Does your Google Business Profile help you in AI search?

A Google Business Profile is Google's free listing for a local business, showing its name, address, opening hours, category, photos and reviews on Google Search and Google Maps. Google says creating a profile and listing your business is free, and its guidelines for representing your business allow one if customers can visit your premises or you travel to them. A virtual office address is not eligible.

Google builds each profile from what you enter and from other sources. Its help page on where profile information comes from lists crawled web content such as your official website, licensed data from third parties, and details, photos and reviews that customers add. The same page says Google shows profiles on third-party websites and apps through APIs such as those on the Google Maps Platform, as well as on its own Search and Maps.

OpenAI has not said whether ChatGPT reads Google Business Profiles or Google reviews when it names a local business. What OpenAI does document is its search crawler: sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and OpenAI recommends allowing it.

Two other companies say their data or systems sit behind ChatGPT. Microsoft says the infrastructure behind Web IQ, the grounding system it built on Bing, powers Copilot and ChatGPT. Yelp's chief executive said in its results of 6 August 2026 that Yelp's content is powering local discovery for ChatGPT and other AI partners. Google shows profile information in other companies' apps, as above, without naming them.

So for ChatGPT, your Google profile may be one input among several, and none of these companies has said how much weight any of them carries. The parts you control are a website OAI-SearchBot can reach, and listings on Google, Yelp and Bing that give the same name, address, hours and services.

Google's guidance on AI features for site owners names your Business Profile directly: among its best practices for AI Overviews and AI Mode is checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up to date. The same page says there are no additional requirements to appear in either feature, and no AI text files or special schema markup to add.

AI Mode puts local details in the answer itself. Google added place cards to AI Mode in May 2025: for restaurants, salons and stores they show ratings, reviews and opening hours, which Google says come from its "trusted and up-to-date info about local businesses". Since April 2026, AI Mode in the UK can find a restaurant table and hand you to a booking partner such as TheFork, ResDiary or OpenTable. In Google Maps, Ask Maps, built with Google's Gemini models, answers questions using information from more than 300 million places, including reviews; Google began rolling it out in the US and India in March 2026.

Google has not said which profile fields these answers read, or how much reviews count in them. What it does publish is how local results on Search and Maps are ranked: mainly on relevance, distance and popularity, where more reviews and positive ratings can help and there is no way to pay for a better position. That page covers local results rather than AI answers. It is still Google's clearest description of a profile that does well.

The profile tasks below come from Google's own help pages, followed by your website and Bing Places.

Use the most specific category. Google says the categories you choose affect your local ranking, and to pick a specific one, such as 'Nail salon' in place of 'Salon'. Its guidelines ask for the fewest categories that describe your core business. Changing a category can mean verifying your business again.

Check your hours, then add special hours. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show in local results, and suggests confirming your hours for official holidays even when they match your usual ones. Set them now for the next bank holiday.

Fill in the details people ask about. Google's tips to improve your local ranking list your full address if customers visit, and details such as parking or Wi-Fi. Its own example of a UK request to AI Mode is a dog-friendly Italian restaurant in Shoreditch for Saturday at 7pm, so if a detail like that is true of you, add it wherever your profile offers it.

Write the description about what you offer. Google's guidelines say to use it for the services and products you offer and the business's mission and history, with no links of any kind and no promotions or prices.

Keep your name as it is on your shopfront. Adding a tagline, opening hours or other extra words to your business name is not permitted, and Google says it could get your profile suspended.

Ask for reviews, and reply to them. Google suggests sending customers a review link or QR code, and says replies show customers that their feedback matters. Never offer anything in return: Google treats incentives for reviews as fake engagement and prohibits them.

Add current photos. Google lists photos and videos among its tips to improve your local ranking: they show customers what you offer.

Make your website say the same thing. Your website is one of the sources Google builds your profile from, and Google's AI guidance lists keeping important content in text and allowing crawling in robots.txt among the SEO basics that still apply. For ChatGPT, that means letting OAI-SearchBot in: the free AI crawler checker shows which AI crawlers your robots.txt blocks.

Copy your listing to Bing Places. Microsoft's Bing Places for Business is free, imports listings from Google with your name, hours and contact details, and Microsoft says it is working on deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot.

Ask the way a customer would, in a private window: the service and your town, such as 'emergency plumber in Hove', then the longer question you would put to a friend. Note which businesses each answer names and which pages it links to.

Two free tools take your own account out of it. The Google AI Overview checker runs one search from a clean UK or US browser and shows whether an overview appeared and which pages it cited. To check if your business is on ChatGPT, the ChatGPT checker puts 3 buyer questions about your category to ChatGPT in a logged-out session and shows whether each answer named you.

One reading is a sample. Discoverable's plans check your 10 tracked prompts weekly on Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and the rest monthly. For a local business, Discoverable writes the questions the way a local buyer types them and adds your town to any that do not already name a place. For more on local businesses and AI, see AI visibility for local businesses and which review sites AI reads.