Google has put the Messages button back inside the Google Business Profile dashboard in Search, pairing the returning feature with an AI agent that handles customer conversations on behalf of the business. The button was previously removed; its return arrives in a different form, no longer a simple inbox but an automated channel labeled “Handled by your AI agent.” The quality of every response this agent sends depends entirely on what Google can read from the business’s own website and its Merchant Center feed.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz first documented the button on June 26, noting it appeared in his own GBP dashboard for several hours before Google pulled it back, apparently pushing the feature before it was ready for a full rollout. Muhammad Hussain had flagged it on LinkedIn, describing it as a pilot that integrates a “conversational AI Agent” directly inside Business Profile messaging.
This is a different feature from the automated FAQ-response tool Google released years earlier. That earlier product allowed businesses to set up canned replies to common questions. The new AI agent is designed to handle open-ended conversations, drawing on live data rather than predefined scripts. The practical consequence is significant: an agent answering a customer’s question about store hours, return policies, or product availability will surface whatever information it can retrieve, and the retrieval source is the business’s website combined with its Merchant Center catalog.
That dependency shifts the stakes for two data hygiene tasks that local teams often treat as low priority. A business whose website has outdated hours or whose Merchant Center feed contains stale product listings will have those errors surfaced in agent replies, directly to customers who asked a question in Search. The data quality problem is no longer confined to a ranking signal; it becomes a customer service problem with a visible failure mode.
The rollout also sits alongside Google’s broader “Business Agent” initiative, which Google has been building to give small and medium businesses an AI-managed presence layer. The messaging channel is one surface; others include automated responses to reviews and AI-drafted profile content. Each of these surfaces the same dependency on structured business data.
Google has not confirmed a general availability date for the restored messaging feature. The brief appearance and rapid removal suggest the feature is in a controlled pilot, with full access likely conditional on additional testing. Businesses that participate in the pilot may see agent-handled messages appearing without having configured the feature manually.
Local SEO teams whose clients have active Google Business Profiles should treat this as a prompt to audit two things now: the accuracy of every structured data field on the business’s website and the completeness of the Merchant Center feed, including product availability status and pricing. When the feature ships broadly, an AI agent will be answering customers before any human sees the message.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) on June 26, 2026.
