How does Google use the Business Profile in its AI answers?
As the source of record for local facts. When someone asks Google’s AI for a heating engineer in Huddersfield, the answer is assembled from the ordinary search index plus the local listings, and the listings come from Business Profile: name, category, address or service area, hours, phone, reviews, photos and the Q&A. Google has said its AI experiences use the same local signals as the rest of search, and the three that have always mattered for the map pack still apply: how relevant the profile is to the question, how far it is from the searcher, and how well known the business is.
That is why a Huddersfield firm with a complete profile and steady reviews can turn up in an AI answer for a question it never wrote a page about.
Which parts of the profile actually matter for AI visibility?
The category first, because it is the hardest filter. Then the business description, in plain words that say what you do and where. Then services, listed individually with a line each. Then the service area, drawn honestly. Then reviews, and your replies to them, which a model reads as a second description of the business written by other people. Then photographs of real work with sensible captions. Posts, products and the booking button matter far less for AI answers, though they do no harm.
- Primary and secondary categories
- Business description
- Individual services
- Service area
- Reviews and replies
- Photos of real work
Does the profile affect ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini too?
Gemini, directly: it is Google’s own assistant and it pulls local results from Maps, so what it says about you is largely your profile read aloud. ChatGPT and Perplexity, indirectly. Neither has access to Google’s listing data, but both read the web, and the web is full of pages that copy it: directories, review aggregators, local guides and the knowledge panel text that other sites quote. A wrong phone number on the profile can turn up in a ChatGPT answer months later by that route.
The reviews are the bigger crossover. Google reviews get quoted and summarised on other sites, and assistants of every kind read those.
What goes wrong with profiles in Huddersfield?
Four things, in our experience. A category chosen years ago that no longer describes the main work, so the profile is relevant to the wrong question. A service-area business that has hidden its address correctly but drawn the area across half of Yorkshire, which dilutes relevance for the town it actually serves. A description written as a slogan, which tells a model nothing. And reviews that stopped in 2023, which reads as a business that stopped too. Each of those is a fix, and the first two can change what the AI says fairly quickly once Google has picked up the change.
Should the profile and the website say the same thing?
Yes, word for word where it matters. Name, category, address or service area, phone and the one-line description should match between the profile and the website, and the website should link to the profile and the profile to the website. A model checking whether the Dolphin Heating on the map is the Dolphin Heating on the site needs those to agree before it will treat them as one business. That agreement is most of what the entity work in GEO amounts to.
How do I tell whether my profile is helping or hurting?
Ask Google’s AI and Gemini the question your customers ask, with the town, and see whether you appear and how you are described. Then open your profile as a customer would and compare. If the answer describes you as something you are not, the profile or a site copying it is usually the reason. If you do not appear at all for a question you should, check the category and the service area first. We do this check as the first step of any GEO work, and it takes an afternoon.
