Adding a WhatsApp link to a Google Business Profile

A WhatsApp link on a Business Profile is a contact option, not an inbox. Google puts one requirement on it, that the profile is claimed and verified, and one limit that nothing in your account can change: the option appears in some regions and not in others. There are two ways to set it, the Contact section of the profile and one URL attribute in the Business Information API, and both write the same field.

What Google requires before you can add one

The eligibility sentence opens Google’s help page “Chat with customers from your Business Profile”:

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

Claimed and verified is the whole gate: no application, no enrolment and no partner to go through. Google’s stated purpose for the option is on the same page: “By giving customers a direct way to contact your business via text or WhatsApp, you can answer their questions in real time and encourage them to visit your business.”

Then comes the limit, which Google marks as important and puts directly above the instructions rather than in a footnote:

Important: Chat options are currently available for select regions and might not be available for your Business Profile.

Google publishes no list of those regions on that page, no checker and no appeal. If the option is absent from the drop down described below, it is not available to that profile, and there is nothing further to do about it.

Route one, the Contact section of the profile

Google’s steps, quoted from the same page. The two labels in the second step run together because the separator between them on Google’s page is an image rather than text.

1. “Go to your Business Profile”
2. “Click Edit profile Contact”
3. Next to Chat, “select Edit”
4. In the Chat drop down, “click the Down arrow”
5. “Select either WhatsApp or Text message”
6. In the URL or Phone number field, “add your WhatsApp click to chat URL or a phone number that can receive text messages”
7. “Click Save”

The field is labelled Chat, the same word Google used for the feature it switched off. That is a naming collision, not a revival: the notice titled “Changes to Google Business Profile chat and call history” still reads, “As of July 31, 2024, the chat and call history features are no longer available in your Business Profile.” What step 6 adds is a link out.

Route two, one attribute per channel through the API

The developer guide is a single page: “You can use the Google Business Profile (GBP) API to add or update the WhatsApp and text messaging URL attributes for a specific location.”

Its prerequisites are two lines, and neither is a special permission: “A Google Business Profile account and location”, and “The necessary authorization credentials to make changes to the Google Business Profile location”.

Channel	Attribute	Google’s example value
WhatsApp	attributes/url_whatsapp	https://wa.me/55555555
Text	attributes/url_text_messaging	sms:5555555555

The write is a PATCH to the attributes endpoint, and the attribute has to be named twice, once in the query string and once in the body: “Specify the attribute you are targeting using the attributeMask query parameter in the URL.” The method reference is blunt about the consequence of naming it in only one place: “All attributes provided in the attributes field that you would like to update must be set in the attributeMask”, and “Attributes set in the above list but not in the attributeMask will be ignored”. The method “Requires the following OAuth scope”, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/business.manage. There is no body to parse on success, only a code: “A successful PATCH request returns a status code of HTTP 200 OK.”

Removing the link is the same request with the value emptied rather than a different call: “Replace the example uriValues with empty brackets. This resets the value and removes it from your GBP.” The method reference states the general rule: “If you’d like to delete certain attributes, they must be specified in the attributeMask with no matching entry in the attributes list.”

What the link actually is

Two different things, and only one of them is a web address.

The WhatsApp value is a click to chat URL, which is Google’s own wording on the help page, and the guide’s example is https://wa.me/55555555 with the instruction “Replace the example 55555555 with the business WhatsApp phone number using international format.” The text value is not a web address at all. It is an sms: URI: “Replace the example sms:5555555555 with the business phone number for text messaging.”

The Attributes reference explains the empty values array that sits in both example request bodies, which looks like an oversight and is not: “When the attribute value type is URL, this field contains the value(s) for this attribute, and the other values fields must be empty.” The same page records the ceiling: “Attribute types only support one value.” One link per location, per channel.

Two further constraints there are worth reading before anything is built on this. The attribute is not guaranteed to exist on a given location: “The attributes that can be set on a location may vary based on the properties of that location (for example, category).” And the set is not pinned to an API version, so a working integration can stop being correct without a version bump: “Available attributes are determined by Google and may be added and removed without API changes.”

One thing that is allowed, and worth knowing before you plan a chain: a tip on the help page says “Different Business Profiles can use the same WhatsApp link.” A chain can point every location at one number.

If you set both, only the text option shows

This is the sentence to read before choosing. From the help page:

If you add both options, only the text message option will be shown to customers.

The two attributes are separate fields and the API accepts each of them, so nothing stops you writing both. The result is that the WhatsApp option is the one the customer never sees. If WhatsApp is the option you want visible, leave url_text_messaging unset on that location. We have not tested what the profile does at the moment a second value lands, and Google documents a display outcome rather than an error, so we are not going to describe an error Google does not describe.

What we could not date, and what this does not bring back

Google’s developer guide carries no launch date for either attribute. The only date on it is “Last updated 2026-08-28 UTC”, which is when the page changed, not when the feature shipped. Our own research notes put a month on it and Google’s pages do not, so the month is not asserted here.

Nor does any of this restore a conversation on the profile itself. Google’s notice names no replacement for the retired inbox. It sends you to other people’s channels, “consider alternative chat channels to continue the conversation with your customers, if available.”, and it describes this field as a handoff rather than a successor: “For eligible accounts, customers can contact you from your Business Profile through text messages or WhatsApp.” A customer who taps the link leaves for WhatsApp or their SMS app, and the thread then lives there under that platform’s rules rather than Google’s. Google does keep a counter on its side: the tips on the help page include “Check your chat performance metrics.”

What remains on the profile is reviews, which is a different job with different rules, including why a reply gets rejected, how to answer a bad one and what review tools actually publish about themselves.

So the whole feature is one field and one exclusion. A claimed and verified profile, a region where the option appears, one click to chat URL or one sms: URI, and if you write both, the text option is the one your customers get.