Google Business Profile and Local Search

Local search is where a business is found by people nearby, in the Google local pack, in Google Maps and increasingly in AI assistants that recommend businesses by name. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) sits at the center of that visibility, and small changes in how Google handles profiles, reviews and business websites can change which businesses customers see.

The posts in this hub document those changes as they happened: Google My Business websites and short names, profile suspensions and fake listings, what happened when I removed my own listing, review platforms such as Yelp, and the more recent shift toward AI-generated local recommendations. Taken together, they show why accurate business information, a real address and a consistent name, address and phone number across the web still matter more than any single ranking tactic.