On September 14, Google switched on a tab inside the Business Profile dashboard called Collected info. Almost nobody has looked at it. It is worth five minutes of your Tuesday.
Here is what is in there. Google’s own help page says those details were “collected in phone or chat conversations with your business,” and that they get used “to match your business with customers looking for services like yours.” The same page says Google “may occasionally reach out using automated messages via call, text, or WhatsApp to the verified phone number on your profile.”
So a machine called the business. Somebody answered and talked to it. The machine wrote down what it heard, and what it wrote down is now part of how that business gets matched to a customer.
The calling is not the new part. The new part is that the owner can finally read the notes. Google’s own words: “You can now review details verified by Google’s automated assistant right inside your Business Profile dashboard.” Edit profile, then Collected info. If a line in there is wrong, there is a Delete next to it.
Now the ordinary version, because the abstract version is useless.
A restaurant in a strip center. The phone rings at 2:40 on a Wednesday. Whoever is closest picks it up, and it is not a customer, it is an automated call asking whether they cater. The answer is “yeah, sometimes,” or “let me go ask,” or a flat no from somebody who is 3 weeks into the job. 15 seconds. Forgotten by 2:41. That answer is now a fact about the restaurant.
A dentist gets asked which insurance she takes. A law firm gets asked whether they do wills. A plumber gets asked whether he works Saturdays. Nobody in any of those offices thought they were publishing anything. They answered the phone.
That is the whole thing, and it is not really a Google story. Something reads about your business before a person does. If you did not write what it reads, it goes with whatever it collected.
But everybody is going to say “fine, I’ll just go delete the wrong ones!” Sure. Go do that. It takes ten minutes and it is worth doing. Deleting is not answering, though. Google says removing a collected detail takes it out of Google’s records and does not change the other details already on the profile. You are erasing a bad note. You are not writing a good one.
And this is only Google. ChatGPT never called anybody. Gemini never called anybody. They read. Whatever is publicly written about the business, in the visible text of the website and in the machine-readable page at the end of the web address, is what they have to work with when a person asks who is good for this in my town.
Which brings me to the unglamorous thing I sell. A back cover page. It sits at your own web address, at /llms.txt, and the s in the middle is a plural, LLMs, large language models, the software behind ChatGPT and Gemini. No design, no photographs. Just true statements about the business in a form nothing can misread: what you do, where you do it, what it costs, what the hours are, what you do not do. Swing Bays and Shortline GMC are two of the businesses we have built one for.
The whole idea is one sentence. Write the page first, so nothing has to guess from a 15 second phone call.
I know how this lands on a Tuesday. You have a website, somebody is paid every month to look after it, and by every measure your business has used for the last 15 years you are covered. This is one more thing on a list that is already long.
So here is the smallest possible version of it. Open your Business Profile, click Edit profile, and look for Collected info. It may not be there. Google says the feature is available for “select regions, languages, and business categories,” so plenty of you will not have the tab at all. Look anyway.
Because whether you find it or not, you learn the same thing, and it is the thing this whole issue is about: you have never once checked what gets said about your business when you are not in the room.
That was always true. The difference is that now there is a tab for it.
If you would rather write the page than read the notes: https://kerzie.ai/back-cover