Google Now Gives You Four Days to Reject Suggested Edits: What Dental Practices Should Do

Google’s Business Profile help documentation now says that when a member of the public suggests a change to your listing and Google asks you about it, you have four days to accept or reject it. If you stay silent, Google may publish the edit anyway, as long as other public information (such as your own website) appears to back it up.

What Google changed, and when

The new wording sits in Google’s help page Understand Google updates on your Business Profile. It says Google will notify owners about certain suggested edits before they are published, by email or with a notification inside the product, and that the owner then has four days to accept or reject the suggestion.

The page also spells out two things owners should not miss:

• Silence can count against you: if you do not respond within the four days, Google may publish the update automatically, provided it is supported by other publicly available information. Google gives your business website as the example.
• Some edits skip you entirely: Google says it may apply some user edits without prior review where that is needed to meet its policy guidelines. It does not list which edits fall into that group.

Google’s help page carries no date, so we can only say when the change was noticed. Search Engine Roundtable reported it on 23 September 2026. A few weeks earlier, on 8 September, the same site reported owners receiving “Does this look right to you?” emails asking them to mark a suggested change to their business name as correct or incorrect, with a four-day deadline. Google has not made a formal announcement or said whether the window works the same way in every country, so treat the help page as the rule.

What this means for an Australian dental practice

For most single-location practices this is not a crisis. Suggested edits are not new. What is new is a stated clock, and a stated reason why an edit you never saw might still go live.

The risk is concentrated in a few situations that are common in dentistry:

• Nobody reads the notification inbox. Many practice profiles were set up years ago by a former practice manager, a previous agency or the original owner. If Google’s emails go to an address nobody checks, the four days pass without anyone knowing.
• Your website disagrees with your profile. Google says it looks for public information that supports an edit. If your website footer still shows last year’s Saturday hours or an old phone number, a stranger’s “correction” now has something to point to.
• The practice has recently changed. A rebrand after a sale, a move down the road, a dentist leaving, new after-hours arrangements or extended holiday closures over Christmas all invite suggested edits from patients and passers-by, some of them wrong.

This also connects to how Google now reuses your profile. Our post on Ask Maps rolling out in Australia explains how Google’s AI answers in Maps draw on your listing details. A wrong phone number or opening hours that slip in through an unreviewed edit do not just sit on your profile: they can be repeated back to a patient asking when you are open.

The practical risk

The edit that hurts is rarely dramatic. It is usually a phone number, an hours change or a closed flag that goes live while nobody is looking, and the first sign is a quiet week of bookings.

What to do this week

1. Find out where Google’s emails go. Log in to your Business Profile and check who the owners and managers are. Remove people who have left, add the current practice manager, and make sure at least one active, regularly checked address receives notifications.
2. Set a twice-weekly check. With a four-day window, a weekly look is not enough to be safe. Put a short task in the front-desk routine for, say, Monday and Thursday: open the profile, look for pending edits or “Does this look right?” emails, and respond.
3. Reject wrong edits rather than ignoring them. Silence is now the risky option. If an edit is wrong, reject it inside the window. If it is right, accept it, then update your website to match.
4. Make your website and profile say the same thing. Because Google says it looks for supporting public information, your website is effectively your evidence. Check that the practice name, street address, phone number, opening hours and holiday hours are identical on both. Do the same on major directories you control.
5. Plan the edits you know are coming. If you are moving, rebranding or changing hours, update the profile and the website on the same day, before patients start suggesting the change for you.
6. Look at the profile as a patient would, once a month. Search your practice name on a phone while logged out. Some edits can be applied without review, so the only way to catch them is to look.

If you want a fuller checklist of the settings that matter, our guide to the Google Business Profile settings most dental practices get wrong covers categories, hours and services in more detail.

A related change: contact details inside Google posts

Around the same time, Google updated its photos, videos and posts content policy to say it may remove posts containing contact information it cannot verify, naming phone numbers, email addresses and social media handles. Google points owners to a Call now button instead, which connects to the verified profile number. Search Engine Roundtable reported that update on 25 September 2026. If your practice publishes Google posts with a mobile number, a booking email or an Instagram handle typed into the text, switch to the button so the posts are not pulled.

AHPRA watch-out

While you are tidying your profile, do not use the business name or description to add superlatives, outcome promises or discounts. Your Business Profile is advertising under the National Law, and a name that does not match how the practice actually trades also breaches Google’s own guidelines.

How worried should you be?

Not very, if the basics are in place. A practice with an accurate website, a current owner on the profile and a twice-weekly check will barely notice this change. The ones that feel it will be those whose profile has drifted out of anyone’s hands, and fixing access and notifications is usually a short job.

Your Business Profile is one part of a broader local visibility plan. Our complete guide to dental marketing in Australia shows where it fits, and our Google Business Profile optimisation service covers ongoing monitoring if you would rather not run the checks yourself.

The short version

• Google now gives owners four days to accept or reject suggested edits it notifies them about.
• Unanswered edits may go live if your website or other public sources appear to support them.
• Some edits can be applied with no owner review at all, so check the live profile regularly.
• Make sure a current staff member receives Google’s notifications and checks them twice a week.
• Keep your website and profile identical, and use the Call now button rather than typing contact details into posts.