The Google profile checklist most local businesses never finish.
The Google profile checklist most local businesses never finish.
One field on your Google Business Profile outweighs everything else — and when it's wrong, Google gives you no warning at all. Your dashboard says complete and verified while you quietly fail to appear for the searches your customers actually use. Here's the full checklist, in order of what moves first, with every claim traced back to the study that made it.
Your primary category is the single highest-weighted relevance factor in local search — ahead of reviews, links and posting. Get it as specific as your business honestly allows, then fill in your services, which is the fastest-moving lever available. Keep reviews arriving steadily rather than in bursts. And skip the tactics that get sold hardest, because the testing doesn't support them.
- The one field that outweighs everything else
- Services — the fastest thing you can change
- The full checklist, field by field
- Reviews — and the part I got wrong
- What doesn't work (and what people sell anyway)
- How not to get suspended
- What to expect, and when
- Why an accurate profile matters more than it did
- Questions people ask about this
The one field that outweighs everything else
Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report asked 47 experienced local SEO practitioners to score 187 individual ranking factors. The result: the primary category on your Google Business Profile is the single highest-weighted relevance factor in the entire system — ahead of reviews, ahead of backlinks, ahead of how often you post.[1]
One dropdown. More weight than everything you might spend a year working on.
One caveat that belongs with that number, because the report itself is honest about it: this is a survey of expert opinion, not a measurement of Google's algorithm. Its author says plainly that none of the participants have access to how local search actually works internally, and that they are being asked to estimate.[1] It's the best-informed guess available, gathered from the people who test this for a living. It isn't a readout from inside Google.
And here's why the category is so often wrong. A business using an imprecise primary category — "Services" instead of "Plumber," or "Contractor" instead of "Electrician" — is invisible for the specific searches its customers are actually making. The profile shows as complete and verified in the dashboard. There is no warning, no flag, nothing to notice. The only trace is that your discovery impressions are low relative to how much people in your town are searching.
Specific beats broad, every time
A broad category makes you eligible for many searches and competitive for none that convert. "Italian Restaurant" outperforms "Restaurant." "Pediatric Dentist" outperforms "Dentist" if that's genuinely what you do. "Nail salon" outperforms "Salon."
Pick the most precise category that matches what you actually get paid for most often — not the widest label you could defend.
How to find the right one in ten minutes
You don't have to guess. The answer is sitting in your competitors' listings.
Search your main service plus your town on Google Maps
Do it on your phone, and not from your own shop. "Plumber Vero Beach," "electrician Palm Bay," whatever a customer would type.
Open the top three listings and note their primary category
It's shown right under the business name. If theirs is more specific than yours, that's your answer.
Look for what repeats across the top five
Write down each competitor's primary and secondary categories. Any category appearing in three or more of the top five listings is one that matters in your market.
How many secondary categories? I'm not going to give you a number
This is genuinely contested among people who test local search seriously. Google's own guidance leans toward using the fewest categories that describe your core business. Several well-regarded practitioners argue the opposite and add far more. I couldn't resolve that disagreement at a primary source, so I'm not going to hand you a rule that's really just somebody's preference.
What I can tell you is the part that isn't disputed: every category you add should map to something you actually get paid to do. Categories describing work you don't perform aren't a growth tactic — they're a misrepresentation of the business, and that's the thing Google genuinely acts on.
Services — the fastest thing you can change
If the primary category decides which searches you're eligible for, the services list decides how many of them you actually turn up in — and it's the quickest-acting change available.
Sterling Sky observed ranking shifts within 24 to 72 hours of adding a pre-defined service. Compare that with reviews or links, which build over months.[2] Two things to know before you rely on it. The test was run in 2022, even though the article carries a 2026 date — they rewrote the post in place rather than publishing a new one, and their 2019 version of the same test found no effect at all.[2] And the evidence is two named client examples, not a large sample.
Sterling Sky describe services as often under-optimized and a powerful, under-utilized lever in competitive local markets. Adding specific, granular services helps trigger rankings for both the searches people type explicitly and the ones Google infers.[2] Whitespark's 2026 report points the same direction: the presence of pre-defined services on a profile ranks 22nd of 187 factors, up sharply from 81st in their 2023 edition.[1]
Pre-defined and custom services are not the same thing
Some categories come with a preset list — plumbers, for instance, get a long menu to tick. Others make you write your own.[2] That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the 24-to-72-hour finding was measured on pre-defined services only. Sterling Sky tested custom services separately and reported that they also help, but less.[2]
So if your trade has a preset list, tick everything on it that's true before you write a single custom entry. If it doesn't — and plenty of trades don't — write your own, but expect a smaller and slower effect than the headline number suggests.
