A new review lands and the obvious fix is making sure someone besides you can answer it. The less obvious question is what that access actually hands over. Google Business Profile has exactly two roles that can reply to a review, and adding someone to either one gives them a lot more than a reply button.
The quick answer
Google Business Profile access comes down to two working roles for reviews: Owner and Manager. Both can reply to reviews, edit business information, manage posts and photos, and answer Q&A. Only an Owner can add or remove other people or delete the profile entirely. That is the whole list. There is no lighter role that can reply to reviews but nothing else.
Owner vs. Manager: what each can actually do
The names suggest a big gap between the two roles. In practice there almost isn't one. Google's current documentation for managing Business Profile owners and managers lists a short set of real distinctions, and everything else is shared.
- Owner-only: add or remove other owners and managers, remove the Business Profile entirely, and edit certain profile URLs.
- Shared by both Owner and Manager: reply to reviews, edit business information like hours and address, manage posts and photos, answer questions in the Q&A section, and view messaging and insights.
- Primary Owner: one designated account per profile, the contact Google treats as the ultimate authority if anything about ownership itself needs resolving.
So a Manager is not a junior, reviews-only account. It is nearly the whole profile, minus the ability to add or remove people or delete it. If replying to reviews is the only reason you are considering adding someone, that is worth sitting with before you send the invite.
Clearing up the "Site Manager" confusion
Search around for advice on this and you will run into a role called Site Manager, usually described as more limited and unable to reply to reviews. That is outdated. Google renamed Site Manager to Manager and folded its permissions into the role described above. If you are working from an old guide, a forum thread, or a memory of how the settings used to look, that mismatch is why.
This still causes real confusion in Google's own Business Profile support forums, where owners report a teammate who cannot see the reply option despite having what they thought was full access. The fix is almost always the same: that person was added under an older link or a leftover lower-tier invite that predates the current Manager role. Re-adding them as Manager, or confirming their existing invite actually went through as Manager, restores the reply option.
How to add a manager
Adding a Manager takes about a minute, and only an Owner can do it.
- Open your Business Profile settings and select People and access.
- Select Add and enter the person's email address.
- Choose Manager (or Owner, if you genuinely want to hand over that level of control) under access.
- Select Invite. They can reply to reviews as soon as they accept.
Removing access works the same way: open People and access, select the person, and choose Remove person. Only Owners can remove another Owner or Manager, so if the person who originally set up your profile has since left the business, confirm at least one active Owner still has that access before you need it.
What Manager access also hands over
“A Manager login is not a review-reply switch. It is nearly the whole profile, sitting on a second person's laptop.”
None of this is a reason to never add a Manager. Plenty of businesses genuinely need a second or third person with full access: a co-owner, an operations manager, a long-tenured employee. It is a reason to ask the actual question before you send the invite: does this person need to run the whole profile, or do they just need to help you answer reviews?
Delegate the writing, not the access
If the honest answer is "they just need to help with replies," there is a lower-risk way to get there that most guides skip: separate writing the reply from posting it.
Send whoever helps you the review text, not a login to your listing, and let them write or approve a reply that lands back with the one verified Owner or Manager who actually posts it. Nobody new gets standing access to your profile, your hours cannot get edited by mistake, and you still see every reply before it goes live if you want to.
This is the same idea behind how Resparo's free reply generator works for a single review: paste one in, get a reply back in your voice, and post it yourself. Using it does not require adding anyone as a Manager on your actual profile. The fuller automation setup follows the same shape at scale: you connect your own profile once, under your own login, and the everyday replies get drafted and handled without a second human account ever touching your Business Profile settings.
- Add someone as Manager only if they need full profile control, not just reply access
- Route review text to whoever writes your replies without giving them a Business Profile login
- Keep at least one active Owner who can add or remove access if a Manager leaves
- Check People and access after anyone leaves the business, invites do not expire on their own
- Add a marketing agency or a temporary employee as Manager just so they can answer reviews
- Assume "Site Manager" still exists as a separate, more limited role
- Let a Manager invite sit unaccepted and lose track of who actually has access
- Share your own Owner login instead of sending a proper Manager invite
If an agency handles your reviews
Agencies and multi-location operators run into this constantly: reply to reviews across several client or location profiles without collecting a pile of standing Manager logins on accounts they don't own. The safer version splits the same way. The agency drafts or gets pinged when a review lands, a verified Owner or Manager on each individual profile is the only login that ever posts, and access gets added or pulled per client instead of shared as one password. It is more setup than a single shared login, and it is the version that does not leave an old client's profile still reachable from your team a year after the contract ends.