Google Business Profile Attributes: What They Are, Which Ones Matter, How to Set Them

Attributes are the short labels on your Google Business Profile that answer the practical questions a customer has before choosing you: is there a ramp, do you take cards, can I sit outside, do I need an appointment. They show as icons and chips on your listing, they feed the filters people tap in Google Maps, and they are among the facts AI assistants read when someone asks for “a wheelchair accessible dentist near me”. Below: the kinds that exist, how your categories control the list you are offered, how to set them under Edit profile and More, and how to keep them accurate.

We treat attributes as a fifteen-minute job with a long tail: quick to set, easy to forget, quietly costly when wrong. They are Step 7 in our pillar guide on how to optimize your Google Business Profile. Before you start, run the free Google Business Profile Optimizer to see where the public profile stands; attributes are an owner-only field it cannot audit, which is why we walk through them by hand.

What attributes are, and what they are not

An attribute is a yes-or-no fact attached to your profile from a list Google maintains. Wheelchair accessible entrance: yes. Accepts credit cards: yes. Dogs allowed outside: yes. You do not write attributes, you switch them on, so the wording is identical for every business. That uniformity is what makes them useful to filters and machines.

They sit alongside two neighbors owners often confuse them with:

	Categories	Attributes	Services and products
What it says	What the business is	Facts about how it operates	What it sells
Who writes it	Chosen from Google’s list	Switched on from Google’s list; some added by customers	Written by you, in your words
Where it shows	The line under your name	Icons, chips and the About tab; Maps filters	Services and products sections
Main effect	Which searches you are eligible for	Whether you match a filter or a condition in a question	Detail for longer searches and for people comparing

“We are a pediatric dentist” belongs in a category; “we accept new patients” is an attribute; “Invisalign consultation” is a service. Our Google Business Profile categories guide covers the first; this guide covers the second.

Factual versus subjective attributes

There are two kinds, and you control only one of them.

Factual attributes are objective and set by you: accessibility, payments, service options, amenities, planning, health, identity. Customers can also suggest factual attributes through the Maps app, and Google sometimes displays a customer-sourced answer before you have confirmed it. When a factual attribute shows wrongly, override it under Edit profile and More; your answer wins.

Subjective attributes describe how a place feels: cozy, casual, romantic, upscale, good for groups, popular with tourists, good for working on a laptop. Google collects these by asking people who have visited, through the short “Know this place?” questions in Google Maps, and displays the consensus. There is no switch for them in your profile. If your cafe is tagged casual and you would rather it read upscale, the only lever is the experience itself and the customers who describe it.

In our experience owners spend too much energy resenting subjective tags and too little on the factual ones they can fix in a minute. Fix what you control first.

How categories unlock attributes

The attribute list is not universal. Google assigns attribute groups by primary category: a restaurant sees dining options, offerings and service options such as outdoor seating and takeout; a hotel sees amenities and policies; a dentist sees accepting new patients and appointment attributes; a plumber sees online estimates and onsite services. Accessibility, payments, planning and identity attributes are offered to most business types.

Two practical consequences. If an attribute you expect is missing, the fix is usually in the category, not on the attribute screen: check that the primary category is the most specific true one, and compare it with the businesses ranking for your searches using the free GBP Category Optimizer. And when you change a primary category, re-open the attribute screen afterwards, because groups appear and disappear with it, and anything in a removed group is gone.

The attribute families

The exact list changes often and varies by country, so treat these tables as a map rather than an inventory. Everything marked owner-set lives under Edit profile and More.

Offered to most business types

Group	Typical attributes	Set by
Accessibility	Wheelchair accessible entrance, restroom, seating, parking lot and elevator; assistive hearing loop	Owner; customers can suggest
Payments	Credit cards, debit cards, NFC mobile payments, cash only, checks	Owner
Amenities	Restroom, gender-neutral restroom, Wi-Fi or free Wi-Fi; parking (free lot, paid lot, street, garage, valet)	Owner
Planning	Appointment required, appointments recommended, accepts reservations	Owner; some customer-sourced
Crowd and atmosphere	Family-friendly, good for groups, LGBTQ+ friendly, transgender safespace; casual, cozy, romantic, upscale	Crowd flags owner-set; atmosphere customer-sourced
From the business (identity)	Women-owned, Black-owned, Latino-owned, Asian-owned, veteran-owned, LGBTQ+ owned, Indigenous-owned, disabled-owned	Owner only; availability varies by country

