Business Profile attributes, including the WhatsApp one

A Business Profile attribute is a typed field on one location, from a set Google controls. You do not invent attributes and you do not word them: Google defines each one, defines what value it accepts, and decides whether your location is offered it at all. That last part is why there is no complete list to work from, and why Google publishes none.

What Google says an attribute is

The Attributes reference defines the object in two sentences: “A location attribute. Attributes provide additional information about a location.” The help page gives the kind of fact involved, “you can share whether your business offers outdoor seats or Wi-Fi”.

Two claims about where they surface, at different strengths. The flat one: “Attributes show up on your Business Profile on Search, Maps, and other Google platforms.” The hedged one is the whole of Google’s stated search benefit: “If you add certain attributes, your business might show up in searches for places with those attributes.” Certain attributes, unnamed, and might.

The value types, which you do not choose

Google’s AttributeValueType enum is the taxonomy.

Value type	Google’s description
BOOL	“The values for this attribute are boolean values.”
ENUM	“The attribute has a predetermined list of available values that can be used.”
URL	“The values for this attribute are URLs.”
REPEATED_ENUM	“The attribute value is an enum with multiple possible values that can be explicitly set or unset.”

The type is not yours to set: the field is marked “Output only. The type of value that this attribute contains.” An ENUM attribute does not publish its options in the reference either, since “Metadata for this attribute will list these values”, so they arrive at runtime.

How many values one attribute takes is put differently on two Google pages. The Attributes reference says flatly, “Attribute types only support one value.” The list endpoint’s metadata carries a per-attribute repeatable field instead: “If true, the attribute supports multiple values.” Act on the second, which arrives attached to that attribute.

The kinds an owner can see

The help page documents three groups. Accessibility, where “These attributes gather info about your business’s accessibility features.” Recycling, scoped by category in the instruction, “Based on your business category, choose one or more of these attributes”, listing Batteries through to Plastic foam, with a stated payoff: “your business shows up in search results with a recycling icon.”

Business identity is a set of owner-declared labels: Asian-owned, Black-owned, Latino-owned, LGBTQ+ owned, Disabled-owned, Indigenous-owned, Veteran-owned, Women-owned and Small business. Two rules come with them, “You can choose more than one identity attribute for your Business Profile” and “You can opt-in or opt-out of a business identity attribute at any time.” Small business has a definition and an exclusion: “A small business makes less than $10 million a year”, and “Franchises can’t be considered a small business.”

Those groups are not the whole documented surface. The older v4 API carries a separate attributes object for one industry, HealthProviderAttributes, “The Health provider attributes linked with this location”, whose one optional field keeps Google’s spelling: “Optional. A list of insurance networks accpected by this location.”

Which ones you set, and which arrive without you

The help page states the split in its first instruction:

You can directly edit some attributes about your business, but there are attributes that may be populated based on inputs from customers who visit your business.

The API makes that split concrete with two reads. locations.getAttributes “Looks up all the attributes set for a given location.” Its sibling, locations.attributes.getGoogleUpdated, “Gets the Google-updated version of the specified location.” Two endpoints, two answers, because Google’s version can differ from yours.

Where Google’s version comes from has its own help page: profile information is “compiled from a variety of sources”, including crawled web content, “Licensed data from third parties”, contributions from users, and “Information based on Google’s interactions with a local place or business”. One attribute is documented as arriving with no action from you: “Your business may automatically be marked as a small business based on the info we have.”

Your own edits are not immediate either: “A review of your edits usually takes about 10 minutes, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days.”

There is also a failure mode with no error message. An attribute can be retired while still accepting writes, which the metadata’s deprecated flag warns about: “If true, the attribute is deprecated and should no longer be used. If deprecated, updating this attribute will not result in an error, but updates will not be saved.” Read that flag before automating writes; the alternative is a write that succeeds and changes nothing.

Why the available set is not a list you can hold

The list endpoint’s summary sentence settles it: “Returns the list of attributes that would be available for a location with the given primary category and country.” Not the attributes that exist: the ones available, given a category and a country.

Its parameters repeat the point. categoryName is “The primary category stable ID to find available attributes” and regionCode is “The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code to find available attributes”. Even the switch that sounds like it dumps everything is scoped: with showAll on, “languageCode and regionCode are required when showAll is set to true”. There is no country-free, language-free view of the set.

The labels are localised too, so what you read is not what you write: languageCode is “The BCP 47 code of language to get attribute display names in. If this language is not available, they will be provided in English.” Nor are the labels stable, per the help page’s own tip, typo and all: “To better match the ways the people search for businesses, attributes name may change over time.”

Then the sentence that should govern anything built on top of this, from the Attributes reference:

Available attributes are determined by Google and may be added and removed without API changes.

No version bump, no client change, no notice.

The count we are not going to print

This page opens with no total number of attributes. We do not have one and cannot get one honestly. Google publishes no total; what it publishes is a paged query you run per category, per country and per language, explicitly allowed to change between runs. A scrape of it yields a figure for one category, in one country, on the day it ran, and calling that the number of Business Profile attributes would be a fabrication with a plausible source attached.

Where the WhatsApp one fits

It is an attribute of type URL, which explains its behaviour. UriAttributeValue is “Values for an attribute with a valueType of URL”, one field, and Google’s wording on it is careful: “Required. The proposed URI value for this attribute.” Google’s word is proposed, which squares with the review step above. The two channel attributes, attributes/url_whatsapp and attributes/url_text_messaging, are ordinary members of this system with a guide of their own, so the mechanics of setting them belong there. What this page adds is why either can be absent with nothing broken.

So the model is narrow. An attribute is a typed field Google defines, offered to your location on the strength of its category and country, sometimes filled in by Google or by customers rather than by you, sometimes deprecated without saying so, and drawn from a set Google may change without changing its API. Reviews, by contrast, cannot be edited at all, only answered, which has its own rules covering why a reply gets rejected, how to answer a bad one and what review tools disclose about themselves.