What Google's Business Profile changes mean for tradespeople

Four days to say no to an edit

The change with the sharpest edge arrived in late September. Google's help documentation now states that when a member of the public suggests an edit to a profile, the owner has four days to accept or reject it. If nothing happens, Google may publish the change itself where other public information, such as the business's own website, appears to support it.

For a shop with staff watching the inbox, four days is plenty. For a one-van heating engineer who checks email on a Sunday night, it is tight. A suggested change to opening hours, a category or a service area can go live while the owner is up a loft.

Google also notes that edits required to meet its policies may be applied without any review at all. The practical advice is dull but necessary: turn on notifications for the profile and look at them.

Posts with a phone number in the text can vanish

Google's Posts policy now says it may remove posts that contain unverified contact information: phone numbers, email addresses, social handles written into the body of the post. Google's preferred alternative is the Call now button attached to the post.

Trades use Posts loosely, often pasting the same "Call Dave on 07…" line into every update. That habit now risks the post disappearing without warning. The fix is to let the profile's own contact buttons do the work and keep the post text about the job.

A Message button beside Call

On 5 November Google published a bulletin confirming that a Message button now appears next to Call on Business Profiles in Google Maps, on Android and iOS, in the profile header and the action bar. The button routes to whichever messaging channel the business has connected, which Google says includes WhatsApp and SMS. If both are set up, customers see the text option.

This matters for trades more than for most sectors, because so much of the first contact is a photo of the problem. A homeowner who can send a picture of a leaking valve from the Maps listing is a homeowner who does not need to ring three other firms first. Google's chat features are available in what it calls select regions, so UK trades should check the profile dashboard rather than assume.

Hours written in plain English

Google has also been testing a feature that lets owners describe their hours in a sentence, with Google converting the text into a schedule. The company's help page lists it as available in select regions and languages. It is a small convenience, but it removes one of the reasons profiles end up with wrong hours: the owner gave up halfway through the form.

Review pauses after spam spikes

Several profile owners have reported emails from Google saying suspected fake reviews had been removed and that new ratings had been paused for a few days. Google has not published a policy page on this, so treat it as observed behaviour rather than a rule.

The relevance for trades is the knock-on. If a competitor, or a disgruntled customer, triggers a wave of suspicious reviews on your profile, you can lose the ability to collect genuine ones for a period. A steady flow of reviews from real jobs, as described in our piece on why review velocity matters for local trades, makes a profile look less like a target.

What a trade should do this week

• Open the profile and check every field against the website. Any mismatch is an invitation for a suggested edit you then have four days to catch.
• Turn on email and app notifications for the profile.
• Remove phone numbers and email addresses from the text of existing Posts and use the Call now button instead.
• Set up a messaging channel if one is offered in the dashboard, and decide who answers it.
• Check that the hours, including Christmas closures, are right before the seasonal rush covered in our 12-month trades marketing calendar.

The direction of travel

Read together, the changes say that Google wants the profile to be accurate without the owner's help, reachable without leaving Google, and free of the clutter that lets spammers hide. That is good for homeowners and good for trades who manage the profile. It is bad for the trade whose profile still lists a landline that was disconnected in 2023.

For the wider picture on where the profile sits among directories, websites and ads, see our state of trades marketing in the UK, 2026.

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