Google has been calling your shop and writing down the answers

A transmission shop in Greenwood picked up the phone in June and a recorded voice asked whether they still closed at two on Saturdays. Whoever answered said yes.

The shop closes at four.

Two weeks later the owner noticed his Saturday walk-ins had thinned out. His Google listing said 2 PM.

Google places automated calls, texts, and WhatsApp messages to verified business phone numbers, asks about things like hours and inventory, and uses the answers to update your Business Profile. This month you can finally read the notes. A section called Collected info now sits under Edit profile, listing what Google has gathered about your business, where each piece came from, and the date it landed.

Go look at yours. It takes about ninety seconds, and it is the only way to see what a robot wrote down about your shop.

Why did my hours change on their own?

Because someone told Google they should, and that someone might work for you.

Google's support page on automated outreach says it contacts businesses to confirm details like operating hours and the status of in-demand inventory, that the calls are automated and monitored by a live supervisor, and that any resulting updates get marked Pending and reviewed for up to five business days before they publish.

Five business days is plenty of runway when your part-timer guessed wrong on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody at the shop remembers the call. The hours change, and you find out from the customer who drove over and found the lights on but the sign flipped.

Customers feed this too. A regular who showed up during a holiday closure can suggest an edit. So can a data aggregator you have never heard of. The automated calls are the newest source and the loudest one, because it is your own phone that rings.

Where to find what Google wrote down

Open your Business Profile, select Edit profile, then Collected info.

You get a list. Each entry shows the piece of information, the source it came from, and the date Google collected it. That last column is the useful one: you can line a hours change up against the week your Saturday traffic dropped.

Two caveats before you go hunting.

Google says the feature is available for select regions, languages, and business categories, so it may not be in your dashboard yet. If you don't see it, you are not doing it wrong.

Also, the tab shows what Google collected. It is a record of inputs, not a changelog of your profile. Some of what you see never went live. Some of what did go live sits in there looking harmless.

The tab tells you what Google was told. It does not tell you what Google published.

What deleting actually does

Each entry has a Delete option, and this is where owners get burned.

Google's wording is specific: deleting collected information removes it from Google's records but does not change other details already on your Business Profile.

Read that twice. If an automated call moved your Saturday close from four to two, deleting the record of that call does not move it back. Your hours still say two. You have removed the receipt and left the charge.

The fix is two steps, in this order:

1. Correct the live field. Edit profile, then Hours, set them properly, save.
2. Then delete the collected entry if you want it gone from Google's records.

Do it the other way around and you will feel productive while your listing keeps telling people the wrong thing.

How do I stop Google from calling my shop?

Four routes, per Google's support documentation:

Route	How
On the call	Say "remove my business from your list" or "stop calling my business" to the representative.
In settings	Business Profile settings, then Advanced settings, then toggle off the options under "Google automated calls and text messages".
Texts and WhatsApp	Reply STOP.
Phone tree mapping calls	Leave a voicemail at +1-650-206-5555 with your business details.

Google notes that even after you opt out, you may still get occasional manual calls to confirm your information.

Should you opt out? For most shops, I wouldn't.

The calls are irritating and the failure mode is real. They also catch listings that have quietly gone stale, and a stale listing costs you more than a wrong one, because a wrong one at least gets corrected by an angry customer. If your hours shift with the season, that call is doing work you were not going to do yourself.

I would instead tell whoever answers your phone what to say. One sentence taped near the register: if an automated Google call asks about our hours, hang up and tell the owner. A garden center in Westfield we work with did exactly that in the spring, when their closing time swings by three hours between March and July. Their listing has not drifted since.

The opt-out is for shops where the phone gets answered by four different people and none of them know the Saturday schedule. You know if that is you.

The ninety-second version

Once a month, or after any week where foot traffic did something you cannot explain:

1. Open your Business Profile and check that your hours, phone, and address are what you think they are.
2. Go to Edit profile, then Collected info. Read the dates.
3. Correct anything wrong in the live fields.
4. Delete the bad collected entries after that, not before.

It is the cheapest audit in local search, and almost nobody runs it.

For about fifteen years the arrangement with Google was simple: you filled in a form, and Google showed people the form. That is no longer the arrangement. Google is out collecting information about your shop from phone calls, crawls, customers, and third parties, then publishing its best guess.

The Collected info tab is the first time Google has shown you its work. Go read it.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Edit your Business Profile (Google Business Profile Help)	The Collected info section, how to reach it, what it displays, and what deleting an entry does and does not change.
2	About automated calls and texts from Google to confirm business info (Google Business Profile Help)	Google's automated calls, texts, and WhatsApp outreach; the Pending status and five-business-day review; all four opt-out routes and the +1-650-206-5555 voicemail line.
3	Google Business Profiles New Collected Info (Search Engine Roundtable)	That the Collected info tab surfaced in Business Profile dashboards in July 2026.
4	Google's AI will start calling your shop (Luminest)	Our earlier piece on Google's automated calls to local businesses.