Is Google’s AI really calling businesses to ask about prices?
Yes — this is real and documented. Google rolled out an AI feature that phones local businesses on a user’s behalf to check things like prices and availability: a customer asks Google, and Google’s assistant makes the call, identifying itself as an automated system calling on a customer’s behalf. Invoca, a call-analytics company, tracked these calls on its own platform from July to November 2025 and watched the volume climb sharply as the feature expanded through home services — with plumbing AI calls up more than 650% in November 2025 alone. (That’s one vendor’s platform data, so treat the exact percentages as directional; the feature itself is public and announced by Google.)
What it means when the robot calls
Behind every one of these calls is a human buyer who asked Google a question about your kind of business, right now. The AI call is effectively a customer inquiry wearing a robot voice. If someone answers and gives the information, your business can show up in the answer that buyer receives. If the phone rings out, you’re absent from a comparison you never knew was happening — and in Invoca’s data, 26% of these calls, on average, went unanswered.
What a local business should actually do
Three practical steps. First, decide your policy: Google’s help pages say a verified business can turn off automated calls for customers’ bookings and inquiries in its Business Profile settings (under Advanced settings), but opting out means opting out of those buyers too. Second, make sure someone or something answers — these calls arrive during business hours, exactly when your team is busiest. Third, keep the basics the AI asks about (services, rough timelines, booking process) easy for whoever answers your phone to state clearly.
The bigger shift underneath
Phone answering used to be customer service. It is quietly becoming distribution: AI assistants — Google’s and others — increasingly do the first round of shopping by phone. The businesses that answer reliably get counted; the ones that don’t disappear from answers they never saw.