How do you contact a business through Google Maps?

Published in January 2019 and rewritten in August 2026. Google switched off Business Profile chat on 31 July 2024, so the original article’s central advice stopped being true. What follows is what works today.

In late 2018 Google Maps shipped something that felt permanent: a message button on every business listing. Ask whether they have your size, check if there is a table free for dinner, clear up the last doubt before crossing town — all without leaving the map and without hunting for a phone number.

It lasted five and a half years. On 15 July 2024 Google stopped opening new conversations, and on 31 July it retired the feature entirely, along with call history in the Business Profile. It never explained why.

The interesting part is not the shutdown itself but what it exposes: the map is still where a customer decides whether to contact you or move on to the next result, only now with fewer buttons. It is worth knowing which ones are left.

What you can still do from a listing

Call. The phone button dials straight from a mobile, no copying and pasting. It remains the most immediate route and the one people use when the decision is urgent: a workshop, a pharmacy, an appointment for today.

Open the website. This is the link that decides the most contacts and gets the least care. The listing sends traffic to a site that opens on mobile data, one-handed, while the person is walking; if it takes five seconds to paint anything or the form demands nine fields, the map did its job and the website undid it.

Questions and answers. This is the closest thing to chat that survives, with two differences that matter: it is asynchronous and it is public. Anyone can ask and anyone can answer — including the business, which should be answering first. A well-written reply stays visible to everyone who arrives later, something private chat never did.

The profile’s links. Since 2023 a Business Profile can carry links to social accounts, and that is where many businesses now hang their WhatsApp. It is not a native Maps channel, but it covers the job chat used to do.

Directions and opening hours. Less glamorous, equally decisive: a good share of the contacts that never happen are down to stale hours or an address that does not match the actual door.

What does it look like from the customer’s side?

Take a concrete search: someone needs a company to build their website and is weighing up options in Bogotá. Before messaging anyone, they open the map.

There they judge things no landing page tells them: which part of the city the office is in, how they would get there if the meeting ends up being in person, what is nearby, what the reviews say and how recent they are. That alone rules out half the shortlist.

That search carries local intent, and recognising it changes where you invest: when the engine answers with a map, the listing matters more than the services page.

For the ones left, they open the website from the listing. That is the moment the contact is won or lost: if the page loads fast, says clearly what the company does, and offers a short form or a visible phone number, the conversation starts. If not, they go back to the map and try the next one.

The conversation that used to begin inside a Maps chat now begins one click further out, on your own site. The funnel has not disappeared — it has moved.

If the business is yours

A Business Profile is free and remains the local marketing asset with the best ratio of effort to result. What is worth checking, in order:

1. Name, address and phone identical to your website’s. Google cross-checks both sources. A silly mismatch — an abbreviation on one side and the full word on the other, an old number nobody removed — weakens confidence in the listing.
2. The right primary category. It is the strongest signal for which searches you appear in. Secondary categories help; the primary one decides.
3. Real opening hours, holidays included. One holiday marked wrong is a customer arriving at a closed door and leaving a one-star review.
4. Questions and answers, seeded. Post the five questions you always get, with their answers. It is content people read before contacting you, and it removes half the first-contact emails.
5. A web destination that survives the click. Fast on mobile, contact details in plain sight, and a form that works even when JavaScript fails.

The first four are an afternoon’s work inside the profile. The fifth is the one that usually means touching the site — and the one that recovers the most contacts; our search rankings guide takes that work slowly.

One detail for that web destination: the map on your contact page should point at the listing itself, not an approximate address. With the Google Maps coordinates tool you paste your listing link and get latitude, longitude and the code to embed the map on your site.

The lesson the dead chat leaves behind

A contact channel you do not control can disappear on two weeks’ notice, and whoever switched it off owes you nothing. It happened with Google’s chat, it happened before with business pages on other platforms, and it will happen again.

So the working rule is simple: use third-party channels to get found, and move the conversation onto something that is yours — your site, your phone, your inbox. The map is the shop window; the door should stay yours.

So no, next time you will not message us through Google Maps. But you will probably find us there.