Saw a Google Business Profile update this week worth flagging

Google's been quietly rolling out a "Social Media Updates" carousel on Business Profiles. If you've got Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, or X linked to your Profile, Google can now pull recent posts from those feeds and show them directly on the Profile. Still mostly mobile. The snippets sit in the updates section under your core business info.

I've been working with agencies on local SEO for a while now, and this is one of those changes that may look small but signals something bigger. Google is tying social activity to how your local presence renders, and they've been moving in this direction for a while (you could see it coming when they added the social link fields back in 2023). This is the next step. The agencies still treating social as the brand team's job and SEO as a separate workstream will start seeing that gap show up in their client reporting before long.

The part I keep thinking about, though, is what this means for AI visibility. The same content Google's pulling onto your Profile is the kind of content the AI models are reading when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a local recommendation. If your last ten Instagram posts are office dog photos and team birthdays (great, love that) and nothing else, that's basically your business description as far as the models are concerned. I've audited client socials where there isn't a single post that actually says what the business sells. Then those same clients wonder why AI tools never surface for them.

So here's what I'd do, and it's not complicated. Link the socials you actually use. Kill the dead X account from 2019 still sitting in your footer. Mix in some posts that say what you do, where you do it, who you do it for, and what you charge. Not every post. Maybe one in three or four. Enough that a machine reading your feed could tell what business you're in inside ten seconds, and enough that Google has something specific to pull into the carousel.

This whole space is what we keep running into at SmartMetrics. Client reporting and AI visibility keep colliding, and the old playbook of tracking local pack rankings and calling it a day no longer cuts it. If you're handling this for agency clients and want to swap notes on what's working, drop me a line.