To meet the demands of the evolving online landscape and the rise of AI-driven search, Google continues to expand the scope and complexity of data in Business Profile listings. Currently, they manage over one hundred data points that influence your locations' search visibility, map rankings, and AI-generated results. Key data points include, but are not limited to:
To populate these data points, Google does of course take your website and data uploads into account, however, they do not stop there. Now more than ever, Google crawls online information, incorporating data sourced from social media, indexed articles, review content, user suggestions, and even competitive activity, often without your explicit knowledge or consent.
Due to internal privacy regulations, Google does not disclose the exact sources of these data points. That said, this is permissible since once your business information is provided to Google, they effectively own that data and can alter its public presentation as they see fit.
As an example, in 2025, Google began adding any social links it could find associated with a business to their listings. This mostly included general Facebook and Instagram links, but we also observed Google adding employee LinkedIn pages to business listings in the social links section. Google highly values filling in data they deem relevant to replace blank data sets, believing it benefits the searcher more than leaving them empty.
While some updates can enhance your search visibility, others may misrepresent your business and harm your brand. With the growing prevalence of AI-driven search experiences, incorrect details not only mislead individual customers but also serve as training data for AI models, potentially amplifying these errors on a large scale. The implications are significant.
Understanding how these edits operate within Google’s system will empower you to better manage both your data and the data Google attributes to your listings. Knowing how to play along within their systems allows you to best align your practices with theirs for better results on both sides.
Google’s systems, including the suggested edit function, prioritize benefiting the searcher over the businesses themselves. This means they will prioritize new information if they believe it will benefit the searcher. In the case of social links, Google’s rationale is that social media pages provide valuable information to potential customers, making any available links more beneficial than having none listed.
Populating all available data fields on your end can sometimes help mitigate these changes, as it signals to Google that you are providing active and comprehensive information to searchers interested in your business. However, this does not guarantee that Google will not prioritize newer or fresher data over yours if they see fit.
While they are often referred to as “community suggested edits” or simply "suggested edits," which imply they are manually suggested by users or the community, most of these edits are not submitted by community members. In fact, these data points are often sourced databases and data sets that Google finds and deems relevant and valuable enough to add to the listing.
If you encounter a continuous data override or a persistent data point not originating from your data set, it likely comes from an external data set. To amend this, you need to locate and correct the data source, which may involve contacting the data set manager to update the information.
Once your business information is provided to Google, they effectively own that data. This allows them to make publicly visible adjustments to your data set based on their findings. Monitoring the integrity and currency of your data becomes crucial at this juncture since the ideal scenario would be for your data and the presented data to match.
When a suggested edit is pushed to your listing, the edit takes the place of the data it is effectively editing. These edits do not need to be approved in order to be displayed. Although your official data set is not overridden by these suggestions, the publicly visible data is overridden by the data pushed by Google.
That said, these "suggested" updates are published online without altering your official GBP listing data. Google’s numerous databases allow them to pull and push data from multiple sources. Again, they unfortunately do not disclose the specific sources of this data.
Additionally, if an edit is pending for a while, it indicates it is assigned for manual review, which can take anywhere from minutes to 30 days or longer, depending on the complexity of the investigation required.
Google allows you to “accept” or “reject” suggested edits. Leaving the edit as not approved or not denied will indicate to Google that it is accurate, or at least not incorrect, and will push the edit to your listing(s). This aspect makes monitoring your data and its suggested edits especially important since setting and forgetting will not maintain the data you initially set.
Within your GBP account, you can see the recent suggested edits for your listing(s) under the "Google Updates" section of the profile editor. Alternatively, LocalClarity’s RealityCheck™ tool simplifies monitoring suggested edits, assembling them together in one place, across Google's 100+ data points, listings, and platforms. For wherever you monitor your edits, checking them at least once a week is best practice for maintaining your data’s integrity. Checking them more frequently, such as once per day, ensures best data integrity.
You should also keep in mind that some edits are more important than others. Suggested changes for categories, phone number, website, and address are the most crucial since they directly drive impressions and conversions for your business(es). The degrees of impact these suggested edits can leave on your business range from inconvenience to affecting your bottom line so it is in your best interest to monitor these and approve or deny these edits as best fits your needs.
