Two bits of housekeeping before the steps, because they trip people up on the way in. The product is called Google Business Profile, not Google My Business — Google renamed it in 2021 and finished migrating the features into Search and Maps over the following years. And there is no separate app to download: the old Google My Business app was retired, so a single-location business now edits its profile directly inside Google Search or the Google Maps app, with the dashboard at business.google.com mainly serving multi-location operators.
That matters practically: if you go looking for “the Google My Business app,” you will find blog posts from 2021 and a dead end. Everything below happens in the two places you already have on your phone. The whole setup is free — Google’s help documentation states you can add or claim your business at no charge — and it takes an afternoon. Verification is the only part where you wait on Google rather than yourself.
What is a Google Business Profile, and where do you manage it?
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that represents your business in Google Search and Google Maps: name, category, hours, phone, service area, photos, and reviews. There is no standalone app any more. You manage it inside Search and Maps, or through business.google.com if you run several locations.
For a local service business, this listing does more work than the website. Someone with a burst pipe does not read an About page; they search, glance at the map results, check the star rating, and tap “Call.” The website answers “is this business right for me.” The profile answers the more urgent “who do I call right now,” and it answers it in the moment the decision is being made.
Do you need a registered company or a tax ID to create one?
No tax ID. Google’s eligibility rule is about operations, not paperwork: your business must either have a physical location customers can visit, or travel to customers where they are. Google’s verification methods — video, phone, text, email, live video call, and mail — do not ask for an EIN, VAT number, or Companies House registration.
This surprises people who expect a company-registry check. What Google verifies is that a real operation exists at a real place and that you are the one running it — and it verifies that visually. So the practical requirement is not a document but evidence you can point a camera at: permanent signage, a branded van, tools, a workspace, an invoice with your business name on it. Which is why setting up a profile “just to see,” for a business that does not really operate yet, tends to fail at verification rather than at signup.
Step 1: Check whether a profile already exists
Before you create anything, search your business name in Google and in Google Maps. Google frequently generates unclaimed profiles on its own from web data, map data, and user contributions, so there is a decent chance yours already exists with hours you never set.
Three situations, three moves:
- An unclaimed profile exists. Open it in Maps, choose “Claim this business,” and go through verification. Do not create a second one — duplicates split your reviews and confuse both customers and Google.
- Nothing exists. Create a new profile at business.google.com/add. All you need is a Google account.
- Someone else manages it (a former agency, a previous owner, a well-meaning employee who left). Google’s documentation covers this: if the profile is already verified and you are authorized to manage the business, you can request ownership from the current owner. Google contacts them, and if they do not respond within a set window, you can escalate the claim.
Step 2: Get through verification
Verification is Google confirming the business is real and that you represent it. Google decides which methods you are offered — video recording, phone, text, email, live video call, or mail — based on your business type and category. Google states that a verification review can take up to five business days; mailed postcards take longer.
Mail has not disappeared, despite what a lot of 2026 blog posts claim. Google still documents it, notes that most codes arrive within 14 days, and that codes expire after 30. What has changed is prominence: many new profiles, especially service-area businesses, are now offered video as the only option. You do not get to pick, so plan for video and treat anything faster as a bonus.
If verification is rejected, resist the urge to start over with a new profile. A second profile makes the situation worse, not better. Check that your business name matches your real-world signage and documents exactly, that the address is right, correct whatever is off, and request verification again.
How do you pass video verification on the first try?
Record one continuous, unedited clip on your phone, at least 30 seconds long, captured live inside the Business Profile flow. Show three things in that single take: where you are, that a real business operates there, and that you are the one running it. Pre-recorded footage is rejected, and other people’s faces are not allowed.
Those constraints come straight from Google’s guidance on verifying with a video recording. The three beats it asks you to cover:
- Location in context. Start outside. Pan across street signs, the building number, neighbouring businesses — enough that the footage could be geolocated by a human watching it.
