Google will draft your review reply now (should you hit send?)

A hair salon in Greenwood had a two-star review sitting in its Google Business Profile last week. "Cut was fine, but I waited 40 minutes past my appointment time." Underneath it, before the owner had typed a single word, sat a full reply. Apologetic and polished. She hadn't written it. Google had.

That's the feature everyone in local search is talking about right now: Reply to reviews with AI, a tool inside Google Business Profile that drafts a response to a customer review for you. You read it, you can edit it, and you tap submit. Or, on some accounts, you don't even have to do that.

What's actually rolling out

Google confirmed it's testing the feature in a limited rollout, first spotted by local SEO specialists in March and still expanding through the summer. It's live for some business owners in the United States, Brazil, and India. It hasn't shown up widely in Europe yet, and availability is inconsistent even within those countries. Two businesses on the same street might not have it at the same time.

The mechanics: you open the Reviews tab in your Business Profile, and next to a review, Google shows you a suggested reply based on the text of that review. Most reporting says the intent is review, edit, then manually submit, the same way a spell-checker suggests a word instead of typing it for you.

One detail is worth pausing on. Some accounts can trigger AI responses in bulk, replying to a stack of reviews in one tap. Reporting on the rollout has conflicting accounts of what happens next: most say bulk replies still get a review step, but some business owners say fully AI-written replies have gone out with zero edits. If that's true on your account, your Business Profile could be speaking in Google's voice instead of yours, and you'd never see the words before they post.

Should you let Google write your review replies?

For a genuinely simple review, sure. "Great haircut, will be back" doesn't need your creative energy. A drafted "Thank you so much, we can't wait to see you again" is fine. Nobody is parsing that reply for sincerity.

The problem shows up on anything with texture. The 40-minute-wait review needs a reply that says something true: we were short a stylist that day, here's what changes about Saturdays. An AI draft doesn't know you were short-staffed. It doesn't know the customer's name is Denise and she's been coming in every six weeks since 2019. It writes something generic and polite, and generic and polite is exactly what makes a reply read as fake.

A drafted reply that sounds like nobody is worse than no reply at all.

The people reading your review replies aren't just the reviewer. They're the next twenty people deciding whether to book with you. A reply that sounds like a form letter tells them the owner isn't actually paying attention. A specific one, even a short one, tells them somebody real runs this place.

The one rule

Use the draft as a starting point on positive reviews. Rewrite the specific detail on anything with a complaint in it. And check, this week, whether your account has bulk-approve turned on. If it does, turn it off, or at minimum commit to reading every single reply before it posts. This is not a place to save four minutes.

There's a smaller, lower-stakes version of the same idea worth knowing about too. Google also quietly added the ability to react to a review with an emoji, straight from the Google Maps app: a heart, a fire, a folded-hands, a few others. It's mobile-only for now, and it's genuinely useful for the easy cases. A customer posts a photo of your food and says nothing else, and a 😋 reaction takes two seconds and says exactly the right amount. Save it for reviews that don't need words. The moment a review says something specific, go back to writing it yourself.

The one thing to do this week

Open your Business Profile. Look at your last five reviews. If Google has already drafted replies sitting there, read every one before you consider using it. If any of them are on a review with a real complaint in it, delete the draft and start over with what actually happened. That's the whole test: would a regular customer believe a person wrote this, or would they know in one sentence that nobody did.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Google Business Profile tests AI-generated replies to reviews	Feature details, March 20, 2026 first sighting, U.S./Brazil/India rollout, bulk-approval and unedited-reply reports.
2	React to a review with emojis, Google Maps Help	Official Google documentation for the emoji-reaction feature on Business Profile reviews.
3	Reacting to Google reviews with emojis: A new way to connect with customers in 2026	Mobile-only availability and step-by-step mechanics of the emoji-reaction feature.
4	What that one 1-star review is actually costing you	Related Luminest piece on the cost of a poorly handled review reply.