Google Business Profile in the age of AI search

You spent years on this listing. Claiming it, arguing with Google about a category, chasing reviews, uploading photographs of the van. It is the one piece of digital marketing almost every local business owner has genuinely done.

So the fair question is what it is worth now, and the answer has two halves that point in opposite directions.

It still matters, and here is exactly where

Your Google Business Profile is the most structured, most verified description of your business anywhere on the internet. Nothing else about you is as machine-readable: a confirmed address, confirmed hours, a category chosen from a fixed list, a phone number Google has checked, and reviews tied to real accounts.

That is precisely the kind of source a system resolves ambiguity against. When something has to decide whether the two mentions of your business name refer to the same company, your GBP is the record that settles it.

It also feeds Google's own answer surfaces directly. AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's local understanding, and your profile is the spine of that. For anything on the AEO side, the profile is doing real work.

And here is what changed

For years the profile was close to the whole game locally. Claim it, feed it, win. That is no longer true, for one structural reason:

ChatGPT's browsing reads Bing's index. Your Google Business Profile is not in it.

So the asset you have spent a decade maintaining is invisible to the assistant with the largest share of AI referral traffic. That is not an argument for neglecting it. It is an argument for noticing that it is now one input among several rather than the input, and that the others have been sitting unattended.

There is also the plainer version of the problem: a profile is a summary. It says you are a plumber in Jupiter. It does not say you specialise in repiping older properties with failing copper, or that you do emergency work at two in the morning, or what a call-out costs. When someone asks an assistant a question with any specificity in it, a profile cannot answer it. A real page on your own site can.

Which fields actually feed AI answers

Not all of the profile is equal for this purpose. Ranked by what is doing work:

Doing real work

• Primary category. The single most important field in the profile, and the one most often set slightly wrong years ago and never revisited. Open it and check it today.
• Services, with descriptions. Most owners list service names and leave the descriptions blank. The descriptions are free text and they are one of the few places in the profile where you can be specific. Fill them in.
• Business name, address, phone. Not for their own sake, but because they must match what your website says, exactly. Inconsistency here is a genuine reason something declines to name you.
• Hours, including the unusual ones. “Open now” is a real filter in a real question. So is 24-hour emergency availability, if you offer it and have not said so.
• Review content. Not the star average. The words in them. See below.

Mostly decoration, for this purpose

• Posts. Short-lived and largely unread by anything you care about here.
• Photo volume. Photographs matter to the human who has already found you. They are not what gets you named.
• The description field. Worth writing well, but it is 750 characters of your own marketing copy, which is the weakest kind of evidence there is.

The review thing, again, because it is the biggest one

Your star rating is a filter. The text is the evidence.

A model asked to recommend a business for a specific job needs to see that job described by somebody who is not you. Fifty reviews averaging 4.9 that all say “great service” give it nothing to match against “who can replace a water heater in Jupiter”. Ten that mention water heaters, Jupiter, and how fast you turned up give it everything.

This is the single cheapest change available to most businesses reading this, and it is not a tool or a subscription. It is changing the sentence you say when you ask. Ask people to mention what you actually did and roughly where they are. Most will, if you ask. Almost nobody thinks to.

What to do with all this

Keep the profile accurate, fix the primary category, fill in the service descriptions, and change how you ask for reviews. That is perhaps two hours of work and it improves a real asset you already own.

Then accept that you have been maintaining one record while several now matter, and go and look at the ones you have never opened: whether Bing has your current site at all, whether AI crawlers can reach you, and whether the pages on your own domain say plainly enough what you do and where you do it to be worth quoting.

The test below covers that second half against your live site, so you can see which of it applies to you before deciding any of it is worth your afternoon.