By the Mayab Media Team
A customer finds your bakery on Google Maps at 9 p.m. and taps Message. Soon, the reply may not come from you or your staff. It may come from Google's AI.
Google appears to be widening access to AI-powered messaging for Business Profiles. Search Engine Roundtable reported on October 29 that more owners are seeing it. Local search consultant Claudia Tomina posted the rollout on LinkedIn, and Mike Blumenthal shared an invitation email offering early access to the pilot at no cost.
We couldn't find a Google help page or blog post about this expansion. So treat what follows as what early users report, not official specs.
How it works, from what we've seen
Customers message the business from Search or Maps, and the chat opens in their phone's regular texting app instead of a separate Google inbox. An AI agent handles routine questions. In Google's own example it shows menu items with photos and prices and suggests open booking slots. When it can't answer, it hands the conversation to the owner, who can also step into any chat. Everything is stored in the Business Profile.
Now the catch.
The AI agent only works when the customer's phone and carrier support RCS, the upgraded texting standard. Everyone else's message goes straight to your business phone as a normal text, and standard rates may apply. So you could have two kinds of conversations running at once. Some handled by a bot. Some landing on the front-desk phone after closing, where nobody is around to see them until the next morning.
That split also makes reporting messy. If you track leads by phone and form only, a chunk of new conversations will happen somewhere your team doesn't usually look.
The agent is only as smart as your profile
This is the part we'd worry about. The agent answers from what Google knows about you, which mostly means your Business Profile. Old hours, last spring's menu, a service you dropped in July? It will repeat them, confidently, to a customer who's ready to buy.
Say you run a dental clinic with two locations. One stopped opening on Saturdays in September, but nobody updated the profile. A patient messages Saturday morning asking to come in today. The agent says sure. Now you have an annoyed patient at a locked door and, quite possibly, a one-star review.
Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable called an earlier glimpse of this agent "more dangerous" than Google's older automated replies. We think that's fair, at least until the agent proves itself. Canned FAQs are dull, but at least you wrote them and knew exactly what they'd say.
Should you turn it on?
For most local businesses, eventually, yes. Unanswered messages are lost leads, and few small teams can reply at 9 p.m. Picture a restaurant that gets 40 booking questions a week and answers half of them the next day, and a good share of those late replies turn into empty tables. If an agent clears the "are you open Sunday?" questions instantly, that's worth something.
Service businesses are a different story. A plumber or roofer usually can't quote from a profile, and a bot that guesses at prices creates expectations your team then has to walk back on the phone. For those, we'd want the agent to collect the details and hand off fast, not try to close the job.
Just don't flip the switch the day the invite arrives. Here's the order we'd follow:
- Audit the profile first. Hours, holiday hours, services, menu or price list, booking links, service areas. Fix anything stale before a bot starts repeating it.
- Decide who catches handoffs. Someone needs the alert when the AI passes a chat over, plus a target reply time. An hour is reasonable. Tomorrow isn't.
- Test it as a customer. Message your own profile from a personal phone. Ask your five most common questions, plus one awkward one about pricing or insurance, and see whether the answers match what your staff would say.
- Check the non-RCS path. If some texts will hit your main line, make sure that number can receive texts at all. Plenty of landlines can't.
- Read the conversations weekly for the first month. You'll catch wrong answers faster than Google will.
If your profile is a mess and there's no time to fix it this month, wait. A slower human reply beats a fast wrong one.
Still unconfirmed
We don't know which countries are included, whether every business category qualifies, or how long the pilot stays free. The messaging button first showed up in profile dashboards back in June, disappeared within hours, and has been reworked since. Expect more changes before it settles, and expect Google to ask for more profile detail as the agent gets smarter.
An AI receptionist that reads your profile out loud is only worth having if the profile is right.
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