Unlocked by specific categories

Group	Who sees it	Typical attributes
Service options	Restaurants, cafes, shops, many service businesses	Dine-in, takeout, delivery, no-contact delivery, curbside pickup, drive-through, in-store shopping and pickup, outdoor seating; for service businesses, online appointments, online estimates, onsite services
Dining and offerings	Restaurants, cafes, bars	Breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, dessert, catering, counter or table service; vegetarian and vegan options, halal, kosher, organic dishes, kids’ menu, happy hour, serves beer, wine, cocktails, coffee
Health	Medical and dental categories	Accepts new patients, appointment required, online care, language assistance
Hotels	Lodging categories	Pool, fitness center, spa, room service, pet-friendly, airport shuttle, free breakfast, EV charging, check-in and check-out times; managed in the hotel amenities section rather than under More
Children and pets	Restaurants, retail, venues	Good for kids, high chairs, changing tables; dogs allowed, dogs allowed outside

Identity attributes are self-declared and unverified, and appear as a badge where available. Set them if they are true and you want them displayed; they are a statement, not a tactic.

How to set attributes: Edit profile and More

1. Sign in to the Google account that manages the profile and search your business name on Google, or open the profile in the Google Maps app.
2. Click Edit profile, then Business information. The dialog has tabs; the last one is More.
3. Work down every group. Each attribute has three states: yes, no and unset. Set what applies to yes and what clearly does not to no. An explicit no stops a wrong customer suggestion from filling the gap later.
4. Save. Most attributes appear on the public listing within a few days, some within minutes.
5. Check the result as a customer: open the listing in the Maps app, look at the chips under the hours line, and open the About tab.

With several locations, repeat per profile: a ramp at one branch says nothing about the other. Our Google Business Profile checklist lists attributes as a setup item so they are not skipped.

Where attributes surface: Maps filters and AI answers

Attributes do their work in three places.

Your own listing. Some appear as icons next to the address (the wheelchair symbol), some as a chip row under the hours (Dine-in, Takeout, Delivery), some as a badge under the name (Women-owned), and all of them under the About tab. People comparing three dentists scan these before they read a review.

Filters. Google Maps and the local pack offer filter chips that vary by search: for restaurants, Open now, Top rated, Price, Takeout, Delivery, Dine-in and Outdoor seating; for other verticals, Wheelchair accessible or Accepts new patients. A filter is a hard cut. If the searcher taps Outdoor seating and your patio is not an attribute, your listing is not shown, however well you rank unfiltered.

Questions with conditions. People also ask instead of filtering: “wheelchair accessible dentist near me”, “restaurants with outdoor seating in Wicker Park that take reservations”, “a cafe where I can work on my laptop”. Google’s AI summaries in Search and Maps, and assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, resolve the condition against facts they can verify, and your attributes are the most machine-readable statement of those facts you have. In our experience a listing with the relevant attribute set is far more likely to be named for a constrained question than one where the same fact is buried in a photo caption or a review. Our guide on how AI assistants recommend local businesses explains the mechanics, the free AI Visibility Checker shows whether you are being named today, and our pillar on AI search optimization for local businesses covers the wider picture.

Accuracy: the cost of a false attribute

An attribute is a promise made on Google’s behalf, and customers hold you to it in the one place that hurts: reviews. The complaints we see are predictable. A wheelchair user arrives to find two steps and no ramp. A customer with only a card is told cash only. A remote worker sits down to discover the free Wi-Fi ended last year. A family is turned away from a patio the listing called dog-friendly. Each produces a one-star review that names the false claim, and the reply you write afterwards cannot undo the visit.

Google’s guidelines for representing your business require the profile to reflect the real-world business accurately, and attributes are no exception. The rule is not to select as many attributes as possible but to set every true one to yes and every false one to no. If you are unsure whether your entrance qualifies as wheelchair accessible, leave it unset and ask someone who uses a wheelchair. If a complaint does land, fix the attribute the same day and follow our guide on how to respond to Google reviews.

