Google Business Profile suggested edits now come with a deadline. When a suggestion needs your review, Google says you have four days to accept or reject it. If you don't respond, Google may publish the change when other public information, such as your business website, supports it. Checking the profile three times a week closes the gap.
Suggested edits are how the public, and sometimes competitors, change your hours, phone number, category or even your open status on Google. The four-day window is short for an owner who checks the dashboard once a month, and shorter still for an agency managing dozens of locations. Here is what Google changed, why your website now acts as the tiebreaker, and a routine that keeps the profile accurate.
Google Business Profile suggested edits now carry a four-day deadline
Google's help page on profile updates now spells out the timing. "Once notified, you have four days to accept or reject the suggestion," it says, and if you don't respond within four days, "Google may automatically publish the update if it is supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website" (Google Business Profile Help). Search Engine Roundtable first reported the new wording on September 23 (Search Engine Roundtable).
Google has not said when this process started. Search Engine Watch noted that "the page does not specify when the underlying process began" (Search Engine Watch), so the rule may describe how suggestions already worked. Either way, the deadline is now documented, and it is the timeline to plan around.
Your website decides which suggested edits Google publishes
The four-day rule makes your website a referee. If your website still lists outdated hours and someone suggests those hours, Google has public information that supports a wrong edit. If your site shows the current hours clearly, a wrong suggestion has nothing to stand on. That makes website accuracy a profile-protection task as much as an SEO one.
Match the facts exactly: name, address, phone, hours, holiday hours and services, on the contact page and in the footer. Add LocalBusiness structured data so the same facts are machine-readable, which we cover in our guide to schema markup for service-area businesses. Service-area businesses that hide their address have extra rules, set out in our service area business setup guide.
Anyone on Google Maps can suggest an edit to your business
Suggested edits come from Google Maps users, and the list of what they can change is long. Google's Maps help page lets the public suggest changes to a place's name, category, location, hours, phone number and website, or report that a place is closed or not there. Google says it reviews all edits, and that edits trying to significantly change a business may be rejected because they may be fraudulent (Google Maps Help).
Most suggestions are honest. A customer finds you closed at 5 p.m. and suggests new hours, or a supplier spots an outdated phone number. The risk sits with the bad ones: a competitor marking you closed, or a spammer changing your category. Category changes in particular decide which searches you appear in, as we explained in our post on Google Business Profile categories.
Spot Google updates on your Business Profile by their color
Google marks its own changes in the profile editor. On the same help page, Google explains that text color shows the type of update, and "Blue: Shows info changed by Google" (Google). Scan for blue text every time you open the editor, because it flags fields that no longer match what you entered.
Multi-location brands should check bulk uploads as well. Google's help page notes that when a field is left blank in a bulk upload, an automatic update may apply. Fill every field you care about, even ones that rarely change, so Google has nothing empty to complete on your behalf. Google also gathers information through automated calls and texts, which we covered in our post on Google Business Profile collected info.
A three-day Google Business Profile check for owners and agencies
A once-a-week check can miss the window entirely. Search Engine Watch pointed out that "an agency checking listings every Monday could miss the entire response window for a notification arriving on Tuesday" (Search Engine Watch). Checking on Monday, Wednesday and Friday keeps every gap at three days or less, inside the four-day window.
Name one owner per profile who receives the email and in-app notifications, and add a backup for holidays. Reject edits that are wrong, accept the ones that are right, and log both. Fixing a bad edit after it goes live takes time: Google says owner edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes up to 30 days (Google Business Profile Help). With Small Business Saturday six weeks away, our holiday listing checklist folds this check into the season's prep.
Google Maps reviews now sit behind a sign-in
A second change landed the same fortnight. Search Engine Roundtable reported on September 30 that Google Maps now requires people to sign in to a Google account to see all reviews on a Business Profile, sort them or leave one (Search Engine Roundtable). The report rests on sightings from several users.
For owners, the practical effect is that logged-out visitors see fewer reviews, so the first few carry more weight. Keep asking recent customers for reviews and reply to them, as our guide to Google reviews explains. If you manage several locations and want help setting up a review and edit-monitoring routine, talk to our local team.
