You run a clinic, a plumbing company, a dental practice, a law firm. Every few weeks someone tells you AI is about to change everything about how customers find you. Then they sell you something new. Meanwhile you still have a phone that needs to ring and a schedule that needs filling.
So here is a piece of news that actually matters, and the reason it matters is not the reason most people will give you.
What Google Actually Announced
Google announced that the "Ask Maps" feature inside Google Maps is gaining a set of agentic capabilities, meaning the AI can take actions on your behalf instead of just answering questions. According to TechCrunch, users can now order food, book hotels, and find event tickets directly through Ask Maps.
A user can open Maps and ask something like where they can order vegan avocado toast and an oat milk latte near home. Ask Maps surfaces nearby restaurants that have it. Tap "Order online" and it places the order through supported platforms like Square, Toast, or Uber Eats, adding items to a cart before the user pays on that platform.
Hotels work the same way. A user can ask for a decently priced, top rated hotel with an artsy vibe within walking distance of a gym and restaurants for a conference weekend. Ask Maps compares prices, checks availability, and returns options with links through to the partner site to book.
Google is also adding Personal Intelligence to Ask Maps, which lets the tool pull from a user's Gmail and Google Calendar to personalize answers. Ask a question about what time your flight lands, or where to eat near your hotel, and it answers using your own email and calendar. That feature is off by default. Ask Maps will also remember prior conversations so users can pick up trip planning where they left off. The agentic features are rolling out to users in the U.S.
Google describes this as part of turning Maps from a navigation tool into an assistant that helps people complete real world tasks. That last part is the part I want to talk about.
Sean's Take: An Old Google Asset Just Got More Important
Here is my honest read on this.
Google Maps has always been one of the most valuable assets a local business has. I have believed that for years and I have said it in nearly every strategy call I have ever had with a service business owner. What is fascinating to me is that a decades old, traditional Google asset is now becoming more important because of AI, not less.
That runs against the story most people are telling right now. The popular narrative is that AI comes along and makes the old stuff obsolete. What I see happening here is the opposite. AI is reaching for the same data Google has been collecting and organizing all along, and it is referencing it more strongly than before.
So the course of action is not new. The course of action is to double down on the exact same thing we have been telling clients to double down on. Your Google Business Profile. Your reviews. Your hours, your services, your photos, your categories. All of it.
Right Now It's Hotels and Food. That Won't Be Where It Stops
Read the announcement carefully and you will notice the agentic features are narrow. Food ordering. Hotel bookings. Event tickets. If you own a dental practice or an HVAC company, none of that applies to you today.
My view is that this is a starting point, not an endpoint. Restaurants and hotels are the easiest categories to start with because the booking and ordering infrastructure already exists and is standardized. Once the pattern works there, I would expect it to extend to other kinds of local businesses over time. That is my opinion, not something Google has stated.
So I am not asking you to panic or to prepare for something that does not exist yet. I am asking you to notice the direction of travel and act accordingly, which conveniently means doing the thing you should already be doing.
Why Google Is the One to Watch Here
There is a specific reason I pay closer attention to Google on this than to anyone else.
Google is the only company that is a serious player in the AI race and is also, by a wide margin, the dominant player in search. Nobody else sits in both chairs. That means we can watch Google to see how AI and search actually fit together in practice, instead of guessing.
My belief is that if the other AI companies build out more agentic search, they will likely lean on the building blocks Google already built. Business listings. Reviews. Categories. Location data. Hours. Those blocks exist because they turned out to be the best available signals of what a good local business is. It is hard to invent a better set from scratch.
Which means the work you do on your Google Business Profile is not a bet on one platform. It is a bet on the underlying signals that any agentic system is likely to reference.
The Core Thesis: Less Is Changing Than You Think
This is the part I keep coming back to.
On the surface, AI is changing a lot. Interfaces look different. People ask questions in full sentences instead of typing three keywords. An assistant can now add items to a cart for someone.
Underneath that, my honest assessment is that far less is changing than the headlines suggest. The question a customer is trying to answer has not changed: who nearby is good at this, available, and trustworthy. AI is just a new way of asking it. And the data it uses to answer is largely the same data Google has always used.
My advice today is nearly identical to the advice I would have given five years ago. If you are a local business, have an excellent Google Business Profile. It supports the Google Ads campaigns we run for you, and it supports the AI search side. Same asset, two jobs, and now the second job is growing.
We have managed more than 3.2 million dollars in ad spend and generated more than 38,000 leads over ten plus years as a Google and Meta Partner. The clients who consistently perform best are almost never the ones chasing whatever launched last month. They are the ones with clean fundamentals and a strong local presence, so their paid traffic converts and their organic presence backs it up.
What You Should Actually Do This Week
Skip the AI strategy meeting. Do this instead.
Open your Google Business Profile and read it as a stranger. Are your hours right, including holidays? Is every service you offer actually listed, in plain language a customer would use? Is your primary category the most accurate one available?
Fill every empty field. Service areas, attributes, appointment or booking links, description, products or services with prices where it makes sense. Empty fields are missing signals. An AI that cannot find the answer on your profile cannot recommend you for it.
Add real photos. Your team, your vehicles, your treatment rooms, your finished work. Not stock images. Refresh them regularly rather than once a year.
Get serious about reviews, permanently. Build asking into your process at the point where the customer is happiest. Then respond to every review, good and bad, in a calm and human way. Reviews are one of the clearest signals of business quality and they are not going away.
Make sure your booking path actually works on a phone. The Maps announcement is all about completing tasks in one flow. If someone taps through from your profile and hits a slow form or a broken call button, you lose them regardless of how good your listing is.
Connect it to your paid ads. Location extensions, call tracking, and consistent messaging between your ads and your profile. When both tell the same story, your cost per lead drops. We have a client running new patient leads at 1.23 dollars each on Meta, and none of that works without a credible local presence behind the ad.
Final Thoughts
Google Maps is becoming a place where people do things, not just look things up. The features announced so far are limited to food, hotels, and event tickets in the U.S., and I expect the pattern to spread.
You do not need a new playbook for that. You need the old one, executed better than your competitors are executing it. That is the honest answer, even though a more complicated answer would be easier to sell.
If you want a second set of eyes on your Google Business Profile and how it is feeding the ads you are already running, book a call with us. We will tell you what is actually worth fixing and what is not.
