In September 2026 we asked four AI assistants the same question: where do you find an English-speaking veterinarian in Sosúa? It was one of twenty-six questions in a study of which Dominican businesses AI systems actually recommend, and we asked each one twice, in fresh sessions, on the same afternoon.

Google's AI Mode answered with three clinics, and then added something we had not seen it do anywhere else in 208 runs. Under its own heading, marked with a warning symbol, it wrote:

"Important Local Status Update — Doctor Bob's Veterinary Clinic. You may see old forum posts recommending Dr. Bob in Sosúa. Please note that this clinic is permanently closed."

It anticipated that the user would run into stale recommendations elsewhere, and pre-empted them.

ChatGPT, on the identical question, minutes apart, recommended Doctor Bob's first. "If English is important, I'd try Dr. Bob first," it said, and printed a phone number.

We ran both again. Google warned a second time. ChatGPT was more emphatic than before: "My first choice for English: Doctor Bob's." It called it "your best first call if English is important" and printed the number again.

Dr. Bob — Robert Amelingmeier — died in early July 2020.

What actually happened to the clinic

This is documented, and it is not a sad story so much as a decent one.

Sosúa News reported on 30 March 2022 that after Dr. Amelingmeier's death, his relatives decided to transfer the practice and the property to TASSO, a non-profit foundation that runs an animal shelter in El Choco. The handover was brokered by a local real estate agent and received by the foundation's director. The clinic did not fail. It became an animal shelter.

So Doctor Bob's Veterinary Clinic has not existed under that name for more than four years, its closure is a matter of public record, and one of the four AI systems we tested knows about it well enough to warn people unprompted.

Two platforms, one question, opposite outcomes

Across the four assistants, the same query produced four different behaviours on this one business:

• Google AI Mode flagged the closure explicitly, on both runs, and did not recommend the clinic.

• Google's AI Overview didn't render at all; the ordinary local results appeared instead, listing the three live clinics and omitting the closed one entirely.

• Gemini named only the three live clinics on both runs. It never mentions Doctor Bob's — which is the right outcome, though by omission rather than by detection.

• ChatGPT put it first. Twice.

That's a clean two-by-two on the same question in the same afternoon: one platform warns twice, another recommends first twice. Not run-to-run noise on either side. A stable, reproducible difference in outcome, in a category where acting on the answer means driving an unwell animal to a clinic that isn't there.

The hedge lands on the wrong fact

The detail that stayed with us is not that ChatGPT was wrong. It's what it chose to be uncertain about.

ChatGPT did hedge. On both runs it flagged that it could not confirm one thing about the clinic from current sources — whether the staff speak English — and it told the user to check: "I'd call first to confirm that English-speaking service is available today."

So the system registered that its information might be out of date, and resolved that by qualifying the language claim. It never asked whether the clinic was still open. It applied caution to the adjective and none at all to the noun.

That's a more interesting failure than a simple hallucination. The uncertainty was detected. It was just attached to the wrong part of the sentence.

Why this category, and not the others

The reason this happened here rather than somewhere else is worth understanding, because it's the part a business can do something about.

Not one of the four Sosúa veterinary clinics has a working website.

One of them used to. Veterinaria Dr. De La Cruz had a site at its own domain — there's a snapshot of it from August 2020, still indexed under the title "Welcome To Clínica Veterinaria Dr. De La Cruz." The domain now returns a 404 on both the www and the apex. Worse, a lookalike domain at a near-identical address has been taken over by a foreign gambling spam site, so an AI reaching for "the De La Cruz website" can land somewhere considerably worse than nowhere.

The others have a Facebook page, a directory listing and a YouTube video between them.

When no business in a category publishes anything itself, the AI answers using whatever third parties wrote. And that's precisely where the two platforms diverged. Google AI Mode cited Facebook — a Sosúa community group post, and the clinic's own Facebook page, which is where a closure gets announced and discussed. ChatGPT cited two scraped business directories. Directories don't attend funerals. They copy a record once and keep serving it.

The difference in outcome wasn't intelligence. It was which second-hand source each system happened to read, in a category where second-hand was the only option available.

The other errors in the same answer

While we were verifying, two smaller things turned up that are worth recording.

Gemini attributed one of the live clinics to "Dr. Lucas Alcántara." Google AI Mode called the same practice's vet "Dra. Rosa Alcántara," and Google's own local results quote a customer review saying "I didn't have to wait long to be seen by Dr. Rosa." We could not verify a Lucas Alcántara in any source. On its second run, Gemini dropped the name entirely and gave no first name at all — a fabricated detail that quietly corrected itself by omission.

And ChatGPT rendered one clinic as "Veterinario Alberto," which is not what the business calls itself. Its actual name is Clínica Veterinaria Dr. Alberto Coste.

Small things. But a customer searching for "Dr. Lucas Alcántara" will not find that clinic, and neither will a customer searching for a business under a name nobody uses.

What we are and aren't saying

We are not saying AI systems are dangerous or that people shouldn't use them. Most of the answers in this study were reasonable, and several were more useful than the search results underneath them.

We're also not saying Google is reliable and ChatGPT isn't. Across the wider study the picture is far messier — Google's own two products disagreed with each other constantly, and on other queries Google produced errors ChatGPT avoided.

What this one query shows is narrower and, we think, more useful: the capability to catch a closure exists, it worked, and it worked because one system was reading what the community publishes rather than what a scraper copied. That's a sourcing outcome, not a limitation of the technology. The same afternoon, on the same question, one system got it right twice and another got it wrong twice.

Two honest limits on the evidence. This is one query, run twice per platform, on one afternoon in September 2026 — these systems change, and this result may not reproduce next month. And we verified the closure from the Sosúa News report and the absence of the clinic from current listings; we did not contact the foundation.

What a business should take from it

If you run a veterinary clinic, or any business where someone might arrive with an emergency:

Publish something you control. One page with your name, address, hours, phone and what you treat. In this category, the AI systems were working entirely from other people's descriptions of the businesses, because the businesses had published nothing themselves. Whatever gets said about you will be assembled from whatever exists.

Check your own name across all four. It takes twenty minutes. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI whether your clinic is open and what it treats, and see what comes back. You may find a competitor's details, a name nobody uses, or a closure that hasn't happened.

Keep your Google listing accurate, because in this study it was the most reliable surface of all — the ordinary local results were 100% stable across eleven repeat checks while every AI answer above them changed. Doctor Bob's does not appear in those results at all. The old, unglamorous listing got it right silently, twice, while the clever layer above it argued with itself. Our thirty-minute audit covers it.

And if you're closing, closing temporarily, or changing hands — mark it. On your Google listing, on your Facebook page, on your site if you have one. Doctor Bob's closure was caught by exactly one system, and it was caught because somebody in a Sosúa Facebook group wrote it down.

For the rest of us

The practical advice is the same one this whole study keeps arriving at: if an AI gives you a business name and a phone number for something urgent, call before you drive.

That's not a sophisticated conclusion. But somewhere this month, someone with a sick animal is going to be handed a phone number for a clinic that became an animal shelter in 2022 — and the system handing it over will have checked whether the staff speak English.

This is part of an ongoing study of how AI assistants describe Dominican businesses: 208 queries, four platforms, two languages, 369 businesses verified individually. The method and the full findings are on our blog, and anyone can re-run it.

At DR Web Studio we build fast, bilingual websites for Dominican businesses — the kind AI systems can actually read, with your Google listing wired to them properly. If you'd like to know what the assistants currently say about your business, contact us for a free consultation and we'll check and tell you honestly what we find.