Google Business Profile: what it is called now and where to edit it

A Google Business Profile is the free entry that puts your company into Google Search and Google Maps with an address, hours, photos and reviews. The current official name of the product is Google Business Profile — the name Google My Business no longer applies. That one fact saves an hour of searching: if a set of instructions tells you to download the Google My Business app, it is out of date, because the standalone app is no longer available. Below: where you physically manage the profile today, what to fill in, and where your influence over ranking ends.

What the Google listing is called today and what changed

Google listing, Maps listing and Google Business Profile are names for one product — the last of the three is the current one. Google uses it in its own documentation at support.google.com/business (as of August 2026). The Google My Business name still turns up in older guides, agency materials and training descriptions, but not in the interface.

The second change matters more in practice than the naming. The standalone Google My Business mobile app is no longer available. Instructions that open with “download the app from the store” lead nowhere — that single sentence tells you the material has not been updated in years. The profile itself is one element of local SEO, which also covers your website, consistent contact details, and content that answers queries containing a city name.

Where you manage a Google Business Profile now that the app is gone

You manage the profile directly in Google Search, in the Google Maps app, and — with several locations — in Business Profile Manager. Which one you use depends on how many profiles you run and whether you are at a computer.

Business Profile Manager only pays off with a chain of locations. The bulk spreadsheet changes holiday hours across every location in a single import, rather than clicking through them one at a time.

Which profile fields actually work on your visibility

Google judges relevance on what the profile says — a field left empty cannot match you to any query. It is the simplest rule in the subject and the most often ignored.

• Primary and secondary categories — the strongest signal of what the business does. The primary category describes the core of the work, the secondary ones widen the range.
• Name — exactly as it appears on the sign and on your documents, with no services or city name bolted on.
• Address or service area — an address when the customer comes to you, an area when you travel to them.
• Hours, including holiday hours — the most common source of negative reviews is mundane: someone drove over and found the door locked.
• Services and products with descriptions — specific entries instead of one general paragraph about the company.
• Attributes — parking, wheelchair access, card payment, service in other languages.
• Photos — the entrance, the interior, the team, finished work; the customer should recognise the place before arriving.

The website field is left empty most often by companies that have only just started — and it is the one place on the profile where you fully control the content and the length of the description. If you do not have a site yet, describe your business to us and we come back with the smallest scope that closes the gap the profile leaves open.

Relevance, distance and prominence — and which of the three you cannot change

Google names three factors for local results: relevance, distance and prominence (support.google.com/business/answer/7091). It does not publish their weights, and it states plainly that you cannot request or pay for a better local position.

The consequence is harder than the repetition of those three words suggests. Relevance is fully in your hands: categories, services, description, attributes. Prominence you control indirectly — it reflects how well known the business is, and Google mentions reviews in that context without giving either the mechanism or the strength of their effect. Distance you do not control at all. If your workshop sits on the edge of town, no profile setting will place you above a workshop in the centre for someone searching from the centre.

That is why “what position am I in Maps” has no single answer — results are calculated relative to where the person searching is. Instead of chasing a position, check whether the profile answers service queries at all, not only the company name. When the profile is complete and the business still does not surface for city-name phrases, look for the cause on the website side — that is the scope of an SEO audit. A separate subject is visibility in AI Overviews, which works by different rules than the local pack.

Reviews: what is allowed, what is not, and how to build the ask into your process

You may ask any customer for a review and make it as easy as possible; you may not choose who you ask, and you may not reward anyone for leaving one. Google publishes guidance on getting more reviews at support.google.com/business/answer/3474122.

The ban on selective asking reads like a formality and has very practical effects. Asking only satisfied customers is not collecting reviews, it is steering an average — and it breaks Google policy. It also removes the only credible source of information about what is failing in your service. And it demands a manual decision for every customer, so the process falls apart in the first busy week.

The opposite approach works: pick one moment in your service and send the request to every customer who passes through it. That can be the email confirming the job is done, a text after collection, a line in the invoice footer, or a QR code on the receipt. The decision is made once, when you design the process, rather than customer by customer.

That last sentence is not politeness. Making it clear that you accept criticism too is what separates a request for a review from a request for praise, and it keeps the send on the right side of the rules.

A suspended profile, a rejected verification and lost access are three different problems

These are three different problems with three different routes, and the first step is working out which one you have — because the procedures do not substitute for each other.

• Suspension — the profile disappears from Search and Maps, and the panel shows a suspension notice. It concerns a breach of Google policy, so the starting point is establishing which policy and what on the profile breaches it.
• Rejected verification — the profile exists and is visible, but has no verified status. Google did not accept the evidence that the business operates at the stated address. The issue is the evidence, not the profile content.
• Lost access — the profile works fine, it is simply managed by an account you do not control: a former employee, a previous agency, or the founder’s private address. The route here is requesting access to the existing profile, not creating a new one.

None of these routes has a guaranteed timeline or outcome, so treat them as a case to run rather than a form to submit and tick off. Prevention is by far the cheapest: a profile created on a company account, with access for at least two people in the business, never produces the third problem at all. Once the profile is in order, the next steps follow the order of work in local SEO — the profile is the start of it, not the whole of it.