Google Business Profile

The name

It was Google My Business until November 2021, when Google renamed it Google Business Profile. Same product, same listing, same reviews. The standalone app was retired in 2022, so you now manage it by searching your business name while signed in to the owner account, or through Business Profile Manager if you run several locations.

If a guide still tells you to download the Google My Business app, it is describing something that no longer exists.

Why it belongs in an AI visibility directory

Because it is the most authoritative statement of who you are, and it is not on your website.

Name, address, phone, hours, categories, service area, reviews — all structured, all verified by Google, all available to anything reading about your business. When an assistant is deciding whether it can safely name you in an answer, this is one of the places it can check your claims against something independent.

That makes it the other half of entity clarity. Your website says who you are; this corroborates it. When the two disagree, you look like two businesses instead of one well-evidenced one.

What to actually do

1. Claim and verify it if you have not. Free. Phone and email verification is usually instant; video takes about five business days.
2. Match your website exactly. Name, address and phone byte-identical to your footer and your Organization schema. This is the single highest-value thing on the page.
3. Fill in every field. Categories, service area, hours, attributes, description. Empty fields are unanswered questions.
4. Keep reviews moving. Recency matters more than volume.

How it relates to what we do

Directly complementary, and worth being clear about. Brand Radar answers am I being mentioned — a measurement question that needs a very large prompt database. Our check answers can I be mentioned — a readiness question that needs your HTML.

If Brand Radar shows you at zero mentions, it has told you something true and given you nothing to act on. The reason is almost always in your markup. Fix that first, then use a tracker to watch whether it moved.

If you are already well mentioned and want to understand competitive share of voice, this is a better purchase than anything we sell.

Where it falls short

Suspensions have become more common since Google tightened enforcement, and the appeal process is opaque. Keep your details accurate and conservative, and avoid keyword-stuffing the business name — that is the most common cause.

Verdict

Not an AI tool, and essential anyway. For a local business it is the closest thing to a verified identity on the open web.

Commercial disclosure. No link in this directory earns us a commission. If that ever changes, the link will be marked (commercial link), carry rel="sponsored", and this note will say so. What we write does not depend on it: nothing here is a paid placement, the order is not for sale, we review tools that pay us nothing, and we say plainly when a tool is better than ours or when you should spend nothing at all. If that ever stops being true, this directory is worthless and so is the rest of the site.

On pricing. We describe what a tool is for, not what it charges. Prices move, free tiers get withdrawn or introduced, plans get renamed, and what you pay differs by region and currency. Anything we wrote about cost could be wrong by the time you read it, so treat it as a rough shape and check the vendor's own pricing page before you buy. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.