How to Get Your Therapy Practice's Google Business Profile Ready for Gemini

What changed on June 10

At its Google for Brazil event, Google announced that the Gemini app now connects directly to a Google Business Profile. In the coming weeks you will be able to link your profile with a single tap. Once connected, Gemini has access to your real profile context: customer reviews, customer questions, and performance data. From there it can analyze how your practice did over a given month, looking at search impressions, direction requests, call data, and how people engage with your listing. It can draft a response to a review in your own voice, referencing the specific feedback. It can update details like your hours and surface gaps in the profile.

The rollout is global and started this month, with one exception that matters for some practices. Google's own announcement notes the feature is rolling out everywhere except the EEA and the UK for now. In practice that means a therapist in the United States or Australia can connect a profile shortly, while a practice in the UK or anywhere in the European Economic Area, Spain included, has to wait.

Why this matters for a therapy practice

For local healthcare searches, Google still shows traditional local results, the map pack and the profile, rather than replacing them with an AI summary. That makes your Google Business Profile the part of your visibility you can most directly control. The change is that the same profile now does double duty. It decides whether you appear in the local results, and it is the data an AI reads when it describes or recommends you. A thin or outdated profile used to be a local search weakness. Now it is also what an AI tool sees when a prospective client asks it to find a therapist nearby.

This sits right next to a shift already underway in how clients find therapists through AI search. Early reports from local SEO practitioners note the launch works with a single connected profile, which is the typical solo practice setup, so this lands on independent therapists rather than large group practices.

What Gemini can see in your profile

• Performance data: search impressions, direction requests, call data, and how people engage with your listing.
• Reviews and questions: your existing reviews and the questions prospective clients have asked, which it can use to draft replies in your voice.
• Profile details: hours, posts, and gaps it can surface, like an unanswered question or hours you never set.

A readiness checklist for your profile

None of this changes how you optimize a Google Business Profile. It raises the stakes on doing it. Run through the list below before you connect anything.

• Set your primary category precisely, the closest accurate fit such as Psychotherapist or Counselor, and add relevant secondary categories.
• List your services with clear names and short descriptions, covering the specialties and modalities you actually offer.
• Write a specific business description in plain language: who you help and with what, not a list of adjectives.
• Keep your hours accurate and current, since Gemini will flag missing or stale hours.
• Add real photos of your space and yourself, and never any images of clients.
• Seed and monitor the questions and answers section so common questions already have answers.
• Build reviews steadily rather than in bursts, and reply to each one. Gemini can draft the replies, but the reviews have to exist first.
• Keep your name, address or service area, and phone number identical across your website and other listings.
• Link the profile to your strongest page, usually your homepage.

If you work online with no public office, you can still set a service area instead of an address, and reviews still matter as a trust signal an AI can read. For the full mechanics of ranking the profile itself, see how to rank in the local 3-pack.

If your practice is in the UK or Spain

The Gemini connection excludes the EEA and the UK at launch, so practices there cannot link a profile yet. The readiness work still applies. A complete profile already shapes your local results today, and it will be ready the moment access reaches your region.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to do anything differently to my profile for Gemini?

No. The same completeness work applies. Gemini reads what is already there, so the value comes from a profile that is accurate, detailed, and current.

Is the Gemini Business Profile connection available everywhere?

It is rolling out globally this month, excluding the EEA and the UK for now. Practices in the United States and Australia are included; the UK and EEA countries, including Spain, are not yet.

Will Gemini write my review replies for me?

It can draft a reply in your voice that references the specific review, but you stay in control. You review and post it.

Being found is shifting from doing more to being legible to the systems clients now use to choose a therapist. A clear, complete Google Business Profile is the most direct lever you have, and it now feeds both Google's local results and an AI assistant. For the wider picture, start with SEO for therapists in private practice. If you would rather have your profile audited for exactly this, that is the kind of work HarborVisibility does.