Best ways to grow your Google Business Profile in 2026

Your profile is the shop window for almost every local search, and increasingly the source AI answers read from. Most of what decides how it performs is boring, controllable and neglected.

BY MAX WEBSTER · UPDATED 17 AUGUST 2026 · 8 MIN READ

What actually decides where you rank?

Google has described local ranking the same way for over a decade: relevance, distance and prominence. How well your profile matches the search, how close you are to the person searching, and how well known you appear to be. That framing still holds.

What has shifted is the weighting inside it. Current activity now counts for more than accumulated history, which means a profile set up once and left alone loses ground to a newer competitor who is actively collecting reviews and answering them. Distance you cannot change. Everything else on this page you can.

The other change worth knowing is who reads your profile. It is no longer only customers and the map pack. AI summaries above the results, and assistants answering on someone’s behalf, pull from the same profile data. Incomplete or inconsistent information gets passed over in favour of a competitor whose profile is clear.

Start with your primary category

This is the single most important thing you control, and it is a dropdown you probably filled in once. Your primary category tells Google what you are, and it decides which searches you are eligible for at all. A restaurant listed as “Restaurant” competes with everything; the same place listed as “Neapolitan pizza restaurant” competes for the search people actually type.

Be specific, and be honest. Then add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do, in order of how much of your business they represent. Check the categories your best-ranking competitors use, since Google adds new ones and a category that did not exist when you registered may fit you better now.

Keep reviews arriving steadily

Review flow beats review count. A business collecting two or three reviews a week outperforms one sitting on hundreds with nothing new in three months, because recency tells Google that customers are choosing you now rather than in 2023.

That has a practical consequence: a campaign is the wrong shape. Fifty reviews in a fortnight followed by silence looks unnatural and the effect fades. What you want is a small number every week, indefinitely, which means the ask has to be part of somebody’s routine rather than a project.

Ask everyone, not the customers you feel confident about. Filtering for the people likely to be positive is review gating, it breaks Google’s policies, and it is easier to detect than most people assume.

Reply to every review, quickly

Response rate and speed are part of what Google weighs, and the replies themselves are read by people deciding whether to visit. Two reasons to do the same thing.

Keep positive replies short and specific: name the thing the reviewer named, the dish or the treatment or the outcome. Generic thanks pasted twenty times reads as automated and adds nothing. For negative reviews, reply once, acknowledge the specific problem, say what has changed, and move the rest to email or phone. Never reply twice.

Fill in every field, then keep them true

Completeness is cheap and most profiles are missing something. Work through the lot:

• Services and products. Each one with its own description, using the words customers use rather than your internal names.
• Attributes. Accessibility, payment methods, parking, whether you are family friendly. These feed filters people actually apply.
• Hours, including special hours. Businesses open at the moment of the search rank better, so bank holidays and seasonal changes are worth the two minutes.
• Description. Plain, factual, no keyword stuffing. What you do, where, and who for.
• Opening date, phone, booking link, menu link. Anything with a field should have something in it.

If you serve an area rather than a shopfront, list the specific regions you cover rather than one broad radius. Granular entries match the specific searches people make.

Post and add photos so the profile looks alive

Photos and updates do two things: they give people something to look at and click, and they signal that the business is running. Add new photos regularly rather than uploading a batch once. Real ones of the room, the team and the work beat stock imagery, and video is increasingly worth the effort.

Weekly is a sensible rhythm for updates. Nobody needs a content calendar for this. An offer, a change of hours, a new arrival, something you did that week.

Answer your own questions in the Q&A

The Q&A section is underused and it has quietly become more valuable, because the answers there are a source AI responses read from. You are allowed to ask and answer your own questions. Take the ten things customers phone up to ask, put each one in as a question, and answer it plainly.

Do it before somebody else answers wrongly on your behalf, which is the normal alternative.

Link to the page that matches the search

A common structural mistake is pointing every profile at a homepage that talks about everything. If your profile is for one location, link to that location’s page. If you have several locations, each profile gets its own page, and those pages link to each other.

The closer the landing page matches the search, the more relevant the whole thing looks. A homepage is a brand introduction; a location page answers the query.

Keep your details identical everywhere

Name, address and phone number should match exactly across your website, your profile, directories and social accounts. Not approximately. “Street” against “St”, an old suite number, a tracking phone number in one place and the real one in another, all of it weakens the picture Google assembles of you.

This is dull work with no visible reward, and it is a real reason some profiles underperform for years.

What to check every month

1. Are new reviews still arriving, and has anything gone unanswered?
2. Has Google added a category that fits you better?
3. Are your hours right for the next few weeks, including holidays?
4. Have new photos gone up since last month?
5. Has anyone posted a question, or an answer you would not have given?
6. Do your name, address and phone still match everywhere you can find them?
7. Has anyone suggested an edit to your profile that Google accepted without telling you?

Quarterly is enough if you run several locations and keep a checklist per profile. The failure mode is not doing it badly, it is stopping.

What not to bother with

• Keyword stuffing your business name. It is against the rules, it gets reported by competitors, and suspension costs you everything at once.
• Buying reviews or offering anything in exchange. Removed when detected, and your rating goes with them.
• A second listing for the same location to cover more ground. Duplicates get merged or suspended.
• Chasing a review total. Recency and flow are doing more work than the number next to your stars.

Common questions