Google's AI now calls local businesses for prices.

What the feature does.

Google's help page gives the examples: booking a hair salon appointment, scheduling car maintenance, finding a phone repair service, arranging pet grooming. The searcher fills in a short form. Google then contacts businesses to check availability and prices, and sends an email with quotes from various service providers.

Google shares the request details with the businesses it contacts, which may include the searcher's name. Availability, in Google's words: English, signed-in users over 18, in the US, on mobile and desktop.

What local SEO people are saying.

A thread on r/localseo this month asked whether Google is starting to recommend businesses instead of ranking them. u/Whaaaaat901 described the mechanics: "it will actually be a bot making phone calls asking for pricing. It will then email you the findings."

The top-voted reply was less patient. u/Bavariasnaps: "next step will be they take 30% from local businesses".

On what gets a business chosen, u/AlexSTL1 saw nothing exotic: "Consistent NAP, a clear primary category, recent real reviews with owner replies, and pages that answer the actual service question still seem to matter most." NAP is name, address and phone.

How to be ready.

1. Be reachable when the call comes. A call that rings out gives Google nothing to put in the email. Decide who or what answers outside working hours.
2. Have a price you can say. A fixed price or a "from" price for your most common jobs, the same on the phone, on your site and on your Google Business Profile.
3. Put the prices on a page, in plain text. When we put price questions to four AI systems on 30 September 2026, every studio they named was cited from its own pricing page.
4. Keep your details identical everywhere. Name, address, phone and opening hours on your site, your Google Business Profile and directories.
5. Ask for reviews after every job, and reply to them.

What is not known yet.

Google has not said when the feature will reach other countries or languages, and this page does not guess. If you serve customers outside the US, steps 2 to 5 are worth doing anyway: they are what search and AI answers already read.

Where Kinetiq fits.

We publish every price in plain text, and we build the same for clients: priced pages that search and AI systems can quote, from $2,250 a month for AI search visibility, and an assistant that answers and books when you cannot, from $3,750, under bots and automation.