A firm profile is mostly a data-hygiene problem with a compliance edge. The parts AI is good at are the parts firms neglect; the parts it must not touch are the parts that get firms into trouble.
Key takeaways
Improve the profile by making it complete, accurate and current, and by answering the questions people actually ask. Google says local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence, and its guidance on improving local ranking points at entering complete data, keeping hours accurate including holiday hours, and managing reviews. AI is well suited to all of that, because it is repetitive text maintenance. It is not suited to anything that creates the appearance of activity that did not happen.
Google’s guidelines for representing your business set the eligibility conditions — a business needs to make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours, service-area businesses have their own rules, and the name must be the real-world name. That last point is the one professional firms get wrong: appending a service and a city to the firm name is a guidelines breach, and the equivalent behaviour on your website is described in Google’s spam policies as keyword stuffing, which the policy illustrates with blocks of text listing cities and regions a page is trying to rank for.
Two structural decisions matter more than any copy. Whether you list a staffed address or operate as a service-area business, and which categories you choose. Both should be decided by the person who runs the firm, once, against the guidelines — not iterated by a tool chasing rankings.
Google’s guidance on getting more reviews is about asking real customers, and its prohibited and restricted content policy for Maps user-generated content prohibits fake engagement and content that does not reflect a genuine experience. Canadian law goes further than platform enforcement. Section 74.02 of the Competition Act makes it reviewable conduct to publish a testimonial unless it was previously given by the person who gave it or approved in writing beforehand, and it accords with what was given. Section 74.01 reaches a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect, and subsection 74.03(5) brings the general impression into account.
The Competition Bureau summarises the two regimes and the exposure on its page on false or misleading representations and deceptive marketing practices, and section 74.1 sets out the administrative monetary penalties a court may order — for a corporation, the greater of $10,000,000, rising to $15,000,000 for each subsequent order, and three times the value of the benefit derived. Clause 7 of the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards says a testimonial must reflect a genuine, reasonably current opinion. Treadstone Law sets out the practical rules on testimonials and endorsements.
And what it must not do: publish anything unread. A generated reply that confirms someone was a client, mentions their matter or corrects their version of events is a confidentiality breach in public. For an Ontario lawyer rule 3.3-1 requires client information to be held in strict confidence, and the commentary notes the duty applies whatever the source of the information; provincial accounting bodies set the parallel rule for CPAs, so check your own.
Thank the reviewer. Do not confirm or deny that they are a client. Do not describe the matter. State the firm’s general standard in one sentence. Offer a private channel. Stop. A model handed those five instructions and the review text will produce a usable draft nearly every time; a model handed “write a reply” will produce a defence of the firm that names the engagement.
A two-office accounting practice in Saskatchewan has an outdated profile: one office shows the wrong hours, the services list is three years old, the questions section is empty, and eleven reviews are unanswered.
The fix takes a morning. Hours and holiday closures are corrected from the firm’s own calendar. A model drafts fourteen question-and-answer pairs from the questions the front desk actually fields; the partner cuts four and edits six. Service descriptions are rewritten from the engagement letters rather than from a competitor. The eleven reviews get drafted replies following the five-step pattern, all read and sent by a person, and one is escalated because it describes a service the firm does not offer.
Nobody is asked to leave a review in exchange for anything, no reviews are written in-house, and the firm name stays as it is registered. The measurable outcome tracked is calls and direction requests from the profile, not review count.
This is local marketing for a firm that sells professional work. If the question is about the front desk — intake, scheduling, recall and reminders — that is the professional practice owners page. If it is about your own bookkeeping rather than what clients see, that is bookkeeping automation. Broader campaign work sits under marketing automation.
Can we auto-reply to reviews?
Draft automatically, send manually. The cost of one bad automated reply on a public profile is larger than the time saved on fifty good ones.
Can we offer clients something for a review?
Incentivised reviews run into the platform’s content policy and, where the inducement is not disclosed, into section 74.01 and section 74.02. Ask for reviews; do not buy them.
Should we add our services to the business name?
No. The guidelines require the real-world name, and the same instinct applied to your website is the keyword stuffing described in the spam policies.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
