The GBP description field holds 750 characters and most businesses use them to say nothing. "We are a family-run business committed to excellent customer service and competitive prices." Every competitor in the category has written that sentence. AI will now produce it for you a thousand times a minute, which is the actual risk here rather than any Google penalty.
The 750-character description problem
Three constraints shape this field. Most people know only one.
The limit is 750 characters including spaces. On mobile, roughly the first 250 are visible before the reader has to tap "more", and most do not tap. So it is really two fields: an opening that has to work alone, and a longer section only interested readers ever see.
Google's guidelines rule out more than people expect. No URLs, no phone numbers, no promotional or sales language, no pricing, no offers, no HTML, no shouting in capitals. Descriptions that break these get rejected or quietly trimmed, sometimes weeks after they were accepted. And the description carries far less ranking weight than the category and services fields. It is a conversion asset, not a keyword field. Stuffing it costs you the reader and buys almost nothing.
What belongs in the first 250 characters: what you do, where, for whom, and the one thing that is true of you and not of the business next door. Everything else - history, credentials, the full service list, parking, languages spoken - goes after the fold.
Prompting for a business description that reads human
The reason AI descriptions read like AI descriptions is that the prompt contained no information. "Write a Google Business Profile description for a plumber in Bristol" has nothing in it, so the model returns the average of every plumber page it has ever seen. Put facts in and you get specifics out.
Collect the raw material first
Ten minutes with the owner, or ten minutes on their site. Years trading, the service list in their own words, accreditations by name, response times they will commit to, areas covered by name, the two questions they get asked constantly, and one job they refuse to take. That last one is usually the most distinctive fact you will get.
Brief the model properly
Give it the facts, the 750-character ceiling, the 250-character front-loading requirement, and Google's banned content list. Then tell it explicitly what to avoid: no "committed to excellence", no "your trusted partner", no superlatives, and no sentence that would still be true with a competitor's name in it. Ask for three versions, not one.
Cut rather than polish
Take the strongest version and delete from it. Generated copy is padded by default. Apply the swap test to every sentence: if it survives having a competitor's name dropped into it, it is not earning its characters. What remains is often well under the limit, and that is fine.
One last pass: read it aloud. Brochure copy fails that test instantly. Copy that sounds like the owner explaining the business to a neighbour passes.
Writing Google Posts that are not filler
Posts run on different mechanics. Up to 1500 characters, but only the first eighty or so appear in the preview card, which is where the decision to read gets made. What's New posts stay visible for months rather than expiring after a week. Events and offers run to their date range. Images want to be at least 720 by 540, and they crop tighter in the card than you expect.
The failure mode is posting to satisfy a calendar. A weekly post saying "It's Friday, book now" is worse than no post: it fills the profile with content that tells a prospect nothing and trains everyone involved to treat the channel as a chore.
What is actually worth posting, in rough order of usefulness:
- A job you just finished - what the problem was, what you did, how long it took, with a photo of the real work rather than stock.
- A question you keep being asked - answered properly in 150 words. These are the posts people read.
- Something genuinely changing - a new service, changed hours, a staff member newly qualified in something, a temporary closure.
Where AI earns its keep is turning one input into a month of these. Hand it the job notes or the FAQ list and ask for four posts, each opening differently, each inside the character limit, each with a suggested CTA button type. The writing is the easy half; collecting the raw material is where this breaks down.
Keeping brand voice consistent across locations
At one location, voice is whatever the owner sounds like. At forty it has to be written down, or you end up with forty voices, or worse, one voice repeated verbatim forty times.
The document that fixes this is half a page:
- Three adjectives and three anti-adjectives - "direct, practical, warm" and "not jokey, not corporate, not salesy". Models respond better to what to avoid than to what to aim at.
- Person and tense - "we", present tense, second person for the reader. Decide once.
- A banned phrase list - the specific clichés you never want to see again. This list grows every time you catch one in review.
- Two worked examples - a real description and a real post you are happy with. Examples do more than adjectives ever will.
- Per-location variables - the town, the manager, the specifics that must change in every version.
The duplicate content question comes up here constantly. Identical descriptions across forty locations will not trigger anything dramatic, but they waste the field. The description is one of the few places you can say something true about that specific branch. Generate from a shared voice brief plus per-location facts, not from one paragraph with the town name swapped.
This is also where a multi-location tool stops being a luxury. Ampli5 Pulse lets you draft and schedule posts across selected locations from one place, with a shared media library so images are not re-uploaded forty times and team roles so the person writing need not be the person approving. It does not remove the need for a voice brief. It removes the forty browser tabs.
What to never let AI write unchecked
A short list, deliberately. These are the things that cause real problems rather than mild embarrassment.
- Credentials and accreditations - Gas Safe, CQC, SRA, chartered status, manufacturer approvals. Models invent these with total confidence. Publishing a qualification the business does not hold is a regulatory problem, not a copy problem.
- Prices and guarantees - "from £49" and "24-hour response guaranteed" are commitments, and they breach the description guidelines besides. Never published without the owner confirming.
- Medical, legal and financial claims - outcomes, success rates, treatment efficacy. Sector rules apply to GBP text exactly as they do to a website.
- Superlatives about market position - "the best in Manchester", "the number one rated". Unverifiable, and precisely the sort of thing that attracts a competitor complaint.
- Hours and closures inside post text - those belong in the hours fields, where Google actually uses them. A post saying "closed Monday" that stays visible for months is a problem you will forget you created.
The rule that covers most of it: AI can draft anything a well-briefed new starter could. Anything needing access to records, legal judgement or the owner's authority is not a drafting task.