Google brings back messaging on business listings — this time with an AI agent

With little fanfare, Google has quietly reintroduced a native messaging button on Google Business Profile (GBP) listings. The difference from the version it scrapped in 2024? It now comes with an AI agent that responds first, drawing on the listing’s own data — and hands the conversation over to a human when it reaches the limits of what it can handle.

This “new” messaging feature appears to still be rolling out and isn’t yet fully functional. For now, it has been spotted by local SEO experts in the United States, with no clear indication of when it will become available in Europe or elsewhere.

How does the new GBP messaging work?

Accessible directly from the Google Business Profile dashboard, the Messages tool now opens an interface organised across four distinct tabs:

Messages — Conversations are split into two categories: “Needs your attention” groups exchanges requiring human input, while “Handled by your AI agent” covers those the agent has dealt with autonomously. This division of labour between AI and human is at the heart of this new version of the tool.

Insights — This section, still marked “coming soon”, promises data on audience, conversions, and conversations — covering trends in what customers are asking, what converts, and what goes unanswered. The full scope and usefulness of the data to be shared is yet to be seen.

Settings — This is where you configure the messaging module’s behaviour, as well as the AI agent itself: welcome message, suggested questions to kick off the conversation (Conversation starters), and brand logo. A “Customer handoff” toggle lets you receive a notification whenever the AI determines it’s time to pass the conversation on.

Promote — Potentially the most strategically significant tab once it’s live. It lets you create Google Ads from which customers can enter directly into a conversation with the AI agent — without ever leaving the search results.

Why this third attempt at GBP Messages could be different

This isn’t Google’s first try. Native messaging had been available for several years before being quietly removed in July 2024, with no official explanation. Too little adoption? Competition from more established platforms? A refocus on core visibility? We could only speculate.

In early 2025, Google introduced alternatives — a WhatsApp button and the option to display a phone number for receiving SMS messages directly from a listing.

Is this a genuine U-turn from Google, or is AI driving a strategic shift?

Maintaining a proprietary messaging tool offered no obvious edge over WhatsApp. But with an agent that can respond autonomously, learn from listing content, handle dozens of conversations in parallel, and only call in a human when genuinely needed, the picture changes entirely.

Google had a good reason to drop native messaging. It now has a better reason to bring it back.

The Google listing becomes an active touchpoint again — and goes further than before

Already central to the online visibility of brands and retail networks, Google Business Profile listings continue to strengthen their strategic position as a point of contact between businesses and customers. This latest development fits into a broader shift:

“After AI Overviews, Ask Maps, and Gemini, Google is progressively transforming Google Business Profile into a local conversational agent. Tomorrow, a Google listing won’t just be there to display opening hours or reviews — it will need to be rich enough and up to date enough for an AI to respond accurately to customers,” says Thibault Renouf, Co-CEO of Partoo.

The return of native GBP messaging has three concrete implications:

Data quality is no longer just a visibility issue — it’s a reputation issue

The AI agent draws on what’s in your listing to respond to customers.

Incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate information won’t just result in a listing that ranks lower in Google search results (SERPs, Local Pack, AI Overviews, AI Mode) — it will produce incorrect answers sent directly to potential customers.

The channel works without human intervention

This is the fundamental break from everything that came before. The old GBP messaging tool — like WhatsApp without third-party automation — assumed someone on your team was available around the clock to respond to incoming messages.

A customer asking a question on a Sunday evening at 10pm would be met with silence.

With an AI agent, they get an answer.

For any sector where customers compare and decide before making a trip, that moment will no longer be lost.

The “Promote” tab shifts local advertising from click to conversation

Connecting Google Ads to this chatbot means a customer can click on an ad and immediately enter into a conversation with your brand’s AI — no intermediary website, no form, no friction.

For multi-location networks investing in local search, this is a new funnel logic worth getting ahead of.

What we still don’t know about the new GBP Messages

The feature is in pilot in the United States. Several users have seen it appear and disappear from their dashboards within hours — a sign the rollout is still unstable.

And while its arrival in Europe seems inevitable, it will almost certainly come later than in the US: Google almost always follows this pattern for features of this kind, and European regulatory constraints (DMA, AI Act, GDPR) add an extra layer of complexity. For French and European networks, now is the time to plan ahead rather than scramble to catch up.

What this first look doesn’t yet tell us is at least as important as what it reveals:

• What data does the agent actually draw on? The GBP listing alone, customer reviews, other sources? The documentation doesn’t yet exist — and the answer directly determines the quality and reliability of what the agent tells your customers.
• The current settings offer no option to define a tone or communication style. For brands that have invested in their identity, this is a real question: to what extent will you be able to control the voice your AI uses with customers?
• And more broadly: can the agent’s responses be corrected, trained, or guided over time? Or is this a closed system that evolves independently of what the business actually wants to communicate?

A test in the United States, or a signal of Google’s strategic repositioning around local conversational commerce? The coming months will tell. What’s certain is that the direction of travel is clear.

How to prepare your Google listings for Messages

Precisely because the rollout isn’t imminent in Europe, now is the right time to lay the groundwork — rather than scrambling to react when it arrives.

Two concrete areas to act on today:

• Audit the accuracy of your listing data. Names, addresses, opening hours, descriptions, categories, attributes — in short, everything the AI agent will draw on to respond to your customers. An incorrect piece of data in a listing means an incorrect answer sent to a prospect.
• Decide who will own the handoff. The agent won’t be able to handle everything: a complex complaint, a bespoke quote request, or a sensitive situation will all expose its limits. Someone on your team needs to be ready to step in quickly.

For networks with dozens or hundreds of outlets, managing both of these challenges location by location simply isn’t scalable.

That’s exactly what we address at Partoo: centralising local data quality and unifying the management of customer interactions — whether the conversation starts on Google, WhatsApp, or your website — from a single interface.

Questions about getting your network ready? Our experts are on hand to discuss.