Google turned off Business Profile chat on 31 July 2024, and guides still tell you to switch it on

Google turned the chat feature off, and it says so itself. The date is on a Business Profile Help page called “Changes to Google Business Profile chat and call history”, and the wording is flat: the feature is no longer available. There is no setting to find, no toggle that has moved, and no permission to request. Any page still walking you through where to switch chat on is describing something Google withdrew more than two years before this article was written.

What Google’s notice says

The first line of the notice carries the date:

As of July 31, 2024, the chat and call history features are no longer available in your Business Profile. You won’t be able to interact with customers through chat or find customer call history from your Business Profile.

“Chat” is Google’s own word for the feature, so it is the word used here. What is left once it goes is the listing itself, which Google still defines as a free listing on Search and Maps.

The notice then answers nine questions, and the answers are more specific than the headline. Quoted as they appear:

Google’s question	Google’s answer
“Can users still request a quote through Business Profile?”	“No, customers can no longer request quotes.”
“Is the chat FAQs feature being deprecated along with Business Profile chat?”	“Yes, the chat FAQ feature is no longer supported.”
“Are customers notified with these changes?”	“Yes, all customers with current chat conversations were notified on July 15, 2024.”
“Will this change impact any other Google Business Profile APIs outside of messaging?”	“The “BUSINESS_CONVERSATIONS” metric is no longer available in the Performance API.”
“Will this change affect all users?”	“Yes.”

So the quote request went with it, the automated answers went with it, and the engagement metric that counted conversations went with it. The history was retrievable through Google Takeout, with an expiry: “These records will be available for download until August 30, 2024.” If you did not export then, there is nothing left to export.

Google’s advice for anyone mid-conversation was blunt and had no product in it: “For existing chat conversations, consider alternative chat channels to continue the conversation with your customers, if available.”

How customers contact you now

The same notice answers this directly:

Customers are still able to find and contact your business through Google Search and Maps. They can learn more information about you from your website links, business description, photos, and anything else you share on your Business Profile.

The practical consequence is the phone number. Google’s FAQ says the call button reverted from its own forwarding number: “Yes, numbers will be automatically updated to use the merchant’s supplied phone number in Google Business Profile.” If chat was how people reached you, the fix Google names is a phone number on the profile, not a replacement inbox, so the question becomes who picks that phone up: a telephone answering service does, and a message-answering tool cannot.

One line in the notice does point at a chat route: “For eligible accounts, customers can contact you from your Business Profile through text messages or WhatsApp.”

WhatsApp and text, and what we could not date

That line goes to a second help page, “Chat with customers from your Business Profile”, which describes what exists now:

Businesses with a claimed and verified Business Profile can add a WhatsApp or text messaging option to their contact info.

Two limits are on that page and both matter before you plan around it. Google warns that “Chat options are currently available for select regions and might not be available for your Business Profile”, and if you set both, only one shows: “If you add both options, only the text message option will be shown to customers.”

It is writable through the API, for the accounts that have one, and access is not public. Google’s developer guide covers the url_whatsapp and url_text_messaging attributes, patched onto a location through the Business Information API’s attribute mask, and states the purpose: “By implementing these attributes, businesses enable customers to contact them using WhatsApp or SMS.” The WhatsApp value is a click to chat URL; the text value is an sms: URI. Adding one hands the conversation to another platform’s rulebook, which for WhatsApp is the 24-hour customer service window.

Here is the limit of what we checked. Our own research notes record these channels as shipping in January 2025, and we could not confirm that date at Google. The developer guide carries no launch date, only “Last updated 2026-08-28 UTC”. The Business Profile APIs changelog we fetched the same day lists nothing earlier than its 2026-04-01 entry and nothing about these attributes at all. So the attributes are real and documented, and we are not going to assert a month for them on the strength of our own file.

The profile is still a reviews surface

Nothing above touched reviews, and this is the distinction worth holding on to. Chat is gone from the profile. Reading and replying to reviews on it continues, with the same requirement as before: “Before you can reply to reviews, you must verify your business”, and “After your business is verified, you can reply to reviews on your Business Profile.”

So the profile is not a place where you hold conversations. It is a place where you answer reviews, which is a different job with different rules: who is allowed to write a reply and what happens after you press Reply starts there, and then what gets a reply rejected and how to answer a bad one. It is also the only place to act on a review you believe is fake, which is a flagging process, not a deletion.

Pages that still tell you to switch it on

We opened two vendor guides on 19 September 2026. Two pages chosen by us is not a survey of the category and we are not presenting it as one. They are what we read, on the date given.

Emitrr’s guide, which shows “Last updated: July 11, 2025” on the page, contains working instructions in the present tense: a heading reading “How to Set Up Google Business Messages on Desktop and Mobile?”, the instruction that “To allow customers to message you through your Google My Business profile, you will need to enable ‘chat’ or Google Business Messages”, and numbered steps through the Maps app and the desktop profile. It then offers its own product as the place to manage the result: “Here’s how you can integrate Google My Business messaging with Emitrr:”. The same page’s FAQ says the opposite, correctly: “No, the chat feature is no longer available on Google My Business”, and “On July 31, 2024, Google ended the chat option on Google Business Profile chat, and so you can no longer use the option to chat with your customers.” Both are on one page, and the how-to comes first.

SleekFlow’s guide has no such correction anywhere we could find on the copy we read. It describes the feature as current: “Google Business Messages is a relatively new platform that enables businesses to communicate with customers through Google Maps and Google Search”, adds that “It requires a verified Google My Business listing”, and gives setup steps including “In the ‘Add messaging’ section, toggle on the ‘Accept Messages’ button and click ‘Next’.” That toggle does not exist.

What to do with an integration that promises this

If a tool’s page offers to put conversations from your profile into its inbox, the feature it is describing was switched off on 31 July 2024, and no vendor can turn it back on. That closure is also why an assistant sold as a receptionist has no profile conversations to answer, one of the limits in what an AI receptionist cannot do. What a review tool can genuinely do on a profile is read and reply to reviews, which is the part Google kept. That is worth checking against what these tools actually publish before you buy on the strength of a feature list.

The useful question is not which vendor restores chat. It is which channel you want to own, because the three Google now points at are your phone number, your text number and your WhatsApp link, and all three stay yours.