Do you need a website if you have a Google Business Profile?

Usually yes, and here is the honest version of why. A Google Business Profile is free, it wins the moment someone needs you right now, and for a small number of businesses it really is all you need. It also cannot rank for your individual services, hold the disclosures your state puts on advertising, or survive being suspended. Those are the jobs a site you own does.

What a Business Profile does better than your website

Google says you can add or claim your business at no charge, and that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” That free listing is the highest-leverage thing a local business has online.

Google describes local results as “mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity”, then defines relevance as “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for” and prominence as “how well-known a business is”, which is “also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.”

Notice what is missing: nothing about your homepage.

When a salon client searches at 9am on a Saturday, or a homeowner with water on the floor searches at 11pm, the profile answers: hours, distance, rating, a number they can tap. If you have no claimed, verified profile, go do that before anything below.

Google turned off the free websites it used to build

For years Google made a one-page website out of your profile, with a business.site address. What it did with that feature is the strongest evidence in the debate.

Its help notice said: “As of March 5, 2024, websites made with Google Business Profiles are no longer available and customers that visit your site will be redirected to your Business Profile instead.” The redirect was temporary. “Your customers will only be redirected to your Business Profile until June 10, 2024. After that, customers will get a ‘Page not found’ error.”

Addresses ending in business.site and negocio.site were removed from the website field, and ads pointing at those pages “may be disapproved and stop running”. Then Google said where to go instead, listing Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Google Sites, Shopify, Durable, Weebly, Strikingly and WordPress. It had the chance to say “your profile is your website now” and said the opposite.

One profile, one name, twenty service areas

A Business Profile is a record, not a site. Google’s guidelines say “there should only be one profile per business” and tell you to “choose the fewest number of categories it takes to describe your overall core business.” The description field bans links: “Display links. No links of any type are allowed.” Service areas are capped at twenty, set by city or postal code rather than a radius, with a boundary no further than “about 2 hours of driving time” from the business.

Line that up against how people search. A plumbing company is hired for emergency drains, water heater swaps and sewer line replacement: three prices, three urgencies, three searches. A dental practice is searched for implants and for a child’s first visit, a salon for balayage and for a bridal updo.

One profile, one primary category, one description with no links in it. The closest the record comes is its services list: Google says businesses in certain categories “might have the option to showcase their offerings directly on their Business Profile”, with “info such as price and description”, and that a matching service “may be highlighted on your profile”. Fill it in. But a line in a list is not a page: it has no URL of its own, no room for the photos, the process and the price reasoning, and it never appears in the ordinary results under the map. That is why the depth sits on pages you control. That exercise is covered in how many service pages your website needs.

The disclosures a profile has nowhere to put

Most “you don’t need a website” advice never looks at this, because it is licensing, not marketing.

Arizona spells it out. A.R.S. §32-1124 says a contractor’s ROC number must appear “on all broadcast, internet or billboard advertising, unless the … advertising includes a website’s uniform resource locator that directly links to a website that prominently displays the licensee’s name and license number.” The statute treats a website as the place the disclosure lives. California is blunter: every licensed contractor “shall include his license number in … all forms of advertising.”

Health care is regulated on a different axis. California’s rule for healing arts licensees, Business and Professions Code §651, counts “Internet, or other electronic communication” as public communication, then puts conditions on images. A photo of a model needs a statement “in a prominent location in easily readable type” saying so. Before-and-after views must specify what procedures were performed and “contain a statement that the same ‘before’ and ‘after’ results may not occur for all patients.”

Picture a dentist’s smile gallery under that rule. A profile photo upload has no caption field built for a compliance statement. A page on your own site does. New York goes further and names a licensed plumber’s website in the licensing code itself, covered in service pages for NYC plumbers.

AI answers cite pages, not profiles

Google’s documentation for AI Overviews and AI Mode is short and useful. “To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.” No extra technical requirements, no special structured data, no AI text file to publish.

The word doing the work is page. Both features may use a “query fan-out” technique, “issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources” before answering, and subtopics are what service pages and posts are. Google is careful about promises: “indexing and serving isn’t guaranteed.” It also lists keeping your Business Profile up to date among the ordinary SEO fundamentals, so this is not profile versus site. It is both, doing different jobs.

The profile is rented space

Google says plainly: “We may suspend or disable Business Profiles that don’t follow our guidelines.” Adding a tagline, a phone number, a service word or a neighborhood to your business name “isn’t permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile.”

If it happens there is an appeals tool. Google suggests attaching evidence such as business registration, a license or utility bills, warns you not to create a second profile while an appeal is under review, and sends the decision by email. No turnaround time is published, and while a profile is removed, “the public can’t go to the profile.”

It is not only Google editing your record. Any signed-in Maps user can suggest an edit to a place’s name, category, address, hours, phone number or website, which Google reviews rather than asking you first. Your domain and pages are the parts no stranger can edit. If ranking rather than suspension is your problem, work through the causes in why your business isn’t showing up on Google Maps.

When a profile on its own is genuinely enough

Sometimes the answer is no, not this year:

1. You are a solo operator at capacity. Referrals fill the week, you turn jobs away, and more calls would make your life worse. A claimed profile keeps you findable.
2. You work inside someone else’s business. A rented chair, a booth, a room in a clinic, with bookings running through the host’s system. Their site is your site.
3. You are testing whether the work exists. Claim the profile, answer the phone for six months, learn which three services people call about, then build those pages instead of guessing at ten.
4. Your customers find you by walking past. Foot traffic plus a profile for hours and directions covers a lot of storefront retail.

Each costs you the same list: no way to rank for an individual service, nowhere to put a required disclosure, no page for an AI answer to cite, nothing left if the profile goes down. That stops being a reasonable trade the moment you want to grow.

The smallest website worth building

The minimum is measured in pages, not features. No booking engine, no chat widget, no app. Six pages covers most local service businesses:

1. A home page saying what you do, where you do it, and your number high on the screen.
2. One page per service you would quote separately, in the words customers use.
3. A page for a place only where you have something specific to say about it.
4. A credentials page: license numbers, insurance, the disclosures your board requires, and your address or service area.
5. A contact page where the number is a tap-to-call link and the form actually emails you.
6. One page answering the question you get asked most on the phone.

On cost, the lines are a domain, hosting, the build and the upkeep. We will not quote an industry average, because we could not source one primarily and the figures that circulate are vendor marketing. Google’s shutdown notice named nine site builders and no prices.

A decision checklist you can run in ten minutes

If the first four are all no, a profile alone is probably fine for now.

• Do you sell more than one service that you would quote at different prices?
• Do you serve more than twenty named cities, towns or postal codes?
• Does your license, board or state require a disclosure in your advertising?
• Would losing the profile tomorrow stop the phone ringing entirely?
• Is the website field on your profile filled in, and does the link work?
• Is there a page on that site for the service that pays you best?

Answer honestly and the decision makes itself. The profile is how people find you in the moment they need you. The website is the part you own, and the part still working on a day Google changes its mind. More on both across the LocalBiz blog.