How to let customers text you from your Google Business Profile

Google replaced chat with texting, not with silence

Google shut down the old Business Profile chat feature in July 2024. For a while after that, a lot of business owners assumed messaging a business straight from search results was gone for good. It was not gone, it moved. For eligible accounts, Google's own help documentation now says a customer can contact a business from its Business Profile through text messages or through WhatsApp, depending on what the owner has set up.

The texting option shows up on mobile search results wherever Google has rolled it out to that profile. It is still rolling out account by account, so not every business sees it yet. If yours does not have it, the fallbacks later in this post cover the gap.

Turning it on

The setup path is the same one several guides to the feature describe. Sign in to the Google account that manages your profile, open Edit profile, and go to the Contact tab. Find Chat and choose Text messaging. Enter the number you want customers to reach, and save.

That is the whole setup. Once it is live, a searcher who finds your profile on their phone sees a way to text you straight from the search result. It opens their messages app, with no dialing and no form to fill out first.

• Edit profile, then the Contact tab
• Find Chat
• Choose Text messaging and enter your number
• Save, then check the profile on your phone

What shows publicly, and what does not

Only your primary phone number is shown publicly on the profile itself. The Call button dials that primary number, and that does not change when you add a texting option. Texting is a separate contact method layered on top, not a replacement for the phone number your profile already shows.

If your profile also carries a booking link, Google requires that link to be a real web address starting with https. A phone number or a raw text link will not work there, so the booking link and the texting option are two different things pointing at two different actions.

If your profile has no texting option yet

Because the rollout is uneven, some profiles genuinely do not have the Chat field to edit yet. That does not mean the profile has to stay silent. A few fallbacks put the same number in front of the same searcher without depending on the feature being live.

• Add a line near the top of your business description, if Google accepts it: Text us at (your number) for a fast answer.
• Repeat the line in a Google Post if Google accepts a phone number there; Posts sometimes reject one.
• If your profile shows a booking link, point it at a page on your own site that carries the same texting number.

The setup is easy, the reply is the hard part

None of this matters if the number behind the button goes unanswered. A searcher who finds your profile, taps to text, and hears nothing back for an hour has learned the same lesson a caller learns from an unanswered phone: this business is hard to reach, try the next one. The texting option only pays off if a reply comes back within seconds, at whatever hour the search happened.

That is the piece Google's feature does not solve for you. It gives you the button. It does not staff the line behind it. On plans with a SetMore AI number, it answers every inbound message within seconds, asks one qualifying question, offers two real times from your calendar, and books the call, day or night. That is the number to put in the Chat field.

Testing it like a searcher would

Once the texting option is live, search for your own business on your phone the way a customer would, not by opening the profile from a bookmark. Find the texting button on the profile and send a real message. Watch how fast the reply comes, and read it as a stranger would rather than as the owner who already knows what the business does.

If a person is going to answer that message eventually, this is a normal, useful test. If the message could arrive at 9pm on a Saturday and nobody is watching the line, the test tells you something worth fixing before a real customer finds the same gap.

Where this fits with the rest of your funnel

Google search is one entry point into the same texting number, not a separate system. The number on your profile should be the same one on your website's text us button, the same one on your QR code, and the same one a follow-up call center or ad campaign would use. One number, answered every time, wherever the searcher finds it, is a simpler thing to run than a different contact method for every channel.