Google Business Profile API: what it is and how to get access

What is the Google Business Profile API?

It is the official way for software to do what you do by hand in the Business Profile interface. Google describes the Business Profile APIs as interfaces that let developers write applications to manage Business Profile account and location data. That covers business data, who co-manages it, and content customers create, like photos, posts and reviews.

You will also hear it called the Google My Business API or the GBP API. Same family. Google renamed the product, but the older reference is still titled Google My Business API, so the old name keeps turning up in library names and error messages.

One thing people miss. It is a set of separate APIs, not one endpoint with one switch. That matters when you enable them and when you read quotas.

Which APIs make up the Google Business Profile API?

Google's reference lists Account Management, Business Information, Business Calls, Lodging, Media, Notifications, Performance, Place Actions and Verifications, plus the older My Business API v4.9. In plain terms:

• Account Management: accounts, admins, invitations and location admins.
• Business Information: location details, attributes, categories and Google location search.
• Performance: daily metrics and monthly search keyword impressions.
• Verifications: verification options, starting and completing a verification, and the voice of merchant state.
• Notifications: notification settings for an account.
• Place Actions: place action links and their types.
• Business Calls and Lodging: call settings and call insights, and lodging details.
• Media: media uploads.

Reviews and local posts are still listed under the older My Business API v4.9 reference, whose service is mybusiness.googleapis.com. That is why a tool that replies to reviews today still talks to an older API. When we read the reference on 2026-10-24, the reviews and local posts methods carried no deprecated label. The account, admin and invitation methods did.

How do you get access to the Google Business Profile API?

You apply. There is no self-serve key. Google's prerequisites page sets out the steps.

1. Create a project in the Google Cloud Console and note its project number.
2. Manage a Business Profile that is verified and active for 60 or more days, with a website listed on it. The profile can be your own or a client's.
3. Submit the Business Profile API contact form and choose Application for Basic API Access. Use an email address that is an owner or manager on the profile, and include your project number.
4. Wait. The page does not say how long approval takes, so do not plan a launch date around a guess. Google sends a follow-up email after it reviews the request.
5. Once approved, enable the APIs from the basic setup guide.

The overview page adds that these APIs are not available to everyone. You need a Google Account, a valid business reason for access, a Google Cloud project and a valid business website URL.

How do you know you are approved? Check the quota in the Cloud console. Google says a quota of 300 requests per minute means approved, and 0 means not yet approved. Another sign: the Google My Business API appears in the Cloud console only after the access request is approved.

A fair warning from our own setup. The number in the console is the check that matters, not the email. We treat a quota of 0 as a stop and call nothing until the console shows the approved figure.

What can you do with the API, and what can you not?

You can do most of what the dashboard does. Read and edit location details, hours, categories and attributes. Read and reply to reviews. Create posts. Upload media. Pull daily performance metrics. Check verification state. Manage admins on the accounts you control.

The limits are the useful part.

• Q&A is gone. Google discontinued the My Business Q&A API on November 3, 2025. You can no longer read or post questions and answers through it, so treat any tool that still offers Q&A over the API with suspicion. We wrote up Google ended the Business Profile Q&A API separately.
• Some older methods are deprecated. The v4.9 reference marks its account, admin and invitation methods that way.
• Approval is per project. Google asks you to request access for the project you plan to use, so access for one project does not cover another.
• Edits are throttled hard. More on that below.

And one thing the API will never do is judge a reply. It sends whatever you give it. That is a tooling problem, and it is why OpenGMB puts rules in front of every write. Posts and profile edits then wait for a person to approve them. Replies wait too, unless the owner turns on auto-approve for 4 or 5 star reviews.

What are the rate limits and quotas?

Google's quota page sets these defaults:

• Per minute: 300 queries per minute by default for the Business Information API, and the same for Account Management, Performance, Verifications, Lodging, Place Actions and Notifications.
• Per day: Create Location 300 a day, SearchGoogleLocation 300 a day and Update Location 10,000 a day.
• Edits: 10 edits per minute for each Business Profile, which Google says cannot be increased.

Go over a quota and you get an HTTP 429 Too Many Requests response, or RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED over gRPC. Google's advice is to pace requests evenly and retry with exponential backoff and jitter.

Our own Google Cloud project follows that shape: the same figure for each API, with a higher one on the older v4 API. We did not find that higher figure on Google's public page, so we do not quote it.

Quotas can change. Check the limits page and your own Cloud console before you design around a number.

How does OpenGMB use the Google Business Profile API?

• For your profile data it uses the official API. You sign in with your own Google account and approve access.
• Reads happen on a schedule. Reviews sync every 2 hours.
• Writes are checked first. Rules look at every reply, post and profile edit. Posts and profile edits need approval, and so do replies unless the owner turns on auto-approve for 4 or 5 star reviews. Replies to 1, 2 and 3 star reviews always need a person.
• We throttle ourselves. One shared limiter paces requests per project and edits per location, counted across the web app, the MCP server and the worker, and a 429 retries with backoff.
• Google calls cost you nothing. Publishing, edits, refreshes and syncs are free, with a fair-use limit on each account. The $10 plan is usage credit for AI drafts and rank scans, and pricing has the details.

The practical benefit is that you do not carry the approval process yourself. On the hosted plan we already hold an approved project.

Do it with OpenGMB

Use the opengmb MCP server. Call workspaces_list, then call
reviews_list_unreplied for each location and tell me which locations
have reviews without a reply. Do not change anything.

Sources: Google for Developers, Business Profile overview (read 2026-10-24). Google for Developers, Business Profile APIs reference (read 2026-10-24). Google for Developers, Prerequisites (read 2026-10-24). Google for Developers, Basic setup (read 2026-10-24). Google for Developers, Q&A API change log (read 2026-10-24). Google for Developers, Quota limits (read 2026-10-24). Google for Developers, Usage fees (read 2026-10-24). Rule ids come from the OpenGMB guardrail packs.