Anyone with a Google account can suggest a change to your business listing. Your opening hours, your address, your phone number, even whether you are still trading. Until this week nobody knew how long you had to say no. Google has now put a number on it, and the number is four days.
SEO and search
Four days to reject an edit, then Google decides for you
Google updated its Business Profile help document with a new section on suggested edits. When a user submits a change that needs your review, you get an email or an in product notification. From that moment you have four days to accept or reject it. Miss the window and Google may publish the change anyway, as long as it is supported by other public information such as your own website.
There is a second line worth reading twice. Google also says it may apply some user edits without notifying you at all, in cases where the edit is needed to meet policy guidelines. So the four day clock is the best case, not the only case.
Why this matters for your business: Four days is shorter than a long weekend. Check who actually receives Business Profile notifications, because on most accounts we audit it is an old staff email nobody opens. Add a second manager and put a weekly listing check on someone’s calendar. If your website still shows old hours or an old address, fix that too, because that stale page is exactly the public information Google will use to justify a wrong edit.
AI Overviews have started linking out again
For most of the past year the story has been one way. Google summarises your content, the reader stays on Google, you get nothing. New data from Peec AI, shared by its Malte Landwehr, points the other way. The share of AI Overviews containing external links has climbed from close to zero to more than a quarter.
Treat it as a signal, not a settled fact. Barry Schwartz, who published the chart, said plainly that it does not feel right to him and that he holds a small investment in the company behind the data. Still, it is the first number in a long while that moves in the direction of publishers.
Why this matters for your business: If the link slots are opening up, the pages that win them are the ones that answer a specific question cleanly in the first hundred words. Go back to your three most valuable service pages and put a direct answer at the top, before the scene setting. Then watch your Search Console impressions against your clicks over the next month. If impressions hold and clicks lift, the trend is real for you.
Rank Math now tracks whether Gemini mentions you
Rank Math has pulled its Content AI, internal linking and AI Visibility tools into one product called Rank Math AI. The useful part for WordPress owners is AI Visibility, which now tracks brand mentions inside Google Gemini as well as ChatGPT, on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule.
Why this matters for your business: Your rankings do not tell you whether an assistant names you when someone asks who to call in your town. That is a separate question and it now has a cheap answer inside a plugin many South African sites already run. Pick five prompts a real customer would type, track them monthly, and see whether you appear. If you do not, that gap is the brief for your next quarter of content.
Social media
LinkedIn is testing a feed with only the people you know
LinkedIn is trialling a Network tab that sits alongside the main feed. Chief product officer Hari Srinivasan described it as a way to stay connected to the people you have explicitly connected with or followed. No recommended creators, no algorithmic suggestions, just your actual network in order.
Why this matters for your business: A connections only feed rewards a different kind of post. Broad thought leadership aimed at strangers matters less. Posts your customers, suppliers and staff would recognise and reply to matter more. If you have been chasing reach on LinkedIn, spend the next month growing the right connections instead, because a tab like this turns your connection list into your distribution list.
Advertising and compliance
Google added South Africa to its list of advertising codes
Google Ads updated its Legal Requirements policy on Monday and added local advertising and marketing self regulatory codes for six countries. South Africa is on the list, alongside Argentina, Australia, Chile, Colombia and Paraguay.
Nothing about your existing campaigns breaks today. Google is clear that the list is a reference, not an exhaustive explanation of the law, and that the responsibility stays with the advertiser in every market a campaign targets.
Why this matters for your business: The practical risk sits with claims. If your ads say cheapest, guaranteed, number one, or carry a price that excludes fees, our local codes have something to say about it and Google has just made that easier for a reviewer to check. Read your top ten ad headlines as though a regulator wrote them down. The same goes the other way if you advertise into Australia or South America, where the rules are not ours.
Automotive
A dealer is building a network so AI can read his stock
Chris Hudson, general manager of Mark Miller Subaru, completed what he calls his first AI to AI transaction. His conclusion was not that the technology had arrived. It was that the plumbing had not. The connections between shoppers, dealers and AI agents do not exist yet, so he is building an agentic dealer network to give AI models clean access to dealership inventory data.
The nearer term win is internal. After asking staff to name their daily friction points, the dealership built more than a hundred AI assisted workflows across sales, service and reception, and cut over a hundred thousand dollars a year in vendor costs by building tools in house.
Why this matters for your dealership: You do not need an agentic network to benefit from the lesson. The bottleneck is your inventory data. If your stock feed carries inconsistent model names, missing variants, stale prices or vehicles that sold last week, no assistant will recommend you and no shopper will trust the listing either. Audit the feed first. Then do what Hudson did and ask your own team where the day snags, because that list is worth more than any vendor demo.
What to do this week
- Confirm who receives Google Business Profile notifications, and add a second manager today.
- Check your website hours, address and phone number match your listing exactly.
- Put a direct answer in the first hundred words of your three best service pages.
- Read your top ten Google Ads headlines for claims a regulator would question.
- If you sell vehicles, audit your inventory feed for stale prices and missing variants.
If you would rather someone watched the listing, the feed and the ad copy for you, get in touch and we will take a look.
Sources
- Search Engine Roundtable on the four day suggested edit window
- Google Business Profile help on suggested edits
- Search Engine Roundtable on external links in AI Overviews
- Search Engine Land on Rank Math AI and Gemini tracking
- Social Media Today on the LinkedIn Network tab
- Search Engine Land on Google’s expanded advertising codes
- CBT News on the agentic dealer network at Mark Miller Subaru