Web UI Elements Read as Group in VoiceOver

I'm assisting a company with making its web product accessible. On the site, some UI elements such as buttons or plain text elements read out as "group" by VoiceOver. For example, VoiceOver will read as follows:

John Smith, group
John Smith
end of John Smith, group

Create Event, empty group

Assigning ARIA roles to these elements seems to fix the issue, such as making the first example a link and the second a button. I'm curious to know what is causing this as we can't seem to track this down in their builder.

Part of it is <a> with no href, but this doesn't explain text-only elements.
The second is aria-role="group", but that's not showing up in code.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.