Your Google Business Profile is now an AI asset: a 15-point checklist

Why your profile matters more than it used to

A Google Business Profile used to be mainly about showing up on the map. The map is no longer the only place it appears. When someone asks Google for “a physio near Leslieville open Saturday,” AI Overviews and AI Mode often answer with a short list of local businesses drawn from Maps data, with hours, ratings and snippets of reviews. Gemini can draw on Maps too.

Assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot pull from a wider mix of web sources, directories and review sites. Your profile is one input among many for them, but its details tend to get copied and repeated across the web. If they’re wrong or thin, that’s what spreads.

For the bigger picture, see our guide to Google AI Overviews for Toronto businesses. This post is the practical part: fifteen checks, each with a short reason.

The basics: who you are and where you are

1. Make sure you own and control the profile. Confirm you’re listed as an owner, and that the account belongs to the business, not a former employee or agency. Why: you can’t fix what you can’t edit, and ownership disputes take time you’d rather not spend.
2. Choose your primary category carefully, then add a few accurate secondary ones. Pick the most specific primary category that fits, such as “Family law attorney” rather than “Lawyer.” Add secondary categories only for things you genuinely do. Why: categories are one of the clearest signals of what kind of business you are.
3. Show your address or service area honestly. A storefront in the Annex should show its address. A plumber who drives to customers across Etobicoke and North York should set a service area and hide the home address. Don’t list a virtual office or mailbox as a storefront. Why: Google’s guidelines don’t allow it, and a location that doesn’t match reality erodes trust everywhere it gets copied.
4. Use your real business name. Use the name on your sign and your paperwork, without adding keywords like “Best Toronto Dentist.” Why: keyword-stuffed names break Google’s guidelines and can get a profile suspended.

What you do and when you’re open

5. List your services (or products) with plain descriptions. Add each main service, and use the description field to say what it involves and who it’s for. A salon in Liberty Village might list “Balayage” with a sentence on what’s included and roughly how long it takes. Why: people ask assistants very specific questions, and specific service details give those questions something to match.
6. Write a description that a stranger would find useful. You have up to 750 characters. Say what you do, where, for whom, and what makes you different, in plain language. Skip the slogans. Why: a clear description is easy to summarize accurately. Vague marketing copy is easy to summarize badly.
7. Keep regular hours accurate. If you close early on Fridays, say so. If you’re appointment-only, say that too. Why: “open now” and “open Sunday” are common parts of local questions, and wrong hours lead to frustrated customers.
8. Set holiday hours ahead of time. Add special hours for Family Day, Victoria Day, Canada Day, the Civic Holiday, Thanksgiving, Boxing Day and any other day your schedule changes. Why: holidays are exactly when people double-check, and a missing update makes a profile look unattended.
9. Fill in the attributes that apply to you. These include things like wheelchair-accessible entrance, gender-neutral washroom, online appointments, outdoor seating or accepted payment types. Only choose what’s true. Why: attributes answer the small, practical questions people ask, like “a quiet café in the Annex with wheelchair access.”

How you look and where you send people

10. Add real, recent photos. Include your storefront from the street so people can find the door, your interior, your team, and your work or dishes. Why: photos help people decide, and a current gallery signals an active business. Stock images do neither.
11. Link to the right page on your website. If you have one location, your homepage is usually fine. If you have several, link each profile to that location’s own page with matching address and hours. Add booking, menu or appointment links if they apply. Why: when the profile and the page it links to agree, it’s easier for people and systems to trust both.
12. Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Check your website, Yelp, HomeStars, RateMDs, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places and industry directories. “Suite 200” versus “#200” is fine. An old phone number or address is not. Why: when sources agree, there’s no doubt about which version is right.

Practical tip: open a private browser window and search your business name plus “Toronto.” Click through the first two pages of results and note every listing that shows an old address, phone number or name. That list is your cleanup to-do.

Reviews and how you respond

13. Ask for reviews consistently, and never fake or buy them. Ask every customer, not just the happy ones, and make it easy with a short link or QR code. Don’t offer discounts or gifts for reviews, don’t filter who you ask, and never write reviews yourself or pay someone else to. Why: it’s against Google’s policies, and a steady, natural flow of genuine reviews is what actually describes your business well. We go deeper on this in our post on the sources AI assistants lean on.
14. Respond to reviews, good and bad, like a person. Thank people specifically. For critical reviews, acknowledge the issue, explain what you’ve changed, and offer to continue offline. Never share private details, especially in healthcare or legal work. Why: responses are public text tied to your business. They show how you treat people and add context in your own words.

Beyond the profile: answers and upkeep

15. Put Q&A-style information on your website, and check your profile monthly. Google has been changing how questions and answers appear on profiles, so don’t rely on that feature alone. Instead, publish clear answers on your own site to the questions you hear every week: Do you direct-bill insurance? Is there parking? Do you take walk-ins? How much does a consultation cost? Then set a monthly reminder to review your profile for edits you didn’t make, since Google and the public can suggest changes. Why: a well-organized FAQ gives people and assistants a reliable source to quote, and a monthly check catches small errors before they spread.

If you want to go a step further on your website, structured data (schema markup) lets you state the same facts in a format machines can read without guessing.

What this checklist will and won’t do

A complete, accurate profile won’t guarantee that any AI tool recommends you. Nobody can promise that, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What it does is remove the easy reasons to be overlooked or described wrongly, and give every system that reads about you a consistent set of facts. For the bigger picture, see what AI search optimization actually is.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes, we review profiles as part of our AI visibility audits, along with the listings and sources around them. If that sounds useful, book a free 20-minute call and we’ll walk through what we’d check first.