Google is going to call your business. These are the three switches that decide what happens next.

What the calls are in 2026, and why they changed

For years Google has placed automated calls to businesses to check facts. A voice says it is calling from Google, asks whether you are open on Sunday or whether you still offer a service, and hangs up. Owners learned to ignore them. That category of call still exists, and it is the least important of the three the profile now controls.

The call that matters is newer. It started as “Ask for Me,” a Search Labs experiment that Google tested in early 2025 for auto shops and nail salons: a searcher typed what they needed, and Google’s assistant phoned local businesses to collect prices and availability, then sent the searcher a written summary. In Google’s I/O post of May 19, 2026, the company said it was expanding agentic booking in Search to “a wide range of new tasks, including local experiences and services,” and that for “select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care” a user can “ask Google to call businesses on your behalf,” with the capabilities rolling out “to everyone in the U.S. this summer.” Trade coverage through July 2026 (JobNimbus, MarketingCode) described the same feature reaching roofing, HVAC, plumbing and electrical under the home-repair umbrella. We covered the customer-facing side of this in Google’s AI is calling Denver businesses for quotes; this post is about the business-facing controls.

The mechanics, as Google’s own Business Profile help page describes them: Google may call “to book appointments, check restaurant wait times, or confirm prices and availability of in-store products and services” once a customer has provided details like a preferred time and service type. If you work with an online booking provider, Google may book through that partner instead of calling. Google limits repeat calls for the same information and avoids late-night and early-morning hours. The calls placed on behalf of customers “are monitored and recorded for quality assurance.”

Two things changed the stakes. First, the call is now a sales call in reverse: the assistant is comparing you to two or three competitors and will report back who answered, who had an opening and what each one said it would cost. Second, the assistant is reaching businesses that already rank. Coverage of the feature consistently describes it contacting businesses that appear in local results for the query and match the customer’s stated criteria, which means the call is a reward for being visible, and the toggles decide whether the reward turns into a job.

The three toggles, labeled the way Google labels them

Open your Business Profile from Search (search your business name while signed in), choose the three-dot menu, then Business Profile settings, then Advanced settings. Scroll to the heading Google automated calls and text messages. You must be a verified profile to see or change these; unverified profiles cannot opt out. There are three switches.

A word on the texts. Google may also send text messages or WhatsApp messages to confirm business details, and these are not governed by the three switches. Replying STOP in English stops the texts and DELETE removes them; the commands differ by language. They are harmless, but a front-desk phone that gets a Google text asking to confirm Saturday hours should have someone who knows to answer it rather than report it as spam, because the alternative is a call.

Note what is not here. There is no setting for “let Google’s AI show my prices,” because the assistant gets prices from your website, your profile and your answers on the call. There is no setting to choose which competitors it calls. And there is no setting that stops Google from reading your profile; turning all three off stops the phone calls, not the recommendation engine. If your goal is to be recommended and booked, the controls that matter are the ones in the AI readiness checklist: one identity, a price range per service, live availability, and a booking method. The toggles are the last mile.

Which to leave on, by business type

The question people actually ask is “should I turn this off,” usually after an employee complained about a robot call. Here is how we answer it, by the kind of business.

Trades and home services (plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, garage doors)

Leave Bookings and inquiries on. Home repair is one of the three categories Google named at I/O, and the whole value of the call is that a homeowner with a dead water heater asked an assistant to find someone who can come today and told it a budget. Whoever answers with a window and a range gets shortlisted. Leave Keep your profile up to date on if your hours shift by season; assign one person to check the Pending edits weekly. Turn Post on your behalf off, because your dispatcher should not be able to change your public hours by misspeaking.

Salons, barbers, spas, pet groomers

If you already use a scheduler that partners with Google (Booksy, Fresha, Vagaro, Square Appointments, Mindbody and others), the booking toggle mostly determines whether Google calls you for the things the partner feed cannot answer, like “can you fit a balayage and a cut before 6 on Saturday.” Leave it on. Beauty and pet care are the other two named categories. Keep the profile-update switch on; posting on your behalf off.