- Proof the business operates there. For a storefront, that is permanent signage with your business name plus the working interior. For a service-area business, it is the professional tools, equipment, stock, or branded vehicle you actually use.
- Proof you manage it. Unlock the door, open the branded van, access the till or the equipment store, or show a business document — a permit, invoice, or utility bill — that carries the same business name as your profile.
The single most common rejection is a name mismatch. If your profile says “Northgate Plumbing” and the sign on the van says “Northgate Plumbing & Heating Ltd,” that is a mismatch. Temporary signage — a sheet of paper taped in a window, a pop-up banner — does not count as permanent signage either. Walk the whole route once before you hit record; a rejected video costs you days.
The five fields that decide whether the profile earns anything
Most businesses enter a name, an address, and stop. Then they wonder why customers phone to ask whether they are open today. Five fields carry almost all of the weight.
| Field | How to get it right |
|---|---|
| Primary category | The most specific option available — “Plumber,” not “Contractor”; “Nail salon,” not “Beauty services.” Secondary categories are useful, but the primary one does the heavy lifting. |
| Hours | Including special hours for public holidays. Nothing costs more goodwill than a customer arriving at a locked door your profile said was open. |
| Address or service area | Travel to customers? Set a service area instead of — or alongside — a public address. Details in the next section. |
| Phone and website | No website yet? Leave the field empty or link a live social profile. A dead link is worse than no link. |
| Business description | 750 characters that can work for you, and usually do not. See below. |
How do you write a business description people actually read?
Write it the way you would explain your job to a neighbour: what you do and for whom, one true differentiator, and what to do next. Google allows 750 characters, but only about the first 250 show before a “Read more” link, so the opening sentence carries the weight. No links, and don’t build it around prices or promotions.
Those last two are not style preferences. Google’s guidelines for representing your business prohibit links in the description and tell you to focus on the business itself rather than promotions, prices, and sales — “Best bagels in town for $5!” is the kind of line Google names as not allowed.
Within those rules, three moves cover it:
- What you do and for whom. “We repair and install water and heating systems in homes and flats across Bristol and the surrounding villages.”
- One real differentiator. Same-day quotes, fixed pricing with no surprises, fifteen years in the trade. One claim a customer can believe beats ten they will skim.
- What happens next. “Call and we’ll quote the same day.”
Two or three short paragraphs. Use the words your customers use, naturally — but do not stuff keywords. The description persuades a person; the category field is what tells Google what you do.
Storefront or service area? The setting most owners get wrong
This is where plumbers, electricians, mobile groomers, and consultants lose visibility. Google treats a service-area business differently from a storefront, and the settings are specific. From Google’s guidance on managing service areas:
- You get up to 20 service areas, defined by city, postal code, or similar administrative area.
- You cannot set a radius. No “30 miles around the depot” — you list the places.
- If customers never come to you, remove your address and enter only the service area. This is how you stop your home address from appearing publicly in Maps.
- If you serve customers both at your premises and at theirs (a hybrid, like a barbershop that also does home visits), enter both.
- Edits can take up to 48 hours to appear after approval.
Google’s general guidelines add a boundary worth respecting: your service area should not extend farther than roughly two hours’ driving time from your base. A profile claiming to serve half the country is a profile Google has reason to distrust.
What gets a new profile suspended?
Four things account for most suspensions, and all four are avoidable at setup. Keywords stuffed into the business name, a duplicate profile for the same business, an address that does not match reality, and a profile that has not been touched since the day it was created and now reads as abandoned.
The name field is the most tempting and the most dangerous. “Kowalski Plumbing Bristol 24h Cheap” looks like a shortcut to ranking; Google’s guidelines are explicit that the name must reflect your real-world name as used on your storefront, website, and stationery, with marketing taglines, service information, and location details all listed as prohibited additions. Google’s profile policies add that a pattern of violations can restrict the account behind the profile, which means every profile on it. Put the real name in the name field.