Either way, most businesses add three services and stop. Add every real service you offer, named the way a customer would say it. Not "residential solutions." Drain cleaning. Water heater replacement. Repiping. Then write a description for each one. It takes an afternoon and almost nobody does it.
If you'd rather not do it yourself, that's what the Local Visibility plan covers — and that page lists exactly which parts you could do for free before you decide.
The full checklist, field by field
In rough order of what moves the needle.
| Field | What to do | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | The most specific accurate option | Highest-weighted relevance factor of 187 surveyed |
| Secondary categories | Only ones you're genuinely paid for | Extends relevance without misrepresenting the business |
| Services | Every one, granular, with descriptions | Fastest-moving lever; pre-defined ones move fastest |
| Business name | Your real-world name, exactly | Keyword stuffing here is a top suspension trigger |
| Address / service area | Real address; hidden if you travel to customers | Proximity is the second-ranked factor, and you can't change it |
| Hours | Accurate, including holidays — and generous | Being open at the moment someone searches is a top-five factor |
| Website link | Direct link, no tracking redirect | Send Google where the customer should land, in one hop |
| Description | Plain language, no keyword stuffing | Near the bottom for rankings; feeds AI answers and conversion |
| Attributes | Every one that genuinely applies | Accurate attributes improve visibility |
| Photos | Real ones, added regularly | An empty profile reads as abandoned to a customer |
| Reviews | Steady flow, and reply to every one | Recency ranks 11th; replying is a conversion factor, not a ranking one |
One row that used to be on this list and isn't anymore: Q&A. Google retired the public questions-and-answers section on business profiles. If you read an older checklist telling you to seed your own questions, that advice now points at a feature that no longer exists.
Two fields worth more attention than they usually get
Your hours. Whitespark's 2026 report introduced a new factor — whether the business is open at the moment someone searches — and placed it fifth of 187 for the local pack.[1] If you close at five and your customers search at seven, you are algorithmically dimmed for exactly the hours they're looking. Widening your listed hours to the hours you'd genuinely answer the phone is free and takes two minutes.
Your description. Resist the urge to pack it with keywords. Whitespark's respondents put keywords in the GBP description at 171st of 187 — and keyword-stuffing that field appears on their negative-factor and suspension-risk lists.[1] The only direction this field can move your rankings is down. Write it for the human reading the first two lines.
If you're a service-area business, this matters more, not less
If you travel to customers rather than having a storefront they visit, Google's guidance is to hide your address — and that's the correct setting.
It comes with a reported cost: in Whitespark's 2026 report, showing an address rather than hiding it sits seventh of 187 factors.[1] Which sounds alarming, until you read what the report's own author says about it a few lines later.
Darren Shaw, who runs the study, doesn't believe his own respondents on this one. He says he remains unconvinced that showing versus hiding an address is a ranking factor at all, and suspects it's a bug — that Google loses the business's coordinates and re-pins it at the verification address or somewhere arbitrary.[1] I've never seen anyone quote the seventh-place ranking and the author's objection to it in the same breath. You should have both.
Either way the practical advice is unchanged: hide the address, because that's the correct setting for a genuine service-area business, and showing one when you shouldn't carries real suspension risk.[1] Then lean harder on category specificity and complete service listings, which are the two fields you fully control.
Reviews — and the part I got wrong
Reviews matter, and what matters inside them isn't the number on your profile.
I'm not going to give you a percentage. Whitespark publishes its category weightings as a chart image rather than as text, and the secondary blogs quoting those percentages disagree with each other about what they say. The ranked factor list is published in text, so that's what I'll use.
Recency and steady flow, not the total
In the 2026 report, recency of reviews ranks 11th of 187 factors, and a sustained influx of reviews over time ranks 14th.[1] Both sit far above most of what gets sold as local SEO. Neither can be faked retroactively.
Which produces a pattern you can see in any local market: a business with 80 reviews from a big push two years ago and nothing since, getting quietly outranked by a competitor with 40 lifetime reviews who collects two every week.