Restaurants

Wait-time checks are a named use. Leave the booking toggle on even if you take reservations through a platform, because the call also covers “do you have a table for eight tonight” when the platform shows nothing. Hosts should know the call exists.

Dental, medical, chiropractic, physical therapy

Leave the booking toggle on, but understand that the assistant will not collect health details and your front desk should not give any. The call will be “are you accepting new patients, do you take this insurance, what is the first available new-patient slot.” Those three answers should be on your website too, because the assistant reads that first.

Professional services (law, accounting, agencies)

The customer-request calls are least common here, and “confirm your price” is awkward for hourly work. Leave bookings on anyway; a call asking whether you take consultations this week is a lead. If the firm has no one answering the main line, fix that before worrying about the toggle.

When turning it off is right

Turn Bookings and inquiries off if you cannot answer the phone during business hours and have no plan to, if your capacity is full for months and new bookings would be declined anyway, or if you are in one of the five states where the feature is not offered (then it is moot). Do not turn it off because the calls are “weird.” They are the customer, one step removed.

What a real call sounds like, and how to spot a fake one

Sterling Sky’s guide of September 28, 2026 to telling Google’s calls from scams lines up with Google’s help page. A legitimate automated call identifies itself as coming from Google, says why it is calling (confirming hours, booking for a customer, checking a price), and discloses that it is automated and recorded. It asks for facts a customer would ask for: whether you are open, whether you offer a service and what it costs, whether you can book a time, how long the wait is. It does not sell anything.

A scam call does one of four things that Google’s never does: asks you to pay to create, verify, maintain or reinstate your profile; asks for your password, a verification code, an OTP or a PIN; threatens to remove your listing unless you buy something; or offers a ranking guarantee. Google does not make unsolicited automated sales calls about SEO at all. If any of those four show up, hang up, press nothing, and check your profile directly.

That exchange is a paraphrase of the pattern, not a transcript, and the specific script will vary. What matters is the shape: a disclosed, recorded, automated caller with a specific customer request; a business that answers with a window and a range; a booking or a callback. The assistant is going to summarize what you said next to what two other businesses said. The business that says “it depends, have them call us” is the one that gets summarized as “could not provide pricing.”

What you should never do on the call: give a price you will not honor, promise a time you cannot keep, or give anything that looks like a credential. What you should also not do is treat the caller as a robot to be gotten rid of. The recording goes to a customer.

The three ways a booking call ends

Every customer-request call we have seen or heard described ends in one of three places, and the difference between them is almost entirely what the person who answered knew in advance.

The second row is the expensive one. A business with a full calendar and good reviews that cannot say a number on the phone ends up listed under a competitor who can, even when the competitor is worse. The fix is not a pricing policy change; it is a one-page sheet by the phone with the range for each of your top eight services, the variables that move it, and the next three open windows. We go deeper on why ranges beat “call for a quote” in the case for publishing price ranges, and the same sheet that serves the phone should be on the website, because the assistant checks the site before it calls.

The third row has a silent version. If the profile phone number rings to a tracking number that forwards to a cell that goes to voicemail after six rings, the assistant hears a voicemail, and you never know the call happened. Check the number on the profile and call it from a different phone at 4:45 pm on a Friday.

The phone side: answer rate, after-hours and who picks up

The toggle is worth nothing if the line is not answered. Jobber’s 2026 Home Service Trends Report (1,050 U.S. home-service owners surveyed December 2025) found that more than 55% of customers expect a response within an hour and 28% expect an immediate reply; Housecall Pro’s homeowner survey of February 25 to 26, 2026 (1,100-plus U.S. homeowners) found 72% would pay more to have an emergency resolved within 24 hours. An automated assistant is a customer with those expectations compressed to one phone call, and it will not leave a message and wait.

Three practical rules. First, during business hours a human answers within three rings, and that human has the price sheet and the calendar. Second, after hours the line should not go to a generic voicemail; it should go to a service or an answering assistant that can take the request, give the range, and book or promise a callback at a stated time. Our sister company AI Speed to Leads builds exactly that for service businesses: an answering assistant that picks up in seconds, quotes from your ranges, books into your calendar and texts the customer a confirmation, with the call summarized to you. Whatever you use, it has to answer on the first ring and know your numbers. Third, the person or system that answers should know what an automated Google call is, so the response is “yes, Thursday 8 to 10” and not “is this a scam?”

