Google Business Profile suggested edits: your site is the evidence

A customer turns up on a Saturday you closed early, opens Google Maps and taps "Suggest an edit": closed Saturdays. Google now gives you four days to reject that. Miss the window and Google may publish the change anyway, if other public information backs it up. The example of public information Google gives is your own website.

Google Business Profile suggested edits have existed for years. In September 2026 Google wrote down two rules: a four-day clock, and what happens when it runs out. The second rule is the one a small business can act on, because Google settles the question with public information, its example is your website, and many websites list the same hours in several places that no longer agree.

TL;DR: Google Business Profile suggested edits now come with a 4-day window to accept or reject. If you stay silent, Google may publish the edit when public information such as your website supports it. So the fix is on your site: one set of hours, one phone number and one address, stored once, and quick to change.

What changed with Google Business Profile suggested edits?

Owners now get a fixed window to answer a stranger's edit, and Google's help page on Business Profile updates spells out what happens when it closes. When an edit needs your review, Google sends an email or an in-product notification, and "once notified, you have 4 days to accept or reject the suggestion." If you don't respond, "Google may automatically publish the update if it is supported by other publicly available information, such as your business website."

Search Engine Roundtable, a search industry news site, spotted the new wording on 23 September 2026. The same page carries another rule: Google "may apply suggested user edits to your business information without prior review" when an edit is needed to meet its policies. So the four days are the good case. Some edits arrive with no window at all.

Anyone with a Google account can suggest an edit: a helpful customer, a confused one, a competitor. Anyone can suggest a change to your hours, phone number, address or open or closed status, and those are the fields that cost you a booking when they are wrong.

Why does your website matter when you miss the four days?

Your website matters here because Google said it would look at public information, and the website is the example it gives. When you and a stranger disagree about your hours and you have not answered within four days, Google looks for something public that supports the edit. Your site is the source you fully control.

That helps when the site is right and hurts when it is stale. Say you cut Friday hours in spring and updated the profile but not the website. A customer later suggests your old Friday hours. By the wording of Google's own rule, that suggestion now has public support: your website says the same thing.

The usual advice is "make your website match your profile." That advice assumes your hours live in one place on the site. On a typical small-business site, the hours do not live in one place. They sit in the footer, on the contact page, in a "visit us" block on the homepage, sometimes in a PDF price list, a booking widget's settings, or the structured data a plugin wrote years ago. Each copy was typed by hand and each one drifts on its own schedule. So the site can disagree with itself as well as with your profile, and one stale copy is enough to give a stranger's edit the public support Google's rule describes.

How many copies of your hours does your website hold?

Count them before you fix anything. Open your site on your phone and note every place your opening hours, phone number and address appear. Then check the parts visitors never see:

• The footer, which repeats on every page and is often hard-coded into the theme.
• The contact page, plus any map embed with its own label.
• The homepage, especially a "find us" or "opening times" section.
• Downloadable files: menus, price lists and brochures with hours printed on them.
• Booking or ordering tools, whose availability settings show up as hours.
• Structured data: a block of code in the page, often added by a plugin, that describes your business to search engines. Visitors never see it. View the page source and search for "openingHours".

If the count is above one, every extra copy is a chance to disagree. Fixing the footer this week still leaves the PDF to contradict you next month.

At SharpHaw we build the other way round, and you can inspect one of our concept sites to see it. In Whitmore & Finch, a site we built for a fictional estate agency, the phone number, address and email are written once, in a single file. The header and the footer both read the number from that file, and an automated test checks those facts before anything ships. Changing the number is one edit, and every page shows the new one. Opening hours work the same way. You do not need our setup to get there: on most site builders, a reusable footer block plus deleting the duplicate copies gets you most of the way.

What should you check this week?

The four days only help if someone sees the notice inside them. Three checks make it far more likely that someone sees it.

1. Find out who receives the notifications. Open your Business Profile's notification settings and see which address gets them. If it is a former employee, an agency you stopped paying, or an inbox nobody reads, the window can close before anyone knows it opened. Google does not say these are working days, so assume they include the weekend: a Friday email can expire on Tuesday.
2. Add a second manager. One person on holiday should not mean a stranger's edit goes live by default.
3. Look at the live listing, signed out, once a week. Notifications can fail, and some edits skip them. Google marks information it changed in blue in the profile editor, so check there too.

Then do the website work from the section above: count the copies, cut them down to one, and make that one easy to edit.

What if a wrong edit has already gone live?

Change it back in your profile, then fix the website the same day. Google's help page says your own edits are reviewed too: usually within 10 minutes, sometimes up to 30 days. A missed four-day window can leave wrong hours up for weeks.

Fixing only the profile leaves the cause in place. If the edit went live because your site supported it, the site still supports it, and the next person who suggests the same change will find the same evidence waiting. Other public sources behave the same way: one agency described on Reddit how a client's hours kept being changed back after every correction, until wrong listings on Yelp were fixed. Your website is the source you can fix today.

Not every suggestion is an attack, either. If a customer is right that your hours changed and nobody updated them, accept the edit and update the website to match. Rejecting a correct edit only invites the next frustrated customer to suggest it again.

Frequently asked questions

Can I turn off suggested edits on my Google Business Profile?

No. Google does not offer a switch that stops the public suggesting changes. What you control is who receives the notice, how often someone checks the live listing, and whether your website clearly shows the correct hours, phone number and address.

Where do Google's own changes come from?

Google says it gathers Business Profile information from several sources, such as user reports and licensed content. When those sources say your details are wrong or out of date, Google may update the profile itself. These updates are separate from the four-day suggested edit notices.

What does blue text in my Business Profile editor mean?

Blue text marks information Google changed, according to its help page. Black or white text means Google has not updated that field. A notification at the top of the editor also flags Google updates, so open the editor during your weekly check and look for blue.

The website is the part you control

Strangers can suggest edits, and Google will not ask you about every one. What you can decide is what Google finds when it checks your website: one set of hours, one phone number and one address.

If your hours live in five places and changing them means a support ticket, that is the job to fix first. Our Foundation plan is the website on its own, built and kept up to date for you. Book a 30-minute call and we will go through your site and your profile side by side.