You get four days to reject edits to your profile
By Mohit Sawhney
Anyone can suggest a change to your Google Business Profile — your opening hours, your address, your phone number. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google has updated its help documentation to spell out what happens next: when Google notifies you about a suggested edit, you have four days to accept or reject it.
If you do nothing within those four days, Google may publish the change anyway — provided, the help text says, it is "supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website".
This is a trade publication reporting a change to Google's own help page, not a press announcement from Google. But the wording quoted is from Google's documentation, and it is specific.
What the help document says
Search Engine Roundtable quotes a new section called "Understand notifications about suggested edits". The two lines that matter:
> If a suggested edit requires your review, you may receive an email or an in-product notification. Once notified, you have 4 days to accept or reject the suggestion. If you don't respond within 4 days, Google may automatically publish the update if it is supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website.
Google also frames this as giving owners more say: it will notify you about certain suggested edits before they go live, to help you keep your information accurate.
There is a catch, and Search Engine Roundtable flags it. Google says it may apply some suggested edits without notifying you first — specifically in cases where edits must meet policy guidelines. So the four-day window does not cover everything. Some changes will simply appear.
What this means for you
The practical point is dull but important: check the email address attached to your profile. If notifications about suggested edits are going to an old address, a staff member who left, or a spam folder, four days will pass without you knowing, and the edit may go live.
A few things worth doing this week:
- Confirm who receives profile notifications. Make sure it is an inbox someone actually reads, and that Google's emails are not being filtered out.
- Turn on notifications in the Google app or Maps, if you manage your profile from a phone. The help text mentions in-product notifications as well as email.
- Look at your profile now. If a wrong edit has already slipped through, you want to know before a customer turns up at the wrong time or rings a dead number.
The line about edits "supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website" is the interesting one. It suggests Google cross-checks suggestions against your own site. If your website says you close at 5pm and your profile says 6pm, a user suggestion moving the profile to 5pm is more likely to be accepted automatically.
That cuts both ways. If your website is out of date, it can pull your profile in the wrong direction. If it is accurate, it acts as a kind of backstop — evidence that the information Google already has is right.
Nothing to panic about
This is not a new risk. Users have always been able to suggest edits, and Google has always been able to publish them. What has changed, per Search Engine Roundtable, is that the timescale is now written down: four days, then Google may act.
If you already keep your hours, phone number and address current in both places, this changes very little for you. If you have not looked at your profile in a year, it is a good prompt. Our guide to what to put on your Google Business Profile covers the fields worth getting right, and why your website should live on a domain you own explains why having a site you control matters when Google is using it as a reference point.