Google has connected your Business Profile to its Gemini app, so AI can draft review replies, update your hours, summarise your performance, and flag gaps. Here is what it means for your local business.
If you run a local business, the most valuable page you own is probably not your website. It is your Google Business Profile: the free listing that shows your business on Google Search and Maps, with your hours, photos, reviews, and the buttons that let a customer call you or get directions. Keeping it fresh is the kind of small, constant job that quietly wins trade and just as quietly gets forgotten when the day fills up.
On 10 June 2026, Google announced on its blog that you can now connect that Business Profile to the Gemini app, its AI assistant, the one you chat with the way you would with ChatGPT. Once connected, Gemini can read your reviews, your customer questions, and your performance data, and then do the legwork: draft replies, update your details, and tell you what needs attention.
For an Australian small business, this turns a pile of fiddly admin into a short conversation. Here is exactly what is arriving, and the sensible way to use it.
There are two parts. The first is a direct Business Profile connection: a single, secure tap that lets Gemini see the reviews, questions, and performance numbers attached to your listing. The second is what Google calls Business notebooks, a workspace that keeps your chats, your website, and your Business Profile together in one place so the assistant remembers your business between sessions instead of starting cold every time.
With both switched on, Google says you can ask Gemini to summarise how your business did last month (search impressions, calls, and engagement), draft replies to customer reviews in your brand voice, update your opening hours, post a seasonal note, and surface gaps such as an unanswered question or missing holiday hours. It will also suggest local opportunities and even sketch a promotion when you ask for one.
One honest caveat on timing. Google said the rollout begins globally this month, but it excludes the EEA and the UK. Australia is not on that exclusion list, so it should reach Australian businesses during this wave, though gradually. If it is not in your Gemini app yet, it is on the way, so check again over the coming weeks.
Google's own framing says it plainly. In the announcement, Vishnu Sivaji, a senior director on the Gemini app, described the Business Profile as your digital storefront, the thing that helps you stand out on Search and Maps, build credibility through reviews, and turn a search into a booking, an order, or a sale. For a lot of local businesses, more buyers see that listing than ever see the homepage.
The reason a profile slides is rarely strategy. It is time. Reviews go unanswered because nobody got to them, hours are wrong over a public holiday because the update never happened, and the question a customer asked in the listing sits there for a fortnight. Each of those is a small leak, and together they cost real trade. Handing the drafting and the reminders to an assistant closes the gap between knowing the work matters and actually getting it done.
The point is not that the AI replaces you. It is that the work which used to wait for a spare hour now gets drafted in a minute, so your storefront stays sharp.
There is a catch worth naming. An assistant that drafts in your voice is only as good as the voice and the priorities you give it. Left to run unread, it will be confidently bland, and a flat reply to an unhappy customer can do more harm than no reply at all. The win comes from pairing the speed of the draft with a human eye on what actually goes out.
The bigger shift here is the one worth keeping an eye on. The everyday marketing jobs that used to need a person at a keyboard are becoming things you delegate to an assistant and approve. That is genuinely useful for a time-poor owner, as long as someone keeps a hand on the wheel so the output stays accurate and sounds like your business.
This is exactly the kind of work we set up at NextAura. We connect these AI assistants to your Business Profile, build the prompts and the brand voice so the drafts come out sounding like you, and put a sensible review step in front of anything that goes public. If you would rather hand the optimising and the automating to a team that tracks these tools daily, get in touch and we will carry it while you get back to looking after your customers.
Tell us where you are headed. We will come back with a scope, a price, and a launch date you can plan around.
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