Google’s limits help here. The help page says Google avoids late-night and early-morning hours and limits repeat calls about the same information, so you are not going to be flooded; a busy Denver HVAC company in January might see a handful a week. But each one is a customer who already decided to hire someone and asked an assistant to pick. We wrote about why minutes matter in lead response time; this is that post with the customer replaced by software that keeps score.

Scripting the answer in ten lines

Give whoever answers the phone a card. It should say: confirm the service and the area; give the next two or three open windows; give the range for that service and the one variable that moves it most; say yes to the booking if the window is real; ask for the customer’s name and number; promise a text confirmation and send it. Ten lines, laminated, by the phone, and a copy in the answering system’s prompt. That card, more than any setting, decides the row of the table above you land in.

Denver notes: state rules, categories and Local Services Ads

Colorado is not on Google’s excluded list. The five states where the customer-request calls are not offered (Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska) are, as far as we can tell, the states with two-party consent or call-recording rules that complicate a recorded automated call; Google does not give a reason on the help page, so treat that as our inference and not a fact. A Denver business that also runs a location in one of those states should expect the feature to behave differently there.

On categories: Google named home repair, beauty and pet care at I/O. Your Business Profile primary category is what the assistant uses to decide whether you fit, which is one more reason the primary category should be the specific trade (“Furnace repair service,” “Hair salon”) rather than a generic one. We cover the category decision in our guide to Google Business Profile changes in 2026, which also lists the features Google removed (chat, call history, the Q&A API) that used to be where this kind of inquiry arrived.

On Local Services Ads: the calls described in this post are organic; they come through Search, AI Mode and Maps, not through an ad, and you are not charged for them. LSA is a separate system with its own phone-answering economics, and it is getting stricter: Search Engine Land reported in late August 2026 that starting October 1, 2026 Google would charge LSA advertisers for certain missed calls, with some follow-up calls becoming chargeable. If you run LSAs in Denver, the answer-rate discipline above is now billed, and the budget split between the pack, LSAs and ads is in our local pack vs LSAs vs Google Ads post.

On booking partners: if you use a scheduler that connects to Reserve with Google, Google may book through it rather than calling you, which is faster and does not depend on who answers. The scheduler-by-trade guide is a separate post, which scheduler makes you bookable. The two features are complementary: the partner feed handles the standard slot, the call handles the odd request.

On the profile itself: the automated call reads your profile before it dials. Hours that say 24/7 when you close at 6 produce a call at 7 pm that goes to voicemail, which is recorded as a miss. Service lists that include things you stopped doing produce quote requests you decline on the call. Keep the profile honest and specific, and if you would rather have someone maintain it, that is what our Google Business Profile management service is for.

A 20-minute setup checklist

1. Verify the profile if it is not already; the settings are hidden until you do.
2. Open Business Profile settings, then Advanced settings, and find “Google automated calls and text messages.”
3. Bookings and inquiries from customers: on. Unless you cannot answer the phone or are full for months.
4. Keep your profile up to date: on, and write down who reviews Pending edits every Monday.
5. Post to your profile on your behalf: off.
6. Call the profile number from a different phone at a quiet time and a busy time. Count the rings. Listen to what happens after hours.
7. Write the ten-line card: services, windows, ranges, the variable, the booking yes, name and number, text confirmation.
8. Put the same ranges on the website, one per service page, so the assistant’s pre-call read and the phone answer agree.
9. Brief everyone who answers the phone on what an automated Google call sounds like and the four scam signs.
10. Check the primary category is the specific trade, and the hours are real.
11. Save a note of today’s date and, in 30 days, ask whoever answers the phone how many of these calls came in and how each one ended. That count is the only report on this feature you will ever get, because Google does not show it.

If you want the phone and the profile handled together, the free audit includes a readiness pass that checks the profile fields the assistant reads and tells you where the first call will fail.

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