Google Business Agent: the brand chat on Search, and how to set it up

What Business Agent is

Google calls Business Agent a virtual associate: a conversational experience on Google Search that lets shoppers chat with a brand and get product questions answered in the brand’s voice. It grew out of a 2025 feature on merchant brand profiles in the US, Canada, Australia and India, which answered questions from the product and brand information in Merchant Center. Business Agent adds customization and more data, and its rollout begins in the US.

Shoppers reach it by searching for your brand. The brand profile shows an Ask button, and the chat opens from there. Google’s examples of what it handles are practical: what a rug is made of, whether shoes run true to size, how many boxes of tiles a backsplash needs.

The agent can only be as specific as the product data and the pages it reads from.

Who can customize it

Google lists four requirements:

• A US-based e-commerce store.
• A verified Google Merchant Center account.
• At least 50 products approved for free listings.
• A claimed brand profile on Google Search.

The free listings requirement means approved products, not submitted ones. If a share of your catalog is disapproved, the guide to products not showing covers the usual causes. For the brand profile, Google says that if the profile shows no “Manage this brand profile” button, you are not eligible to claim it.

Three ways to set it up

• In Merchant Center: under Marketing, choose Business Agent, then Customize.
• On Shopify: the Google & YouTube app shows a Business Agent card on its overview page. It imports the logo, brand colors and support contacts, and sends you to Merchant Center for anything more advanced, such as the tone of voice.
• From Search: search for your exact business name and choose Business Agent on your brand profile card.

Each route edits the same settings:

• Tone of voice. Google mirrors the tone of your website if it detects one; the alternative is a neutral Google tone.
• Welcome message and conversation starters.
• Header and background colors.
• Support handoff: contact details for when a shopper needs a person.

Customizations can be previewed before they go live and turned off later. Until they are turned on, shoppers see a standard Google-branded agent.

What it answers from

Google says Business Agent uses Gemini models to analyze the information in your Merchant Center account and the business data you provide, including your website. That makes its answers a mirror of two sources you control:

• The product data. Titles, descriptions, attributes and categories. A size question is easier to answer from a feed with sizes, materials and a specific category than from a bare title. Merchant Center’s conversational attributes are designed to carry this kind of detail.
• The website. Product pages, size guides, care instructions and policies. If the answer is not on the site, the agent has nothing to quote.

One practical check: list the questions your support inbox receives most, then look for each answer on the site and in the feed. The ones that are missing are the ones the agent cannot answer either. Reviews are another source of those questions, and the Review Analyzer pulls the recurring ones out of a large set.

What Google says is coming

Google’s help page lists three things as coming soon: training the agent on more business data, such as brand guidelines, services and size guides; performance insights; and agentic checkout. It gives no dates.

The help page does not say how agentic checkout in Business Agent will work. Google’s existing standard for checkout on its AI surfaces is the Universal Commerce Protocol, and its Merchant Center requirements, a return policy, support details and a per-product eligibility flag, are worth having in place either way. The UCP guide sets them out.