Web DesignSEO

Google Business Profile vs a Website: Do You Need Both?

Kage Works7 August 20266 min read

For most local businesses the answer is both, but that's not the interesting question. The interesting question is what each one is doing for you, because a lot of the advice floating around is either outdated or skips over a rule that removes the choice entirely for some businesses.

The free "Google website" isn't a thing anymore

If you've read older advice telling you to skip a website and use the one-page site Google Business Profile generates automatically, that option is gone. Google announced in February 2024 that it was shutting down GBP-created websites (the ones on business.site domains), switched them over to simple redirects in March, and killed those redirects entirely on June 10, 2024. Anyone who still had a link to their GBP-generated site got a 404 after that date (Search Engine Journal). Google's own suggestion to affected businesses was to go build a real site on Wix, WordPress, or Shopify.

So if "just use the free Google one" was ever a legitimate answer, it stopped being one over two years ago. Any article still recommending it is working from stale information.

Some businesses don't get to choose

Google Business Profile isn't available to every business, and this is the part most comparisons skip. Google's own eligibility rules require face-to-face contact with customers, either at a physical location people can visit or through a service you deliver at their address. A business that operates entirely online, with no physical premises and no in-person service calls, doesn't qualify for a profile at all (Google Business Profile Help).

That rules out ecommerce stores with no showroom, most SaaS and consulting businesses that work remotely, and anyone selling purely digital products. For that group, "Google Business Profile vs website" isn't a real comparison. The website is the only option Google gives you.

Google Business Profile's edge in the map pack

For businesses that do qualify for a profile, Google Business Profile carries a lot more weight in the three-result map pack than your website does. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, a survey of 47 local SEO practitioners scoring 187 individual ranking factors, puts GBP signals at roughly 27% of what determines map pack rankings, with on-page website signals at around 8% (Whitespark). Reviews (20%) and behavioural signals like clicks and calls (17%) both outweigh your website too.

Two things worth being precise about here. First, this is an estimate from experienced practitioners testing and observing results over time, not a number Google has published. Nobody outside Google has direct access to the actual algorithm weighting. Second, this figure is specific to the map pack, the three-listing block with the map above it. The same report tracks a separate set of factors for regular organic results below the pack, where on-page and website signals carry meaningfully more relative weight than they do in the pack itself. A well-built website matters more for showing up in ordinary search results than it does for the three-pack.

In practice: an optimised, review-heavy GBP profile is usually what gets a plumber or a cafe into the map pack for "near me" searches. It is not what gets that same business ranking for the searches happening away from Google Maps, and it's not what happens after someone clicks through.

The part GBP can't do

A Google Business Profile has a fixed structure: name, category, hours, photos, posts, a Q&A section, reviews. It's built for quick answers to "is this place open and how do I get there," and it does that well. It was not built to hold a project portfolio, a pricing breakdown, a booking flow with your specific rules, an email capture form, or content written to answer the dozens of different questions a prospective customer might search before they're ready to call.

New Zealand data backs up the trust gap specifically. A 2025 InternetNZ survey of 750 businesses and 500 consumers found that almost three-quarters of consumers rated a business's own website as the most important tool for engaging with it, ranked above social media (InternetNZ, reported by eCommerceNews). A profile gets someone to notice you exist. A website is what most of them use to decide whether to trust you with their money, which lines up with what we found when we looked at whether a website is worth it at all for different kinds of businesses.

The risk of building only on Google's land

You don't own your Google Business Profile the way you own a website. Google can suspend or restrict a profile, and its stated triggers are specific and avoidable if you know them: stuffing extra keywords into your business name, mismatched name/address/phone details between your profile and your actual signage or website, running more than one profile for the same location, using a virtual office or PO box as your address, or picking categories that don't match what the business does (Google Business Profile Help).

None of that is likely to happen by accident to a business following the rules. It becomes a real risk when a profile is the entire online presence and something trips a review, because there's nothing else for a customer to find while it's under review. A website doesn't have that failure mode. Nobody can suspend it but you.

Building the right setup

If your business has a physical location or delivers service in person, claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile first. It's free, it's what gets you into the map pack, and Whitespark's data says it's doing more of that specific job than your website will. Then build at minimum a small, well-structured website, even a handful of pages, that your profile links to and that matches your profile's name, address, and phone number exactly. That combination covers both what the map pack rewards and what a serious customer checks before they commit.

If your business is online-only, skip the comparison. You're not eligible for a profile, so the website carries the entire job on its own.

If you're already running both, the maintenance task that matters most is consistency: same name, same address, same phone number, same categories, everywhere. Whitespark's data and Google's own suspension triggers agree on that point for different reasons, one for ranking, one for staying live at all.