Business Agent is a conversational experience on Google Search that allows shoppers to chat with your brand. It acts like a virtual associate that can answer product questions in your brand’s voice and connects with customers at critical shopping moments to help drive sales.
Starting in 2025, a conversational feature was made available on merchant brand profiles in the US, Canada, Australia and India that provides responses to customers' questions based on product and brand information stored in Merchant Center.
Business Agent is an evolution of this experience, and it begins its rollout in the US. It is designed to support deeper customer relationships through greater customisation and data integration.
Explore key capabilities of Business Agent
- Customised experience: Choose your brand’s colours, different welcome messages and prompts for conversation starters to better fit your brand.
- More helpful answers: Business Agent uses information from your company’s website, which allows this virtual assistant to provide more helpful answers in addition to your shopping data in Merchant Center.
Coming soon: Business agent will enable you to train your agent further using your business data, like brand guidelines, services and size guides, which can improve the answers and helpfulness of this virtual associate more. Performance insights and agentic checkout are also coming soon.
Business Agent eligibility and customisation
To be eligible to customise your Business Agent, your business must meet these criteria:
- Have a US-based e-commerce store.
- Have a verified Google Merchant Center account.
- Have at least 50 free listings approved. Learn more about free listings for products.
- Have a claimed brand profile. Learn how to claim your brand profile on Google Search.
Customise your Business Agent
You can configure your Business Agent directly in Merchant Center. Alternatively, if your shop is hosted on Shopify, you can quickly activate your agent using the Google & YouTube app on Shopify.
Option A: Customise in Merchant Center
- Go to your Google Merchant Center account.
- On the left, under 'Marketing', select Business Agent.
- Under 'How your Business Agent appears', select Customise.
- In the pop-up window, update your Business Agent’s identity:
- Tone of voice: This will help shape your Agent's personality. We'll automatically mirror the tone used on your website if one is detected.
- Welcome message: Choose the greeting that you want to show to your customers when they open the chat.
- Conversation starters: Choose suggestion prompts to start the conversation.
- Appearance: Choose header and background colours that fit your brand identity.
- Support handoff: Add support contact information so that your customers can reach your customer support if needed.
- Select Save.
- In the pop-up window, select Save and turn on customised agent.
A standard Google-branded version of Business Agent is shown to customers until you complete customisation.
Tips:
- You can preview your changes during the customisation process.
- You can turn off the customisations and branding at any time.
Option B: Enable and customise via the Google & YouTube app on Shopify
- In your Shopify admin, open the Google & YouTube app.
- On the Overview page, locate the Business Agent recommendation card and select to begin setup.
- Review the preview of your agent. The app will automatically import your logo, brand colours and support contact details, and provide smart defaults for your welcome message and conversation starters.
- Review and accept the Business Agent Terms of Service, then select Publish.
- To make advanced customisations (such as modifying the tone of voice), select Manage agent on the business agent status card. You will be redirected to Merchant Center to make these edits.
Option C: In Search
- Open Google Search.
- Search for your exact business name.
- In the search result, your brand profile shows up.
- Within the brand profile card, select the Business Agent button.
- If the 'Manage this brand profile' button isn’t available, you’re ineligible to claim the brand profile. Learn how to claim your brand profile.
- In the Customise your Business Agent pop-up window, you can update your Business Agent’s identity:
- Status: Toggle on to display the customised version of your Business Agent.
- Tone of voice: This will help shape your Agent's personality. We'll automatically mirror the tone used on your website if one is detected. You can choose to use your brand’s tone of voice or use the default Google neutral and helpful tone of voice.
- Welcome message: Choose the greeting that you want to show to your customers when they open the chat.
- Conversation starters: Choose suggestion prompts to start the conversation.
- Appearance: Choose header and background colours that fit your brand identity.
- Support handoff: Add support contact information so that your customers can reach your customer support if needed.
- Select Save.
- In the pop-up window, select Save and turn on customised agent.
Understand how Business Agent works
After you have customised your Business Agent, consumers can engage with it when they search for your brand on Google Search. They can click 'Ask' to get their questions answered.
Business Agent uses Gemini models to analyse information from your Merchant Center account and additional business data that you provide, including your website. It then provides conversational responses to customer questions about your products, like 'What is this rug made of?', 'Do these shoes run true to size?', or 'How many boxes of tiles do I need for a 20 square foot backsplash?'
Give feedback on Business Agent
To help improve this feature, you can provide feedback on Business Agent's performance when you select thumbs up 
