Google Business Profile AI messaging review: free and quick, and only as right as your profile

The verdict

If Google offers you its AI messaging pilot, accept it, but only after you've spent half an hour on your Business Profile. The agent is free, it puts a Message button on your listing in Search and Maps, and it can handle the questions that eat a front desk's afternoon. It's also only as good as what your profile and website say, and it only reaches customers whose phones and carriers support RCS. Everyone else texts your business phone as before.

It's still a pilot, and Google decides who gets it. Google's help pages now set out the limits: the agent is offered to restaurants, beauty services and vehicle services businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and in the US only on select mobile carriers. Invitations arrive by email, headed "Meet your business' AI agent," and some owners just see a red dot on Messages in their profile. Google turned off the old Business Profile chat in July 2024, so this is a comeback with an agent attached.

Saying yes takes more than a click. Before messaging goes live, an outside reviewer checks your business on Google's behalf, separately from your profile verification. In the US that means your EIN, a business email that actually receives mail, a website or official social profile, and public links to a privacy policy and terms of service. Sole proprietors, and anyone using an email off the business domain, may also be asked for a photo ID and a live selfie. Google says US reviews can take up to four business days and have to be renewed every year. Once you're approved, changing your display name or logo means a support request.

The easiest way to judge it is to follow three ordinary messages through it.

Message one: "Do you take credit cards?"

This is the example in Google's own invite, and it's the agent's best case. The question is routine, the answer lives in your profile, and the customer wants it now. The agent answers in the customer's own texting app, instantly, and the conversation shows up in your profile's messages so you can see what was said.

Multiply that by the questions every local business gets daily: are you open, where do I park, do you have gluten-free options, how late is the kitchen open on Sunday. Google's demo, described by Claudia Tomina, has the agent pulling up menu items with photos and prices. For a restaurant, a salon or a repair shop, taking those off the phone is real time back.

The catch is in where the answers come from. Google says the agent takes hours, address, phone number and listed services from your Business Profile, and also reads your verified website. If your hours are wrong on Google, the agent will confidently give the wrong hours, in a text, with your business name above it. As Tomina put it, "The agent can only answer as well as your profile does." The agent doesn't know your business. It knows what your profile and website say, and those are only the same thing if someone keeps them that way.

So the half hour before accepting goes on the basics: regular and holiday hours, payment options, parking and accessibility details, the menu or service list with current prices, the business description, and the website pages that repeat any of it. Then give one person the job of updating both whenever any of those change. One quirk to know: if you rename the business on your profile, the name customers see in their messaging app doesn't follow. Google says that takes a support request.

Message two: "Can I book a table for four on Saturday?"

This is where it gets more useful, and more delicate. Google says the agent helps with bookings, and its demo shows it offering open reservation times. For a business that takes bookings, that's the difference between a lead and a booked customer, at 10 p.m., without anyone picking up.

There's a line, though. Google's help page says large group reservations and custom quotes get handed to you, so a table for four may stay with the agent while a party of twelve comes to your phone.

The questions to ask yourself before accepting are about the times it offers. Where do they come from, and are they actually open? Google hasn't documented how the agent connects to booking systems, so check during the pilot whether the times it offers match your real calendar. If you take bookings by phone and a paper book, the agent can't know what's free. If the slots it shows aren't real, a confident "yes, 7 p.m. is open" is worse than no answer.

Message three: "My son has a nut allergy. Is the curry safe?"

This is the message you don't want an agent answering, and Google agrees. Its help page lists food allergies, health conditions and specialized service requirements among the topics the agent hands off, along with complex requests, questions it can't answer and anyone who asks for a person. The agent tells the customer it's passing them on, the chat moves to a "Needs your attention" list, and you get a text and an email naming the topic. You can also take over any conversation whenever you want.

That puts the weight on who picks up. Google sets its own clock: if the agent hands off during your business hours and nobody replies within an hour, the conversation goes back to the agent, which tells the customer to call you. A worried parent told to ring the restaurant after an hour's wait isn't a good handoff. Decide who watches messages during opening hours, and what happens outside them. Read the first week's conversations closely too, to see whether the agent hands off the questions it should. We made the case for always keeping a way to reach a person in keep a door without the bot.

Where it falls short

The RCS split. Google's footnote says the agent works for customers on participating networks with phones that support RCS. It won't reply to others, and their messages go straight to your phone, where standard messaging rates may apply. In the US, Google only says "select mobile carriers" and hasn't listed them. iPhone users also don't see the welcome message or conversation starters. In practice, some customers will get instant answers and some will get your normal phone, so somebody still needs to answer texts.

Narrow eligibility. Three business categories in four countries. A plumber, a dentist or a law firm can't turn it on yet, however good their profile is.

You don't set the rules. The settings cover a welcome message of up to 175 characters, up to three suggested questions, handoff notifications and an off switch. There's no way to tell the agent what it must never say, such as promising a price or a delivery time. Google's pages explain the handoffs but not how the agent decides what to say, so when it gets something wrong, the fix is your profile or your website.

Closures don't pause it. If you shut for a holiday, messaging stays on until you turn it off yourself.

It's a pilot. Features can change, and so can the price. It's free now.

Pricing, alternatives and who should wait

Pricing: free, according to Google's invite and statement. Google's help pages don't list a price. Standard messaging rates may apply for texts that go to your phone.

A messaging agent you control. Third-party agents connected to your booking system and your own rules cost money and take setup, but you decide what they read and what they must hand off. For businesses with real booking volume or regulated questions, that control is the point.

Your own website assistant. An assistant on your site, answering from your own records, reaches people who come to you directly. It doesn't replace being reachable from Google, but it's where you can make the answers exactly right.

Who should wait: businesses whose menus, prices or availability change daily and aren't kept current on Google; businesses that get health, legal or financial questions by text; and anyone without a person who can pick up handoffs within the hour.

Who should accept: restaurants, salons and vehicle-service businesses with stable, accurate profiles and lots of routine questions.

If you'd like help deciding what an agent should answer for your business, and what it should always send to a person, that's the work our AI applications and agents team does. Talk to us.

Related work: Sutton Place.