The one review number that's been tested repeatedly
There appears to be a step at ten. Sterling Sky took three businesses sitting at nine reviews each, in the same industry, in different parts of the country, and had each get one more. All three saw a small but visible lift in Maps ranking on hitting ten. They then took three businesses at ten reviews and added one more each — and saw nothing.[3]
Hold that loosely. It's three businesses per arm, one keyword each, re-checked days later — and they say themselves it's the law of diminishing returns rather than a magic threshold, and that reviews are only one input among many.[3] But they've repeated the test across clients for years and keep landing in the same place, and two other well-known people in local search independently arrived at ten.[3]
If you have fewer than ten reviews, that's the most useful target on this page. Not fifty. Ten.
How often after that? It depends on your competitors, and that's the real answer
Asked directly how often a business needs new reviews, Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky gives the answer nobody likes: it depends, and it's relative. Look at your competitors. If they're getting reviews weekly, you need to be getting reviews weekly. In a smaller or less competitive market, monthly is likely fine. What you don't want to do is stop.[4]
For a business in a town the size of Sebastian, that's genuinely good news. You are not in a race against a hundred competitors. You're in a race against four.
The part I got wrong, and am correcting here
An earlier version of this article told you that keywords in your replies to reviews get indexed and help you rank, and credited that finding to Sterling Sky.
That was wrong, and it was my error. I went back to the actual study. Sterling Sky tested the text customers write in reviews — one Christmas tree farm with no other SEO work, six planted reviews over a few months, two keywords tracked. Rankings did not improve; one keyword got worse.[5] They never tested review replies at all. I attributed a finding to a named source that the source never made, which is exactly the thing this blog criticizes other people for doing.
And the direction is, if anything, the reverse of what I published. Whitespark's respondents rank keywords in owner responses to reviews 182nd of 187 — deep into myth territory — while keywords in the review text itself sit at 36th.[1]
Reply to every review anyway, within a day. Not as a keyword tactic — as a conversion one. In the same report, simply having owner responses on most of your reviews ranks 17th for conversion.[1] The person deciding whether to call you is reading those replies. Write for them, in plain language, and stop trying to work your service keywords in.
Why a survey and a controlled test can disagree — and what happened next
This is the most useful thing I found while checking my own work, and almost nobody publishes it.
When Sterling Sky's review-text test found nothing, a reader pointed out that Whitespark's survey had review-text keywords ranked ninth at the time. Darren Shaw answered directly in the comments: his report is a survey of opinions, the experts don't have access to the algorithm, much of it rests on observation, and correlation isn't causation. When a controlled test contradicts a long-held belief, the experts run their own tests and the opinions move in later editions — and he called that a good thing.[5]
And it's observable. Review-text keywords sat at 9th in the older report. In the 2026 edition they sit at 36th.[1] The shift he predicted actually happened. That's what a healthy evidence base looks like from the outside, and it's a good reason to trust ranked lists more than percentages.
Two things not to do
- Never buy reviews. Detection looks at reviewer history, patterns across accounts and sudden spikes, and the consequences aren't limited to removing the fake ones — legitimate reviews can go with them, and the listing itself is at risk.
- Don't coach customers on what to say. Beyond being awkward, the testing above says the keywords in their text aren't the lever people claim. Ask for the review. Leave the words to them.
If a competitor leaves you a fake one-star — it happens — respond professionally and factually, then flag it. Don't argue in public.
One more field worth ten minutes
Your name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere they appear online — your site, your profile, and every directory that lists you. Citation consistency is a smaller ranking factor than category or reviews, but an old phone number sitting in a directory somewhere is a customer calling a dead line, which costs you the job regardless of what it does to your ranking.
What doesn't work (and what people sell anyway)
This is the section that costs me money to write, so it's probably the useful one.
Google Posts do not improve your rankings. Sterling Sky took three dormant business listings with no other SEO work, posted once a week for nine weeks, and tracked 441 keywords per location. No measurable movement in the local pack.[6] Whitespark's 2026 report lands in the same place independently: how often you post ranks 148th of 187, and how much you post ranks 168th.[1]
Two honest caveats on that study, because I'd rather you have them than not: it was published in 2021, back when the product was still called Google My Business, and it's three listings — a case study, not a large controlled trial. One of the three even declined during the test, for a reason unrelated to posting.[6]
But here's the part that settles it for me, from the same source: the average click-through rate on a Google post is around half a percent.[6]
That number matters because "posts don't rank, but they're great for engagement" is the standard fallback when someone's caught selling them. Half a percent isn't engagement. Post when you have something real to say — an actual promotion, a genuine update, storm hours. Don't buy weekly posting as a ranking service, and don't accept engagement as the consolation prize.
