Google Business Profile

Local businesses can now connect their Google Business Profile to Gemini. I wanna talk about why this is more powerful than it might seem at first, and what this tells us about how people will be using software in general moving forward.

So if you don't know, your Google Business Profile is essentially your listing in Google Maps. For a local business, it's arguably more important than your website.

And a lot of SEO agencies out there will charge you hundreds of dollars every month just to manage it for you, which has always felt like a ripoff to me. Connecting your Google Business Profile to Gemini does two things for you.

One, it makes it easier to manage your profile once it's connected to Gemini. You can just ask it to respond to reviews for you, to make updates to your business information, to give you data on how your profile is performing, and to get insights on things like your busiest times or what customers are saying about you.

But the other thing it does is it instantly gives Gemini a bunch of context about your business...

ing it could use, but it's a lot better than it having nothing. this trend of connecting large language models to software platforms is much bigger than just Google Business Profiles.

More and more of our work is being handled by AI, and we're spending more and more of our day inside of these platforms, whether it's Gemini, Codex or Cloud Code. If you're using tools like this regularly, you've probably started to notice how tedious it feels when you have to switch to another piece of software to do something, and how much better it is when that software is just integrated directly in the AI platform.

If you're not using these tools regularly, I urge you to start trying them. This is the way knowledge work is going.

I also recommend checking out the episode of Lenny's podcast where he interviews the CEO of every. He lays out some really smart predictions about how this is going to evolve.

But we're now seeing Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI fiercely competing to be that one platform everyone uses, and Microsoft's out there just giving it their best...

We're about to enter a world where most buying decisions are made by AI agents, not humans. At Google I/O, we just learned that after someone searches for the products or services you offer, Google will give them the option to have an AI agent to check pricing on you and your competitors.

AI agents will be scouring your website. If you're a local business, your Google Business Profile, but they'll even be filling out forms and calling you to get that information.

So I wanna talk about what you need to do as business owner to get ready for this shift. Now, if you're an e-commerce business, you just need to make sure you're implementing Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and that you're eligible for the universal shopping cart.

If you're on Shopify, this is automatically happy to report you. Otherwise, you should look into it.

If you're a local business, you need to make sure you filled out every field on your Google Business Profile, including all of your services. And if you have a booking option through a third party integration, make sure that's connected...

bsite. And then you'll need to integrate web MCP so that AI agents can easily use it.

And here's a big one: you're gonna start getting calls from AI agents within a year. I wouldn't be surprised if most of your calls are coming from AI agents.

You. You need to be answering these calls.

And if you can't have a human answer, quickly have an AI answer. And make sure your staff knows not to hang up on the AI agent.

If these AI agents can get the information they need to recommend you to the user, and they can't get that on your competitor, you win by default.