Duplicates are the second trap, usually created by an owner who could not access the original profile and made a new one instead of claiming it. Reviews and signals split across the two, and neither performs. Report the duplicate for merging rather than leaving both live.
Why the profile matters for AI answers, not just Maps
The reason this old-fashioned chore is back on the priority list: your profile data now feeds AI answers as well as map results. Google says so directly in its AI features and your website guide — “Using products like Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results.”
That is Google describing its own systems, and the same logic holds beyond Google. When a customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation in their town, the assistant is assembling an answer from place databases, directories, reviews, and business listings rather than crawling your site in the moment. Complete, consistent listing data is what makes your business easy to name — and thin or contradictory data is what makes it easy to skip. We break down which sources feed those local answers, including the Foursquare connection behind ChatGPT’s place data, in AI visibility for small and local businesses.
The behaviour shift is real, though it is early and the numbers deserve a careful reading. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (published 11 February 2026, based on a representative panel of 1,002 US adults surveyed via SurveyMonkey) found that use of ChatGPT and similar AI tools for local business recommendations rose from 6% to 45% year over year, making AI the third most popular source of recommendations, while Google’s share for finding local business reviews dipped from 83% to 71%. That is one consumer survey in one market, not a law of nature — but the direction is consistent with everything else we see, and a complete profile serves you in both worlds at once.
Worth being clear about what nobody can promise: a well-built profile does not guarantee a spot in the local pack or a mention in any AI answer. What it does is remove the reasons to leave you out.
Where to go after setup
Once the profile is verified and filled in, the work is maintenance: photos added regularly, reviews requested and replied to, and business details that match everywhere else you appear online. To find out whether AI tools name your business today, check if AI recommends your business walks through a test you can run in an evening — and if the answer is “only when I ask about it by name,” why ChatGPT doesn’t recommend your business explains the mechanism. For the on-site side, see how to optimize your website for AI search.
If you would rather have someone diagnose the whole picture and hand you a prioritized list, that is our AI visibility audit: 39 criteria across six areas, the same questions asked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, from PLN 499 net (around $125), with a five-fixes-or-refund guarantee. Want a wider read on your marketing first? Take the free 3-minute marketing audit, or book a free 20-minute consultation and we will tell you honestly whether this is your bottleneck.
FAQ
How much does a Google Business Profile cost? Nothing. Google’s documentation states you can add or claim your business at no charge, and there is no fee for maintaining it. If someone offers to “set up your Google listing” for a few hundred pounds or dollars, you are paying for an afternoon of work you can do yourself with the steps above. Ongoing management is a different service and can be worth paying for.
How long does Google Business Profile verification take? Google says a verification review can take up to five business days. Instant methods like phone or text resolve in minutes when they are offered, and Search Console verification can be immediate for eligible sites. Mailed postcards are slowest: Google says most codes arrive within 14 days and expire after 30.
Can I create a profile without showing my home address? Yes. If customers never come to you, set your business up as a service-area business, remove the address, and enter only the areas you serve — up to 20 of them, defined by city or postal code. Your profile then appears for those areas without publishing where you live.
A profile for my business exists, but I don’t have access. What do I do? Open it in Google Maps and start the claim process. If the profile is unclaimed, you go straight to verification. If it is verified by someone else — commonly a former agency — Google’s ownership request routes a message to the current owner, and if they do not respond within the window Google gives them, you can escalate and take control.
Can one profile cover several towns? It depends which situation you are in. One profile equals one business at one location, or one service-area business with its defined areas. Several branches with fixed addresses need one profile each. If you simply travel to customers across a region, one profile with the right service areas is correct — and Google’s guidance is that the area should not stretch beyond about two hours’ driving time from your base.
What if Google suspends my profile? The usual causes are keywords in the business name, an address that does not match reality, or a suspected duplicate. Fix the underlying data first so the profile reflects the real business, then submit an appeal through Google’s reinstatement process. Suspension is not the end of the road, but prepare your evidence before you start the appeal, because the form is time-limited.