Two more worth naming:
- Keyword-stuffing your business name — "Joe's Plumbing Vero Beach Emergency 24/7" — was effective years ago. It is now one of the most common suspension triggers.[7]
- Keyword-stuffing your profile description, which as noted above sits near the bottom of the ranking factors and on the suspension-risk list at the same time.[1] All downside.
The pattern is consistent: the things that used to work by gaming the system are now the things that get profiles suspended. What's left is accuracy and completeness, which is boring and works.
How not to get suspended
Nobody selling Google profile management talks about this, and it's the risk that actually matters — because your profile disappearing costs more than your profile ranking third.
The three kinds of trouble
Soft suspension
Your listing stays visible to customers, but you lose the ability to manage or edit it. Google is saying something's off, fix it.[7]
Hard suspension
The listing is removed from Google Search and Maps entirely. Customers can't find you even by searching your exact business name.[7] This is the one that empties the calendar.
Account-level restriction
The one people don't see coming. A suspended Google account can suspend every Business Profile managed by it.[8] Sterling Sky had this happen to their own agency — an employee's account was wrongly suspended, and it took down client listings alongside their own.[8]
What actually triggers them
The documented triggers are all forms of misrepresenting the business: keyword-stuffed names, virtual offices and PO boxes used as addresses, an address that can't be verified, showing an address when you're genuinely a service-area business, duplicate listings, fake or solicited-under-pressure reviews, and problem accounts attached to the profile.[1][7][8]
A correction to my own earlier advice. This article used to tell you to change one field at a time and wait days between edits, on the theory that rapid editing trips a filter. I've since gone through the documented trigger lists carefully and can't support that. The triggers are about what the profile claims, not how quickly you fix it. If your hours are wrong, your category is vague and your website link is stale, correct all three this afternoon. Leaving inaccurate information live to avoid an editing-speed penalty I can't evidence is the worse trade.
The one genuine constraint on batching: your website has to agree with your profile. If you change your hours on Google, change them on your site the same day — including anywhere they're buried in structured data, which is where they most often go stale without anyone noticing.
Prevention, in four habits
- Keep your real-world details real — the name on your sign, your invoices, and your state registration, all matching.[7]
- Own the profile from a domain-based business email, not a personal Gmail.[8] It also means it stays with the business if you ever sell it.
- Link directly to your site, not through a tracking redirect.[8]
- Don't run a second listing for the same business at the same address.[7]
If it happens
Stop editing immediately and screenshot your key fields — name, address, categories, hours, service area — before you touch anything. Work out which type of suspension you have, fix the underlying violation, then appeal through Google's tool with documentation: business license, utility bills, photos, a video walkthrough.[8] Don't create a second profile while an appeal is pending; it complicates everything.[7]
I've seen appeal timelines quoted confidently in several places and can't trace any of them to a source worth repeating, so I won't give you one. One piece of genuine reassurance instead: your reviews are held, not deleted.[7]
What to expect, and when
| Change | When you'd see movement | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Adding pre-defined services | 24–72 hours | Fastest lever; measured on pre-defined services only |
| Adding custom services | Slower, smaller | Helps, but less than pre-defined |
| Fixing the primary category | Days | Biggest single change you can make |
| Widening your hours | Immediate, but only during those hours | Being open at search time is a top-five factor |
| Completing remaining fields | 1–4 weeks | Compounding, not dramatic |
| Getting from nine reviews to ten | Days | Small, repeatedly observed step |
| Building sustained review flow | 2–3 months | Slow, and the most durable |
Why an accurate profile matters more than it did
Whitespark ran 540 manual searches across three large US cities and six industries to see how often Google answers a local question with an AI Overview instead of a map pack. The headline was that AI Overviews appeared for an average of 68% of local business queries.[9]
But the headline isn't the useful part. The split by what kind of question was asked is.
| What the customer typed | AI Overview appeared | Map pack appeared |
|---|---|---|
| "plumber Vero Beach"Local intent — they know what they want | 15% | 93% |
| "how much does repiping cost"Informational intent | 92% | 6% |
| "should I repipe or repair"Hybrid — information plus money on the line | 97% | 17% |
They run almost perfectly inverse.[9] Which means the two halves of local marketing aren't competing for the same space at all — your Google profile wins the searches where someone already knows what they need, and your website wins the ones where they're still working it out. Neither substitutes for the other.
