Changelog
- Updated
- Updated
When someone types “plumber near me” into Google, or asks Google Maps which bakery opens early on Sunday, the Google Business Profile answers first, a product Google called Google My Business until it renamed it in November 2021. For a shop, a clinic or a law office, the profile shows the hours, the phone number, the photos and the reviews beside the map, where a customer decides whether to call before the website loads.
How does Google rank a Google Business Profile in local search?
Google publishes the answer in its own guide to local ranking, which names three factors. The three are relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well a profile matches what the person searched for, while distance is how far the business sits from that person. Prominence is how well known the business is, and Google measures prominence in part through links to the website and through review counts. Google also notes that more reviews and positive ratings can help a local ranking. An owner cannot move the building closer to the customer, so the work of local SEO goes into relevance and prominence. Money does not move the ranking either, since the same guide states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.
What a complete Google Business Profile includes
Google’s ranking guide says that “businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results.” The fields are plain. An owner fills in the address or service area, the phone number, regular and holiday hours, the website, attributes such as parking or Wi-Fi, and photos of the storefront, the products and the people who work there. A missing field is hard to explain, and an incomplete profile gives Google less to match against a search. Wrong hours cost the owner twice, because the customer who drives to a locked door is a lost sale who now has a reason to leave a one-star review.
How do you choose the primary category for a Google Business Profile?
The category tells Google what the business is. Google’s category guidelines frame the choice as finishing the sentence “this business IS a,” which leaves out the things a business has on offer. A coffee shop inside a bookstore picks coffee shop and leaves the bookstore category to the bookstore. Google asks owners to choose categories as specific as possible while still representative of the main business. The guidelines also ask for as few categories as the business needs, and warn against using categories as keywords or as a list of features. The category says what the business is, while the services list and the description cover the rest of the menu.
How to ask for Google reviews and answer them
Reviews feed prominence, so a steady flow of them helps. Google’s review guidance covers the mechanics, where an owner can share a Google review link or print a QR code for the counter or the receipt. The customer needs a Google Account to post. Google calls free or discounted goods offered in exchange for a review “strictly prohibited,” and the same rule covers offering something to change or remove a negative review. A reply sits on the record next to the review it answers. Google asks owners to keep replies constructive, to follow up on the concern, to keep the reviewer’s private information out of the reply, and to leave deals and promotions for another channel. For an owner who is also working the register, review replies are the first task to slip, and the replies are what the next customer reads.
What replaced the Q&A section on Google Business Profiles?
The older version of this advice told owners to seed the Q&A section with their own questions and answers. On December 3, 2025, Google said it was removing Questions and Answers from Google Maps and replacing the feature with an AI-powered Ask button. The Ask button gives a customer an instant answer drawn from the business’s own answers and from relevant reviews. Google also told owners that their answers to aggregated customer questions would keep feeding its understanding of the business. Does the shop take walk-ins? Is there parking out back, and does the clinic see children? Google’s Ask button answers those questions from the words the owner and the customers have already written. A review reply that names the service, the neighborhood and how the problem got fixed gives the next customer a better answer.
Do Google Business Profile posts help local SEO?
Google lets a business publish three kinds of posts to its profile, where updates come with a photo and an action button. Offers come with dates and a View Offer button, and events have a start and an end. A live post shows on Search and on Maps. Google archives older posts unless the post has a date range, so a profile with no new posts ends up showing none. A short post about a new service, new hours or a seasonal menu keeps the listing current for the customer reading it and for Google.
How ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini find a local business
A customer who asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for a dentist in their neighborhood gets an answer assembled from what has been written about local dentists somewhere the assistant can read. Getting a business into those answers is what answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) describe, and together with Google and Maps they make up search discovery, the full set of places a customer can find a business before visiting its website. A corner shop has a short written record, made up of the profile, the reviews, the website and a handful of directory listings. Matching hours and addresses across the profile and the website help Google and the AI assistants at the same time, and so does a description that says in plain words what the business does and for whom. Site pages that answer the questions customers ask are the other half. Our posts on writing content for conversational search and structuring a page so AI search answers quote it cover the site side in detail. The engines do not agree on sources. When Content Cucumber put the same buyer questions to four answer engines, each one named a different set of companies, which we wrote up in what AI search engines cite when asked for a content agency.
Who writes the Google Business Profile description?
The reflex is to hand the description field to a tool and accept a paragraph that reads like the listing next door, an AI draft that moves sideways through what already exists online about businesses of that type. An owner or a writer who knows the business puts down the details a model has not seen, such as the person who answers the phone, the brands of equipment the shop repairs, or the side street the parking lot opens onto. Those details point forward, toward what the business knows that is not online yet, and a customer and an answer engine both need them to tell one shop from the next. Review replies and posts follow the same rule. The website behind the profile gives a local retailer more room than a listing to say what the store knows, as our list of content ideas for a specialty running store lays out for one kind of shop.
By improving your business profile you help buyers better understand your brand and your location. It makes you real.
Content Cucumber’s SEO and AI search team writes the descriptions, posts, review replies and site pages that give Google, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini something accurate to say about a local business. Our search discovery audit shows how Google and the answer engines describe a business today.
Let us help you rank higher with human-written SEO content
Our SEO Content Services →Keep Reading
Frequently Asked Questions
A Google Business Profile is the free listing a business manages for Google Search and Google Maps, with its hours, phone number, address, photos and reviews. Google renamed the product from Google My Business in November 2021.
Google's local ranking guide names three factors, relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well the profile matches the search, distance is how far the business is from the person searching, and prominence is how well known the business is, which Google measures in part through links and review counts.
Google's category guidelines ask owners to finish the sentence "this business IS a" and pick a category as specific as possible that still represents the main business. The guidelines ask for as few categories as the business needs and warn against using categories as keywords.
No. Google's review guidance calls free or discounted goods offered in exchange for a review strictly prohibited, and the same rule covers incentives to change or remove a negative review.
On December 3, 2025, Google said it was removing Questions and Answers from Google Maps and replacing the feature with an AI-powered Ask button. The Ask button answers customer questions from the business's own answers and from relevant reviews.
