A Business Profile listing and a website do different jobs — what a listing can and can't do, and why Google shutting down its free profile websites in 2024 left a real gap.
Short answer: a Google Business Profile is a free listing on Google Search and Maps — hours, photos, reviews, a category — that you don't design or control beyond a limited set of fields. It is not the same as a website. Google also shut down the free auto-generated \u201cWebsites\u201d feature it used to build from Business Profiles, from March 2024, so a business that relied on one of those pages as its only web presence may have lost it without realising.
"We're already on Google" is one of the most common reasons a business gives for not having a website — and it's worth taking seriously, because a Google Business Profile genuinely is useful. It's also genuinely not a website, and the difference matters more than it looks like at first glance.
It's a free listing that shows up on Google Search and Google Maps: your business name, hours, category, photos, reviews, and a way for people to message or call. It's set up and managed through Google's own tools, inside Google's own format. Until 2024, it also came with an option to auto-generate a simple one-page "website" from that same profile information, hosted on a business.site address.
Google retired the free auto-generated "Websites" feature built from Business Profiles, with those business.site pages stopping working from March 2024. Businesses that had one as their entire web presence — not unusual, since it cost nothing and took no effort to set up — were left with just the underlying listing again. Some may not have noticed at all: their Google listing still shows up exactly as before, but the "Website" link on it may no longer lead anywhere real.
For a very small, early-stage operation running entirely on word of mouth with no need to explain multiple services, a Business Profile alone can be a reasonable starting point. It costs nothing and takes minutes to set up.
Once a business wants to look established to someone unfamiliar with it, explain more than a single service, show real pricing, or simply not be entirely dependent on one platform's decisions, a listing on its own stops being enough. A website and a Business Profile aren't competing for the same job — they do different things, and most local businesses genuinely benefit from having both.
No. A Business Profile is a free listing you don't control the design of — it shows on Google Search and Maps, but you're working inside Google's fields and layout, not your own site. Google also retired the free auto-generated Websites feature built from Business Profiles in March 2024, so profiles that used to link to one of those pages generally don't any more.
Google retired the feature and stopped supporting those auto-generated business.site pages from March 2024. Businesses that relied on one as their only web presence were left with just their Google listing again, with no independent website.
Yes — they're not a replacement for each other. A Business Profile is how you show up on Google Maps and local search results with reviews, hours and directions; a website is where you control the message, the design and what happens once someone actually clicks through. Most local businesses benefit from having both.