That's also why the fields on your profile matter more than they used to. When Google generates a local answer, it builds it from structured information about your business — your categories, services, hours, reviews and website. A complete, accurate profile feeds both systems. An incomplete one fails both.
Caveats, as always: that study is from May 2025, it covers Houston, Phoenix and Denver rather than towns the size of ours, and Whitespark says outright that the figures could differ in smaller markets.[9] Treat the direction as solid and the exact percentages as someone else's market.
Questions people ask about this
What is the most important field on a Google Business Profile?
The primary category. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, in which 47 practitioners scored 187 factors, found it is the single highest-weighted relevance factor, ahead of reviews, backlinks and posting frequency. Choose the most specific accurate option rather than a broad one. Note that the report is a survey of expert opinion rather than a measurement of Google's algorithm, and it says so itself.
How do I know if my Google Business Profile category is wrong?
There is no warning. A profile with an imprecise category still shows as complete and verified in the dashboard while failing to appear for the searches customers actually use. Check by searching your main service plus your town on Google Maps and comparing the primary categories of the top three listings against yours.
How quickly do Google Business Profile changes take effect?
Adding a pre-defined service is the fastest lever, with ranking shifts observed within 24 to 72 hours in Sterling Sky's testing. Custom services help but less. Category corrections typically move within days, completing remaining fields compounds over one to four weeks, and building sustained review flow takes two to three months.
Do Google Posts improve local rankings?
No. Sterling Sky posted weekly for nine weeks on three dormant listings, tracking 441 keywords per location, and found no measurable ranking movement. Whitespark's 2026 report agrees independently, ranking posting frequency 148th and posting quantity 168th of 187 factors. Posts are also barely read: the average click-through rate on a Google post is around half a percent, so engagement is not a good consolation argument for buying them as a service.
Do keywords in customer reviews help my rankings?
The evidence says no, and an earlier version of this article got the related claim wrong. Sterling Sky tested keywords in customer review text on one business with six planted reviews and saw no improvement. They never tested review replies, so any claim that keywords in your replies get indexed is not supported by that study. Whitespark's respondents rank keywords in owner responses 182nd of 187. Reply to every review anyway, because having owner responses on most reviews ranks 17th as a conversion factor.
How many Google reviews do I need?
Ten is the threshold that has been tested most often. Sterling Sky took three businesses at nine reviews each and saw a small ranking lift in all three when they reached ten, then took three businesses at ten reviews and saw nothing when they reached eleven. Treat it as a repeatedly observed step rather than a precise rule, since each arm was only three businesses tracking one keyword.
How often do I need new Google reviews?
It depends on your competitors, which is Sterling Sky's own answer. If businesses ranking near you collect reviews weekly, you need to collect them weekly. In a smaller or less competitive market, monthly is likely fine. Whitespark ranks recency of reviews 11th and a sustained influx of reviews over time 14th of 187 factors, so a steady habit outperforms an occasional push.
Why do Google Business Profiles get suspended?
The documented triggers are forms of misrepresenting the business: keyword-stuffed names, virtual offices or PO boxes used as addresses, unverifiable addresses, showing an address when you are genuinely a service-area business, duplicate listings, fake reviews, and problem accounts attached to the profile. A suspended Google account can also suspend every profile it manages. Fixing several inaccurate fields quickly is not itself a documented trigger.
Should a service-area business hide its address?
Yes. Hiding the address is the correct setting for a genuine service-area business, and showing one when you should not carries real suspension risk. Whitespark's respondents place a hidden address seventh of 187 factors, but the report's author states he is unconvinced this is a ranking factor at all and suspects it reflects a bug in how Google assigns coordinates. Cite both together rather than the ranking alone.
The numbers I took out of this article
This piece was rebuilt on August 20, 2026 after I went back and read every source it cited, at the source, rather than trusting a summary of it. Six things came out. I'd rather list them than quietly delete them:
- "Rankings fall off a cliff after three weeks without a review." Widely repeated, and I repeated it. It exists only as a bullet in an article summary whose actual body never tests review gaps at all — and a member of that company's own staff says so in that article's comments. There's no test behind it.
- "Keywords in your review replies get indexed." Covered above. My error, wrong direction, wrongly attributed.
