Google Business Agent: Waste of Time or Timely Solution?

In late 2025, Google announced that it could provide your business with an agentic "sales associate" linked directly from the Google search results, free of charge.

You can try it out by searching for participating retailers on Google, like Lowe's or Nike. Once you click the blue Chat icon, customers can interact with a virtual assistant that has access to your Google Merchant Center (GMC) products, coupons, store policies, shipping, and other details.

I do not think it is a stretch to say it is currently a fairly underwhelming experience -- but it might still be useful for tech-centric consumers or as a real-world time-saver for a shopper looking for specific details (like shipping info on a particular product) from your store.

Despite our "mid" feelings on the feature, we still recommend deploying it:

• It can help marketing teams wrap their heads around more robust agentic solutions that may be in the works for the future.
• You get some basic stats within GMC regarding visitors. You do not get any juicy details yet -- specifically, you cannot see the prompts or even question categories.
• It forces you to clean up your GMC account by ensuring you have proper shipping, loyalty programs, and return policies clearly stated. This is the exact data the agent uses to answer consumer questions.

You must be located in the US to enable the feature, and you may need to ping your Google rep to get the option to show up within Google Merchant Center. Since there is no cost, we recommend turning it on if your team is interested in agentic shopping in any fashion -- if only to see how many visitors are perusing your store via the agent.