What a Google Business Profile is, and what it stopped being in 2024

A Google Business Profile is the free listing Google shows for your business on Search and Maps, built partly from what you enter and partly from what Google collects elsewhere. Google’s own words for it are “With a Business Profile on Google, you can manage how your business shows up on Maps and Search at no charge.” The definition is the hard part, because one of the features it used to include is a feature Google switched off on 31 July 2024. Google’s notice names no replacement for it on the profile. What it points to instead is other people’s channels and a contact link that sends the customer somewhere else.

Google’s current definition

Two help pages carry it. The get-started page frames the profile as a way to “Maintain accurate information about your business online”, to “Interact with customers” and to “Attract new customers”, and the specifics under those headings are narrow: provide hours, website, phone number and location, “Post photos and videos of your business and the products and services it offers.” and “Collect and respond to reviews from customers.”

A newer page, which exists to separate the profile from Google’s brand profile, says what the thing is more plainly than any definition we found elsewhere:

On Maps and Search, your Business Profile serves as your local storefront and acts like an online listing for your local business.

The same page lists what a searcher sees: “These profiles include the location, contact info, business website, store hours, photos, and reviews.” That is the whole product, in Google’s order. It also draws the line on who it is for: “A Business Profile is for businesses that interact with customers face-to-face during operating hours, while a brand profile is for businesses that sell products online.” The get-started page puts the same rule as an exclusion: “Business Profiles aren’t for online-only businesses nor properties for rent or sale.”

Claiming it costs nothing. Google states that twice, once as “You can add or claim your business at no charge.” and once inside the definition above. Verification is the gate, not payment: “Verify your business: Only verified businesses can show their business info on Maps and Search.” Which values Google’s guidelines accept in the fields you fill in on the way there is a separate question, answered in the four fields that decide whether a new profile survives.

It is a listing about you, not a page you own

This is the part worth being exact about. Google compiles the profile from several inputs, and only one of them is you:

Information in profiles is compiled from a variety of sources: Publicly-available information, such as crawled web content (e.g., information from a business’ official website) Licensed data from third parties Users who contribute factual information (such as addresses and phone numbers), and content (such as photos and reviews), including business owners who claim profiles through Google Business Profile Information based on Google’s interactions with a local place or business

It is also not only on Google. The same page says Google displays profiles “on Google Search and Google Maps, as well as third-party websites and applications via APIs such as those on the Google Maps Platform.” So the accurate mental model is a database record about your business that Google publishes in several places, which you can claim and correct, rather than a profile page you host. That model is also what decides what deleting a profile does and does not remove.

What was removed on 31 July 2024

Google’s notice is one paragraph and it is not hedged:

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.

An engagement metric went with it. Asked whether the change reached any API, Google’s answer on the same page is:

The “BUSINESS_CONVERSATIONS” metric is no longer available in the Performance API.

Google is explicit about what survived: “You’ll also continue to receive calls from your Business Profile and track other engagement metrics for your business, such as web traffic or directions requests.” Calls, directions and clicks stayed. Conversations did not. How customers reach you instead, and which third-party guides still walk you through switching chat on, is the chat Google ended.

Google’s own documentation still describes the old product

We checked the two pages a reader would check, and both still list the withdrawn feature. The performance and insights help page enumerates the metrics you can see, and one entry is “Messages: The number of different conversations through messages.” The developer reference for the performance API still publishes BUSINESS_CONVERSATIONS among its twelve enum values, described as “The number of message conversations received on the business profile.”, with no deprecation note and a footer reading “Last updated 2024-10-16 UTC.”, which is after the shutdown date on the notice above.

Neither page is lying so much as stale, and the help page hedges itself: “Important: Only metrics that apply to your business appear. Not all metrics are available to you.” We did not test whether the field returns zero, an error or nothing at all, and we are not going to assert a behaviour we have not observed. What we can say is that reading Google’s reference documentation alone would leave you expecting a metric Google’s own notice says is gone. Whether you can call that API at all is a separate application, set out in getting access to the Business Profile API.

The contact surface that remains

Small, and worth knowing before you plan around it. The profile carries a phone number, a website link, an address or service area, hours, which have three settings of their own, and a chat option that is a handoff rather than an inbox: Google’s field description is “Your customers can contact you from your Business Profile with text message or WhatsApp.” The dedicated page says “Businesses with a claimed and verified Business Profile can add a WhatsApp or text messaging option to their contact info.” Two limits sit on it. Availability is partial, “Chat options are currently available for select regions and might not be available for your Business Profile”, and setting both gets you one: “If you add both options, only the text message option will be shown to customers.”

Location is looser than the word address implies: “Depending on your business category, your location can be a street address, service area, or place marker.”

Reviews are the part that grew in importance

With conversations gone, the interactive half of the profile is reviews. Google describes the loop simply, “Customer reviews can give helpful feedback about your business.”, gates replying behind verification, “Before you can reply to reviews, you must verify your business”, and moderates what you write: “If your reply isn’t approved to be posted, you’ll be asked to edit it.” Availability is not universal here either: “Reviews are available only in certain countries or regions and for certain business categories.”

That makes reviews the only conversation the profile still hosts, which is why the useful follow-on questions are all about them: why a reply gets rejected, how to answer a bad one, what you can and cannot get removed, how flagging a fake one actually works, and what the tools in this category really do.

The definition, without the dead feature

A Google Business Profile is a free, verified listing that Google publishes on Search, Maps and third-party surfaces, assembled from your input plus crawled, licensed and user-contributed data, holding your location, contact details, hours, photos, description and reviews. You can update those fields, post, and reply to reviews. What Google does with an edit after you save it, and with a post after you publish it, is documented separately. You cannot hold a conversation on it. Any page that tells you otherwise is describing the version Google retired on 31 July 2024.