It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday night and somebody is on Google Maps trying to figure out if you’re open Saturday. Up until now, they’d either call and get your voicemail or move on to the next listing. With Google’s new AI-powered messaging, they can text your business right from their phone and get an answer before they set it down.
Fast answers win local business—but there’s a catch. The AI agent doesn’t know anything about your business that Google doesn’t already know. So if your profile is wrong, the agent is going to be wrong, and it’s going to be wrong fast.
How AI-Powered Messaging on Google Business Profile Works
Google pulled the plug on the old Business Profile chat back in 2024. This is its replacement, and it’s a totally different animal.
Customers who find you on Search or Maps can message you through the regular texting app on their phone. An AI agent picks up the routine questions (hours, services, whether you take walk-ins) and answers them for free. When something comes in that it isn’t equipped to handle, it passes the conversation to you, and you can jump in whenever you want. Everything shows up inside your Business Profile.
To put its answers together, the agent pulls from your profile, your website, and your reviews.
One thing to keep in mind: it only works for people with phones and carriers that support RCS. If someone’s phone does not support RCS, their text comes straight to your phone like a normal message, and regular texting rates may apply.
Bad Info Used to Just Sit There
Quick question: When’s the last time you actually looked at your Google Business Profile? Not glanced at it, but actually analyzed the information it displays to everyday customers.
For a lot of businesses, the honest answer is “when we set it up.” Since then, maybe you stopped offering a service. Maybe you moved your Saturday hours. Maybe you never put in holiday hours at all, which means Google thinks you’re open on Thanksgiving.
None of that used to matter much. It sat there, a few people noticed, most didn’t. Now there’s an agent reading that information to your customers, under your name. If it tells somebody you’re open and they drive 20 minutes to a locked door, they’re not going to be mad at Google. Instead, your business will pay the price via poor review, angry calls or poor word of mouth.
Getting Your Profile Ready for AI-Powered Messaging
Here’s the good part: None of this is complicated, and all of it is in your control. Before you turn the feature on, block off half an hour and go through your profile like a customer would.
Start with hours, because that’s the question you’ll get more than any other. Regular hours, special hours, holidays. All of it.
Then go through your services. Are they all still things you do? Are they described the way your customers would say it, or the way you’d say it in a staff meeting? The agent matches questions to answers, so the words need to line up.
Read your business description out loud. If it sounds like it was written five years ago, it probably was.
Now pull up your website next to your profile. Since the agent reads both, any place they disagree is a place your agent might give a mixed answer. This is one of those spots where good website content and SEO really earns its keep.
Last, look at your reviews and whether you’re responding to them. They feed into how your business gets described, and a business that answers its reviews comes across as one that cares about customer satisfaction.
Somebody Still Has to Pick Up
The agent covers the easy stuff, but it certainly is not running your relationships. When a conversation gets handed off, a real person needs to grab it quickly, so decide now who that is.
It’s also worth scrolling through the conversations the agent handled on its own every week or so. If you catch a wrong answer, don’t just correct it for that one customer. Go fix whatever on your profile or website led to it there, so it doesn’t happen again.
And don’t forget about those non-RCS texts going straight to your phone. Make sure that phone belongs to somebody who checks it.
Where This Is All Heading
While—for right now—this tool is in a testing phase and only available to select businesses at random, it’s likely this tool will be fully flushed out in 2027. This isn’t a one-off feature. More and more, people are getting answers from AI before they ever land on a website, and the information on your profile is feeding Maps, this messaging agent, and the AI answers people see in search, all at the same time.
That’s a big part of why we built AI Pulse™, our AI search optimization product. Being accurate and easy for AI to trust is quickly becoming as important as ranking on Google, and the businesses that figure it out first are going to be hard to catch.
Make Google Business Profile AI-Powered Messaging Work for Your Business
Google Business Profile’s AI-powered messaging gives you a way to answer customers the second they reach out, even after you’ve locked up for the night. We think most local businesses should use it. Just do the homework first, clean up the profile, align it with your website, and assign a person to handle questions AI cannot answer.
If you’d rather have someone go through it with you, contact our SEO experts and let’s increase your local visibility.
