Brand-level approval and implementation rules, and a Contacts page for client portal access

Approval policy, auto-approve fallback, implementation mode and content writing can now be set once on a brand and inherited by every client under it. A new Contacts page shows who at each client can sign in to their dashboard, what they receive and what is waiting on them.

A day about settings that should only be set once, and about answering a question partners keep asking: who on the client side actually has access. Underneath, most of the work went into agents that read a Business Profile properly and schedules that mean what they say.

For our partners

1. Approval rules and implementation can be set on a brand, and every client under it inherits them.
2. The Clients list has an Access column and an Approvals column, and a new Contacts page under Clients lists every person who can see a client dashboard.
3. Websites arrive in October; partners without access now see a Get Early Access door in the sidebar.

1. Brand-level rules

If you run a franchise or a multi-location group as a brand, the four settings that used to live on each client (approval policy, auto-approve fallback, who implements, and content writing) can now be set once on the brand. The Brand page has two new tabs, Approval rules and Implementation, that mirror the client tabs.

Nothing changes for clients you have already set by hand. A client keeps its own setting when it has one, falls back to the brand when it does not, then to the workspace. Each client page now names the layer it is inheriting from and links to it, so you can see where a value came from without guessing.

2. Contacts and access

The Clients list shows an Access column that reads as plain language: how many people can sign in and when they were last seen, an invite pending, notifications only, public link only, or nobody invited with an Add contact link right in the cell. Beside it, an Approvals column badges how many items are waiting on that client and how long the oldest has sat.

The new Contacts page is one row per person per client: what they can do, what they receive, when they last signed in, and how many approvals they have waiting or decided. Invite, resend, cancel and remove all live on the row. The per-client tab formerly called Client Portal is now Contacts & Portal.

Approvals made from a client’s own dashboard now record which person made them, rather than reading the same as an anonymous visit through a share link.

3. Websites early access

Websites launch in October. Partners who do not have access yet see Websites, Get Early Access in the sidebar: four questions about how you would want client sites managed, and an optional note. Answers can be changed later.

Behind the scenes

Most of the day went to the agent that plans Business Profile work. Its main report was being cut short, so on any profile with a few dozen photos everything after the photos (services, attributes, posts, reviews) simply was not there to read. The report is now a structured summary with photo counts instead of photo addresses, and it fits in a third of the space with every section present.

The bigger correction was about what counts as true. A public scrape of a Business Profile cannot read the services tab and often cannot read the description, so an agent reading only the scrape was proposing work that already existed on the profile. The report now carries a second view taken from the connected profile itself, and the agent is told plainly which view is the truth for the client’s own fields and which is what a searcher sees. On the first profile we checked, the scrape said empty and the connection held a description, sixteen services and twenty-two attributes.

Scheduled agents now honour a runs-per-cycle limit, default one. A monthly planner means one planning session that month, whether the run started on the schedule or by hand. We first counted that window rolling from the previous scheduled slot, then corrected it to the calendar month, because that is what “monthly” means to everyone reading it. Replaying two months of history under the calendar rule told us how many double sessions this prevents, and it is not a small number. Running an agent on demand is never blocked.

We also split the planning tools by stream, so a planner working on Business Profile posts can no longer draft a content plan on a campaign that does not buy content, and the agents list now shows paused as its own status instead of reading the same as live.