- "Reviews rose from 16% to 20% of local pack weight." Those percentages exist only inside a chart image; the blogs quoting them disagree with each other. Ranked factors, published in text, replace them throughout.
- "AI Overviews appear on about 40% of local queries." The real study is Whitespark's, the real figure is 68%, and 39% is the map pack number sitting in the next column over. Wrong source and wrong column.
- "Aim for 4.5 to 4.9 stars, because a perfect 5.0 looks suspicious." Plausible, repeated everywhere, and I couldn't find anyone who actually measured it.
- Exact suspension-appeal timelines, and precise category-count rules. Confidently stated in many places, traceable to none.
Everything that remains is either a named report, a test I can link you to, or Google's own documentation — and where a study is small, old, or disputed by its own author, I've said so in the sentence rather than in a footnote.
- Whitespark. 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, Darren Shaw, published November 6, 2025. Survey of 47 experienced local SEO practitioners scoring 187 individual factors; the report states that participants have no access to Google's internal workings and are estimating. Source for: primary category ranked 1st; proximity 2nd; business open at time of search 5th; address showing on a service-area business 7th and on the suspension-risk list; recency of reviews 11th; sustained influx of reviews 14th; presence of pre-defined services 22nd, up from 81st in 2023; keywords in native reviews 36th; owner responses to most reviews 17th for conversion; keywords in GBP description 171st; frequency of posts 148th and quantity 168th; keywords in owner responses 182nd; and Shaw's stated disagreement with his own respondents on the hidden-address factor. whitespark.ca
- Sterling Sky. Do Services in Google Business Profiles Impact Ranking? Joy Hawkins. Carries a February 2026 byline, but describes a 2022 retest; the 2019 version of the same test found no effect and was overwritten rather than archived. Two named client examples. Source for the 24–72 hour observation, pre-defined versus custom services, and services as an under-used lever. The relative weakness of custom services is stated by Sterling Sky staff in that article's comments, linking to their separate custom-services test. sterlingsky.ca
- Sterling Sky. 2025 Update: Does the Number of Google Reviews Impact Ranking? Joy Hawkins, April 30, 2025. Three businesses moved from nine to ten reviews, three moved from ten to eleven; a lift was observed only in the first group. Also reports an earlier test in which a listing gained ranking going from three to sixteen reviews and none from sixteen to thirty-one. sterlingsky.ca
- Sterling Sky. Does Review Recency Impact Ranking? Joy Hawkins, July 28, 2025. Single-client observational case study following the Vicinity update. Source for the competitor-relative cadence guidance and the statement that monthly is likely sufficient in a smaller or less competitive market. sterlingsky.ca
- Sterling Sky. Can Keyword Text from a Google Review Boost Your Local Map Pack Rankings? Joy Hawkins, published January 25, 2023, describing a 2022 test. One business, six planted reviews, two keywords tracked, no improvement. Review replies were not tested. Also the source of Darren Shaw's comment explaining why an opinion survey and a controlled test can diverge. sterlingsky.ca
- Sterling Sky. Do Google Posts Impact Ranking? Joy Hawkins, published July 26, 2021. Three dormant listings, one post per week for nine weeks, 441 keywords tracked per location. No measurable local pack movement. The half-a-percent post click-through figure comes from Sterling Sky's separate posts study, cited by the author in that article's comments. sterlingsky.ca
- Google Business Profile Community. Guide to Handling Google Business Profile Suspensions, Claudia Tomina, Google Business Profile Product Expert. Source for soft versus hard suspensions, common triggers, duplicate listings, and reviews being held rather than deleted. support.google.com
- Sterling Sky. The Ultimate Playbook for Google Business Profile Suspensions. Source for account-level suspensions, including Sterling Sky's own experience of one, and for prevention habits and appeal documentation. sterlingsky.ca
- Whitespark. New Research: The Prevalence of AI Overviews in Local Search, Miriam Ellis, May 12, 2025. 540 manual queries across Houston, Phoenix and Denver in six industries. AI Overviews on 68% of local business queries overall; by intent, 15% local, 92% informational, 97% hybrid, against map packs at 93%, 6% and 17%. The study notes figures may differ in smaller towns. whitespark.ca
Three spots on the map. Are you in them?
Send me your business name and I'll check your categories against whoever's outranking you, find what's missing, and tell you what to fix first. Free, ten minutes, no pitch — and if you can fix it yourself, I'll show you how.