Worked example: a Chicago cafe sets its attributes

Milwaukee Avenue Grind (fictional) is a two-room coffee shop in Wicker Park, Chicago, with a sidewalk patio from May to October, a ramped entrance, an accessible restroom, card and phone payments only, and a co-owner who is a woman. Its profile had the primary category Coffee shop, a dozen photos and no owner-set attributes; Google was showing Dine-in and Takeout from customer answers and nothing else.

Accessibility. Wheelchair accessible entrance: yes (ramp). Wheelchair accessible restroom and seating: yes. Wheelchair accessible parking lot: no, explicitly, because there is no lot at all; leaving it unset invited a wrong guess.

Payments. Credit cards, debit cards and NFC mobile payments: yes. Cash only: no. This matters on a block where the next coffee shop is cash only.

Service options. Dine-in and takeout confirmed. Delivery: yes, through two third-party apps, with the ordering link added to the profile. Outdoor seating: yes, with a calendar reminder to turn it off on the first of November and on again in May. Curbside pickup: no.

Amenities and offerings. Restroom, gender-neutral restroom and free Wi-Fi: yes. Coffee and vegan options (oat milk, vegan pastries): yes. Dogs allowed outside: yes.

From the business. Women-owned: on; the co-owners want it displayed.

What changed on the listing. Within days the Maps card showed a chip row reading Dine-in, Takeout, Delivery; a wheelchair icon appeared beside the address; a Women-owned badge sat under the name; and the About tab filled with six groups instead of one. The cafe now appears when someone filters Wicker Park coffee results by Outdoor seating or Wheelchair accessible, and when someone asks an assistant for a dog-friendly cafe with Wi-Fi near Damen and North, the facts it needs are on the profile rather than in a photo caption. Subjective tags took longer: over the following months customer answers added Cozy and Good for working on laptop, which the owners could not have set themselves.

A quarterly attribute review

Ten minutes per location, four times a year, plus an immediate pass whenever something physical changes.

1. Open Edit profile → Business information → More and read every group top to bottom. New attributes appear here without announcement.
2. Confirm each yes is still true: Wi-Fi, payment methods, delivery partners, patio, appointment policy.
3. Turn seasonal attributes on or off: outdoor seating, fireplace, heated patio.
4. Open the public listing in the Maps app and compare the About tab with what you saved; customer suggestions can have changed a factual attribute.
5. Note which subjective tags customers have added and whether they match what you want to be known for.
6. Look at the two competitors ranking above you and note any attribute they display that you qualify for but have not set.

Keep the description in step with the attributes: if the description promises a patio, the attribute should say so too (see our description guide). Fold the whole pass into the wider quarterly review in our Google Business Profile audit guide.

Common mistakes

• Claiming accessibility you do not have. A step at the door or a restroom too narrow for a chair. Ask a wheelchair user before you set it.
• Setting attributes once and forgetting. The patio in January, the Wi-Fi that ended, the delivery partner you dropped.
• Leaving attributes unset so customer guesses fill the gap. An explicit no protects you.
• Hunting for a missing attribute on the More screen when the problem is the primary category.
• Copying attributes across locations that differ physically.
• Putting a fact in the wrong field. Vegan options is an attribute; Vegan restaurant is a category; a vegan brunch menu is a menu item or service.
• Treating subjective tags as something to fight rather than something to earn.

Do this now

• Run the Google Business Profile Optimizer to see where the rest of the profile stands; attributes are an owner-only field it cannot see.
• Confirm the primary category is right so the attribute list you see is the right one; compare with competitors in the GBP Category Optimizer if unsure.
• Open Edit profile → Business information → More and set every true attribute to yes and every clearly false one to no.
• Verify accessibility claims physically, or with someone who relies on them, before saving.
• Add the ordering, booking or appointment links your service-option attributes imply.
• Check the public listing in the Maps app: chips under the hours, icons by the address, the About tab.
• Add calendar reminders for seasonal toggles and a quarterly ten-minute review.
• Repeat for every location, then continue with the rest of our Google Business Profile optimization guide.