If an AI assistant tells someone you are closed on St Patrick's Day when you are actually open, you lose that customer before they ever reach your door. The root cause is almost always a missing or incorrect special hours entry in your Google Business Profile. Fixing it takes about three minutes and the effect on AI-generated answers is typically visible within a day or two.

Why "public holiday hours" matter for assistant answers

Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free listing tool that lets businesses control how they appear in Google Search and Google Maps — and, increasingly, in the AI-generated answers that appear above organic results. When someone asks Google's AI Overview, Gemini, or a third-party assistant like Siri or Bing Copilot "is [business name] open on Easter Monday?", those tools pull structured data from your GBP listing first.

Ireland has more bank holidays than many people realise: New Year's Day, St Brigid's Day (first Monday in February), St Patrick's Day, Easter Monday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in June, the first Monday in August, the last Monday in October, Christmas Day, and St Stephen's Day. Each one is a potential mismatch between what your listing says and what you actually do.

AI assistants are particularly sensitive to time-based queries. In our measurements, "open now" and "open on [date]" queries are among the most common local intent searches, and an incorrect answer is more damaging than no answer at all — the user assumes you are closed and moves on to the next result.

How to record special hours without overwriting regular hours

This is the most common point of confusion. Many business owners avoid touching their GBP hours around bank holidays because they fear changing their Monday hours permanently. Special hours in GBP are a completely separate field from your regular weekly schedule; updating one never affects the other.

Here is how to do it:

  1. Sign in to your GBP dashboard at business.google.com.
  2. Select your location, then go to Edit profile → Hours.
  3. Scroll past your regular hours to Special hours (sometimes labelled "Holiday hours").
  4. Click Add special hours or the pencil icon beside an upcoming date that Google has already suggested.
  5. Set the date, then choose either a custom open/close time or mark the day as Closed.
  6. Save. Google will prompt you to confirm.

Google often pre-populates a list of upcoming Irish public holidays, so you may just need to confirm or adjust them rather than entering dates manually. If a date is not pre-populated, use the Add a date option and type it in.

A practical tip: do this for all ten Irish bank holidays at the start of each year. It takes about fifteen minutes once and removes the risk of forgetting a single date. For more detail on managing the full Irish calendar, see our article on Google Business Profile hours: handling Irish public holiday variations.

How holiday hours interact with appointment queries

If your business takes bookings — a hair salon using Treatwell or Booksy, a GP practice using a dedicated booking system, a restaurant on TheFork — there is a second layer to consider. AI assistants increasingly check whether a business is "bookable" on a given date, not just whether it is listed as open.

If your GBP says you are open on Easter Monday but your booking platform shows no available slots, the AI may present a confusing or contradictory answer. The fix is to keep both in sync:

  • Mark the date as closed in your booking platform if you are genuinely closed.
  • If you are open but with reduced hours, update both GBP special hours and your booking platform's availability for that date.
  • If you take walk-ins only on bank holidays (no bookings), add a note in your GBP description or a Post explaining this — more on that below.

Your business category in GBP also affects how AI handles appointment queries, so it is worth checking that your primary category is accurate.

What photos, posts, and Q&A can add for clarity

Structured hours data is the most reliable signal, but AI assistants also read unstructured content when the structured data is ambiguous or absent. Three features of GBP are particularly useful around bank holidays.

Posts — GBP Posts are short updates (similar to a social media post) that appear on your listing. A post published a few days before a bank holiday saying "We are open 10am–4pm on St Patrick's Day" gives AI tools a clear, dated text signal that reinforces your special hours entry. Posts expire after seven days by default, which is fine for this purpose. See our guide on Google Business Profile posts and Q&A: when they change AI answers for more on how these influence AI outputs.

Q&A — The Questions & Answers section of your GBP listing lets you post your own questions and answer them. Adding "Are you open on bank holidays?" with a clear answer is a legitimate and effective tactic. AI tools often quote Q&A content verbatim when answering conversational queries.

Photos — A photo of your shopfront with a visible "Open on bank holidays" sign, or a seasonal photo posted around a specific holiday, provides a visual context signal. This matters less than structured data but can help on platforms that weigh image metadata. For a full breakdown, see the photo checklist that improves local AI recommendations.

GBP feature Best use for bank holidays AI signal strength
Special hours Exact open/close times High
Posts Short-term announcements Medium
Q&A Evergreen policy questions Medium
Photos Visual reinforcement Low–medium

What happens if you leave special hours blank

If you do not fill in special hours for a bank holiday, Google typically defaults to displaying your regular hours for that day of the week. On a bank holiday that falls on a Monday, for example, your Monday hours will show — even if you are actually closed or operating reduced hours.

This is the most common source of the "Google Business Profile hours Irish bank holiday incorrect AI" problem. The listing is not technically wrong from GBP's perspective; it is simply showing your standard schedule. But the AI assistant reading that data has no way of knowing you deviate from it on public holidays unless you tell it explicitly.

The practical consequence: a customer asks their phone's assistant if you are open on the August bank holiday Monday, the AI says yes because your Monday hours say 9am–6pm, the customer arrives at 10am to find you closed, and they leave a frustrated review. Filling in special hours is the single highest-impact fix available.

How suggestedby.ai can validate "open now" recommendations

Once you have updated your special hours, posts, and Q&A, it is worth checking how AI tools are actually presenting your business in response to time-sensitive queries. suggestedby.ai runs a free check that shows whether AI assistants are currently recommending your business and, where detectable, whether the hours they cite match your listing. It is a straightforward way to confirm that the changes you made have propagated correctly before the next bank holiday arrives.

For further reading on the signals that influence what AI can quote about your business, the article on services and pricing signals on Google Business Profile covers the broader picture of how structured listing data shapes AI recommendations.