sees directly counts most: whether you are open now and whether profile and website say the same thing. The further back a source sits in the chain, the less it carries. A listing that mentions your name, address and phone number outside your own channels is called a local citation. You do not need a collection of them, just a few correct ones. Above all, you need no wrong ones, because an old address in a forgotten directory is exactly the kind of publicly available information that can back up a wrong user report.
A footnote for anyone thinking of answers from search assistants: in the same study Whitespark also rates visibility in AI search, and there mentions on other people's sites rank much higher, led by inclusion in expert-curated best-of lists. For the question of whether your opening hours are right, that changes nothing. It only shows that mentions outside your website are gaining weight again, and a mention with an old address is then doubly annoying.
What happens with holidays, a move or a new number?
This is where most contradictions arise, because one detail changes and not every place follows at once. The most common case is public holidays. In its help page on holidays, Google lists for each country the days on which your profile may show a warning that your hours might differ, and recommends setting special hours in advance for those days. Skip it and your customers are left guessing on exactly the days they are most likely to check. That being open also affects visibility was measured by BrightLocal in December 2023 across 50 locations in ten categories: during opening hours local rankings were higher on average, most clearly for fast food restaurants at an average of 2.4 positions.
For a move or a new phone number, the order of the changes is the tool. Website first, everywhere the details appear: contact page, footer, legal notice and the schema markup in the source code. Then the Google Business Profile, then Apple and Bing, then the directories and trade portals you are listed in. In this order every new detail already has a source behind it when it is checked. The other way round, your own website contradicts the new profile, and with the next user report the old version may well win. Keep the old phone number forwarded until it no longer appears anywhere. From our project work: that almost always takes longer than the move itself.
For the address, Germany and Austria even have a mandatory place. In Germany, § 5(1) no. 1 of the Digital Services Act (DDG) requires the legal notice to state "den Namen und die Anschrift, unter der sie niedergelassen sind", the name and the address at which the provider is established. In Austria, § 5(1) item 2 of the E-Commerce Act (ECG) requires "die geografische Anschrift, unter der er niedergelassen ist", the geographical address of establishment. The legal notice is therefore the one place where you have to keep the address current anyway. It is the natural starting point for all the others.
How does your website become the source everyone believes?
With one document and one habit. The document is a master data sheet: a page that records the official spelling, not just the content. The name exactly as it appears in the company register, with the short form you use day to day explicitly as a second line. The address with a decision for "Straße" or "Str.", with or without staircase and door number. The phone number in a single format, ideally international with +43 or +49. The regular opening hours, and beneath them the special hours for the current year. Specialists call such a document a single source of truth: every other place copies from it, never the other way round.
On the website the same details appear once visibly and once in machine-readable form. Visibly on the contact page and in the footer, word for word as in the profile. Machine-readable as LocalBusiness markup, in which, according to Google's structured data documentation, openingHoursSpecification with validFrom and validThrough can also express seasonal hours, right up to a closure over the holidays. Whether Google carries these details into the profile, the documentation does not say. But they sit as publicly available information exactly where Google, by its own account, looks.
The habit is a date in the diary: twice a year, before the summer and before Christmas, lay the master data sheet next to the five most important places and compare. Google, Apple, Bing, your own website and the main directory for your industry. It takes half an hour. What else counts in the profile is in the article Local SEO for service businesses, and how the reviews come in is in getting Google reviews without begging for them.
Three levers for this week
One: look at what a customer sees. Search for your name on Google, open Apple Maps and Bing, and read the opening hours for next Monday and the next public holiday. Every place that differs from your website is the next locked door.
Two: make the website the reference before you touch any profile. Create the master data sheet and bring contact page, footer, legal notice and markup into line word for word. Only then align the profiles, in the order Google, Apple, Bing, directories. That way every correction has a source behind it.
Three: enter your special hours up to the end of the year now. On the website and in the profiles, for Christmas, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. In Austria, All Saints' Day on 1 November and 8 December, when many shops open anyway, come first. The questions about these days come every year; this time the answer can already be there.
If you want to know where your business details drift apart today: we will line them up with you once. 📍