Chrome keeps cookies. Your listing loses chat.

Two notices landed in the same week and they point in opposite directions. One takes a deadline off the calendar that has been sitting there for four and a half years. The other takes something off your Google Business Profile a week from today.

Owners have asked us about the first one all week. The second one is the one that will actually change a report you look at.

Chrome is not switching third-party cookies off

On Monday Google said it no longer plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. Instead of removing them, Chrome will introduce a new experience that lets people make an informed choice about them that applies across their browsing, and the Privacy Sandbox tools stay available for anyone who wants to use them.

That is a real reversal. The plan was announced in January 2020, pushed back twice, and in January of this year Chrome started blocking cookies for a small slice of users as the first live step. Now the removal is off.

What it means for a local business is mostly relief about work you do not have to do in a hurry:

• Remarketing audiences are not about to fall over. The lists you run on a browser basis keep working for now. If yours had already shrunk, that is people opting out of tracking on their phones, which is a separate story and still true.
• Nothing you moved to first-party measurement was wasted. Enhanced conversions, click identifiers stored on the contact record, server-side event sending from the Meta side. None of that was a response to Chrome. It was a response to platforms losing sight of the browser in general, and that has not changed.
• There is no new deadline to plan around. The honest version is that browser-level choice replaces a hard switch-off, so the numbers keep drifting gradually instead of dropping on a date.

If you spent the spring rebuilding your measurement around your own data, you have not lost anything. You now have reporting that does not depend on a decision Chrome can reverse in a blog post on a Monday morning.

The change that actually removes something

Chat and call history come off Google Business Profile on 31 July, a week from today. Google announced this in the spring and has been dropping reminders into the profile since.

Two things go:

1. Chat. The message button on your listing, and the conversation history behind it. If a customer has messaged you through Google in the last year, that thread is going away, and anyone who downloaded the Google Business Messages experience through a third-party inbox loses that channel too. Download anything you need to keep before the 31st.
2. Call history. The log inside the profile that showed calls coming from the listing, including missed ones. That view disappears.

The chat side is easy to shrug at. Most of the businesses we work with got a handful of messages a month through it, and half of those were price shopping. The call history is the loss, because for a lot of owners it was the only place they ever saw how many calls the listing produced and how many of them rang out.

So replace both before the 31st rather than after:

• Put a chat channel on your own site, where you control the hours, the routing and the transcript. If nobody is watching it at 7pm, do not put it there.
• Turn on missed-call text back on your main line if it is not already running. A text within seconds of a missed call recovers more bookings than the chat button ever did.
• Get call tracking in place on the phone number that answers the listing, so you keep a call log, a recording and an answer rate after the profile view is gone.

What we are still measuring

The profile performance report stays. Calls, website clicks, direction requests and the searches people used are all still there, and that is where the listing side of the reporting lives from next week.

Around it, the list we keep in every account has not moved:

1. Booked work. Appointments made, and then appointments kept. Everything else is a proxy.
2. Calls answered against calls offered, by hour. The cheapest revenue in most accounts is sitting in the 8am hour and the lunch hour.
3. A click identifier saved on every lead record, so a conversion can be sent back when the job is booked rather than when a form is filled.
4. Enhanced conversions for leads in Google Ads, sending hashed contact details with the conversion.
5. One number per channel that a human checks weekly. Reports nobody reads get built beautifully and then ignored.

What we are not doing this week

We are not tearing out server-side setups because Chrome changed its mind. We are not rebuilding audience-heavy remarketing campaigns for a single-location business, because those lists were too small to do much work even when cookies were plentiful. And we are not buying a new attribution tool on the strength of a headline, in either direction.

One announcement removed a deadline. It did not give you back the view-through data you lost when phones started asking people whether apps may track them, and it does not make platform-reported conversions more honest than they were last month.

What to do this month

• Before 31 July, download any Google chat conversations you would want to reread, and tell whoever watches that inbox that it is closing.
• Take the chat expectation off your listing and put a real one on your site, with hours attached.
• Turn on missed-call text back this week if you do not have it.
• Put call tracking on the number people reach you on, so you still have a call log in August.
• Write down July’s baseline now: calls offered, calls answered, appointments booked, appointments kept.
• Leave your first-party measurement alone. It was not built for a cookie deadline.

The listing keeps doing the work either way, which is why the week’s real job is profile management rather than reading cookie commentary. If you want the phone and the follow-up handled properly once chat is gone, that is the part we build in GoHighLevel, and it feeds the same local search reporting you already read every month.