Part of what appears on your Google Business Profile was not written by you: Google compiles some attributes from what customers report, writes its own editorial summaries, and surfaces themes drawn from your reviews. Editorial summaries cannot be edited.

On a Business Profile you enter the name, the opening hours, the photos, the description. Around those fields Google adds a second layer of content that it produces itself, from your reviews and from what customers report to it. That second layer is the one most companies never look at.

The three things Google writes without you

Google distinguishes three kinds of summary on a profile.

The description.
You write it, you edit it. It is the only one of the three that is genuinely yours.

The editorial summary.

A short phrase written by Google to describe a popular business, along the lines of “Southwestern cuisine in a modern setting”. It appears next to your reviews and your rating. Google is explicit: unlike the description, an editorial summary cannot be edited.

Review snippets and place topics.

When several reviews use the same words, Google turns them into topics and snippets that it surfaces on the profile. Nobody at your company wrote them, and they are the first thing the customer sees.

Attributes follow the same logic

Attributes are the labels on your profile: patio, accessible parking, contactless payment. Some are ticked in the interface. The others, in Google’s own words, “may be populated based on information provided by customers who visit”.

One wrong answer entered by a customer can display a false attribute on your profile for months, without anyone at head office knowing.

When you correct an attribute, the review takes about ten minutes at best, and Google warns it can take up to thirty days.

What Google agrees to remove, and what it refuses

Google removes content it has generated in two cases only.
1. A review snippet or a keyword attached by mistake to the wrong address.
2. An editorial summary that describes a service you do not offer.

Outside those two cases the content stays up. A summary that works against you but describes exactly what you offer is not removed, and the fact that it is negative or poorly worded changes nothing.

Summary types, removal policy, attributes populated from customer input and review delay: Google Business Profile documentation, consulted 21 September 2026.

What you can still control

You cannot rewrite what Google generates. You can act on what feeds it:

1. Keep factual attributes current, location by location, before a customer fills them in for you
2. Watch the edits suggested by the public, which Google usually publishes without consulting the owner
3. Reply to reviews, because reviews are what produce the topics and the snippets
4. Check that a false attribute has not been imported onto a profile nobody looks at

Each of these tasks is simple when there is one profile to maintain. With forty locations they have to be repeated forty times, at every change of hours and at every new review.