Updates Coming To Google Business Profile in 2025
We’ve often referred to Google Business Profile as the forgotten child of Google’s various services. A vital and incredibly powerful resource for small and local businesses; it’s often felt like the tool has been abandoned with sporadic updates that only serve to make an already frustrating tool that little bit more difficult to use.
Whether that’s the changes to verifying your Google Business Profile, the constantly changing statistics and reporting that offer very little detail or the outright removal of features like the chat, which was itself replaced by the integration of WhatsApp chat. For the longest time, Google Business Profile has felt like its design has flown in the face of its very purpose; to be an easy face for businesses.
In recent months, however, we have started to see a change in the landscape. Google Business Profile has gone under its biggest transformation in a long time with a bunch of new features including one we’ve been waiting on for years now. It’s worth mentioning that some of these new features are in the testing phase so they might not be available on all accounts.
New Post Features
The first of these came a few months ago with a revamp to the Posts section of Google Business Profile. Posts have always been an important part of the platform but adding posts was always a bit of a faff and viewing them after posting was quite difficult. This more recent update looked to change that with a specific section, which stores all posts made regardless of type in an easy to visualise list. You can then add posts from there or edit existing ones.
When adding a post, you get the usual pop-out but you are now able to flick through the 3 different options (Update, Offer, Event) at will, making for a much easier and convenient experience. The update also brought a bit of a sleeker design to posts which was badly needed.
Use cases : While more of an aesthetic change, it does make posting far easier and checking previous posts is so much easier. If you are running a business that has a lot of events or offers, checking through the previous ones you’d added to make any changes is now much easier.
Cross Account Posting
The next of these was cross-account posting. This was a curious addition to the platform. Google Business Profile has always been very anti-spam across all its different sections, such as reviews, posts and images. The spam censor can be quite trigger happy at times and incorrect flagging is quite common. So to see a feature that allowed you to post the same post across multiple accounts was surprising.
Alongside this change was the addition of Profiles. If you manage multiple profiles, clicking on Profiles will allow you to quickly swap between Profiles which is a far more user friendly option than the previous alternative of going through the Business Profile Manager.
Use cases : We generally advise to keep every post unique even if you are posting across multiple profiles so we’d advise caution when using this new feature but this can be really good for making company wide announcements, such as a new product launch or bank holiday opening times.
Google Insights
Another new feature that is reportedly being tested is the Insights feature. Insights are common across most Google properties at this point, particularly Google Analytics. They are designed to offer tips to maximise the value of your data and improve performance. For Business Profile, they seem to be relatively basic and just offer general advice and things to do with your account.
Use cases: Chances are that you are most likely already doing everything Insights would make you aware of but as the tool evolves, it might become quite useful as a way of getting more out of your account. Not likely to be too useful but could give you some decent tips.
Brand Profiles
Brand Profiles are technically separate from Business Profiles but they are useful to cover here. Google is currently rolling out Brand Profiles as part of a beta for ecommerce sites. Now, ecommerce sites often don’t fit into the niche that Google Business Profile provides, especially if you don’t have a brick and mortar store. Therefore, Brand Profiles are designed to act as a presence on Google for those businesses. They are linked to your Merchant Center account under the Marketing tab and that synergy should be obvious than it currently is under Business Profile, even if you have your two properties linked.
One interesting thing is that this account is linked to your socials so it’ll pull images and videos from there, which is quite useful and a feature that Google Business Profile might look to integrate in the future. If you have a Google Business Profile for your site and you are testing this new Brand Profile, just be aware you might see some visibility drops as Brand Profile might take up some of that real estate on Google Search. It shouldn’t impact you overall but be aware that there might be some teething problems early on.
Post Scheduler
The most recent update to Google Business Profile might be its biggest ever. For the longest time, a scheduling tool, similar to those on social media platforms, has been a majorly desired addition to the platform. Now, there were scheduling tools out there on premium services. We had tried a few ourselves but most came with some disadvantages and it required another tool and another expense.
The recent switch in design seemed to be a sign that a native scheduler was in the works (I even predicted this on LinkedIn) and now it’s finally live. You can schedule any post at any time up to a year in advance.
This is a game changer. We’ve discussed potential use cases above for the other updates but the use cases here are endless. Got a sale coming up? Prepare all your posts in advance and get them live on your schedule. Need to send out a post on the weekend? Schedule it and have a lie in. Going to be out of office on a key day for a post? Schedule it in advance.
One of the biggest bug bears for us managing accounts is having loads of ideas for posts but being handicapped to a specific day. For example, we work with gyms that have weekend events. Now we can get all those posts live for the client. We can also work through posts in one fell swoop, saving us time and ensuring all posts go live exactly when we want them to.
Google Business Profile is in a state of constant change and as one of the most important tools for businesses, it’s an exciting time but also one where you need to be ahead of the game. With more opportunities than ever before to spread the word about your business and keep regular updates coming, you need to be ensuring that you are beating the competition to the punch. For more tips and tricks, check out our guide on how to optimise your Google Business Profile.
