Two Google Business Profile changes landed last week, and both of them affect how much control you have over what Google says about your business. One is a new tab in your profile dashboard called Collected Info. The other is a backlog on the Google Business Profile API that is slowing down the tools many businesses and agencies rely on to manage listings. Neither is dramatic on its own, but together they are a good reminder that your Google listing is not a set-it-and-forget-it asset.

We manage a lot of Business Profiles for clients, from single-location firms to businesses with more than a dozen locations, so here is what each change actually means and what we recommend doing about it.

What Collected Info is

Google has been quietly using an automated assistant to verify business details for a while now. It calls, texts, or messages the verified phone number on your profile and asks questions. Do you offer this service? Are you open on Sundays? Do you take walk-ins? Whoever picks up answers, and Google records it.

Until now, you could not see what that assistant had gathered. As of this week, you can. Google announced the rollout on September 14, and the Collected Info tab lives inside the Edit Profile section of your Business Profile dashboard in Google Search. It shows the details Google’s automated system has verified through those conversations, and it lets you review each one and delete anything that is outdated or wrong.

Here is the part that matters. Google’s own help documentation notes that deleting collected information removes it from Google’s records but does not change the other details already on your Business Profile. So this is a separate pool of data, sitting alongside what you entered yourself, and it has been shaping how Google understands your business without you seeing it.

Why you should check it this week

Think about who answers your business phone. A front desk person. A new hire. Someone covering lunch. If Google’s assistant called on a Tuesday afternoon and asked whether you offer emergency service, and the person who picked up said “I think so,” that answer may now be sitting in your profile as a verified fact.

This is the kind of thing that is hard to trace when it goes wrong. A home services company starts getting calls for a service it stopped offering two years ago. A law firm starts showing up for a practice area it does not handle. The owner checks the profile they filled out and everything looks right, because the bad information did not come from there. Collected Info is very likely one of the places it came from, and now you can finally look at it.

So open your profile, go to Edit Profile, find the Collected Info tab, and read every line. Delete what is wrong. Make a note of what is right but that you never entered yourself, because that tells you what Google has been asking about. And if the tab is empty, good. Check it again in a month, because the assistant keeps calling.

Train whoever answers the phone

This is the practical takeaway most businesses will skip, and it is the most important one. The automated calls do not always announce themselves clearly, and they can sound like a customer. Anyone answering your business line should know that if a caller asks a string of yes-or-no questions about services, hours, or amenities, they should answer accurately or say “let me have the owner confirm that.” A confident guess becomes a verified fact.

For multi-location businesses this matters even more, because each location’s number gets its own calls, and a wrong answer at one office only shows up on that one listing. You will not catch it from the main office.

The API delays and why they affect you even if you have never heard of the API

The second change is less visible but worth knowing about. Google announced through its Business Profiles support forum that applications for access to the Google Business Profile API are taking much longer than usual to process. The message, posted by Google’s Victoria Kroll in several languages, says the delay is due to an unusually high volume of applications, that Google is working through the backlog, and that there is no timeline yet. They have also asked people not to submit duplicate applications, which only makes the queue longer.

The API is what lets software talk to your Business Profile. Listing management platforms, review tools, reporting dashboards, and agency systems that push updates to dozens of locations at once all run through it. If you use a tool like that, it already has access and you are fine. If your agency is setting up a new tool, or you are moving to a new platform, expect the approval to take longer than anyone quoted you.

The bigger lesson is not to build your local presence on a single integration you do not control. We have always recommended that clients know how to log into their own Business Profile directly and make a change by hand, even if a tool normally does it for them. This week is a good example of why.

A quick Business Profile checklist while you are in there

Since you are already opening the dashboard, spend ten more minutes. Confirm your hours, especially any holiday hours Google may have auto-suggested. Check that your primary category is still the one that best describes what you do, because Google occasionally changes these. Look at the services list and remove anything you no longer offer. Read the Q&A section, where anyone can post a question and anyone can answer it. And check for pending suggested edits, because that “does this look right to you” email Google sends is easy to miss and is exactly how a wrong address slips through.

What we are telling clients right now

Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a customer sees, before your website, before your reviews, before they ever call. Google is increasingly filling it in with information it gathers on its own, and Collected Info is the first time you get a clear window into that. Use it.

If you would like us to audit your profile, or all of your locations, and clean up what Google has collected, reach out. It is one of the highest-return hours you can spend on local visibility this month, and it is a lot cheaper than finding out from a customer that Google has been telling people the wrong thing.