The holidays will be here before you know it! Is your Business Profile ready?

Quick definition first, because this gets muddled with every other Google product.

Your Google Business Profile is the box that appears when someone searches your business by name: your hours, phone number, photos, directions, reviews. It is also what puts you on Google Maps. You might know it as your Google listing, or by its old name, Google My Business.

Google can suspend it. When that happens it drops off Search and Maps at the same time, and the only way back is an appeal. How long that takes is partly up to you, which is the reason for this email.

BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer research is worth a minute here, because the numbers are less about visibility than most owners expect.

72% of people looking for a local business look at three or fewer options before deciding. Only 1% look at more than ten.

Three quarters decide within thirty minutes, and 28% decide in under five.

When they were asked what settled it, the top answer was not price. It was clear, complete information, at 32%, just ahead of reviews at 30% and pricing at 29%.

Just over half start that search on Google, and 71% touch Google Search somewhere in the process. Google’s share is slipping rather than growing; people now use around six different sites when choosing a business, and Instagram, TikTok, and AI tools are each taking a piece. It is still the largest single starting point by a wide margin, and nothing else is close.

So a suspended profile is not a small dip in visibility. For the stretch it is down, you are missing from a shortlist that was only ever three names long, being built in under half an hour, by people who are ready to buy today.

Google permits a Business Profile if your business makes in-person contact with customers during the hours you say you are open. That is the whole test, and it cuts two ways:

Q4 is when holiday hours, seasonal services, and category changes tend to pile up on your Google Business Profile, and what that looks like depends on the business.

A store is changing holiday hours, adding Christmas Eve closures, maybe extending Saturdays through December. Run more than one location and that is the same edit repeated across every profile you own.

A service business is switching seasonal offerings, or changing a category because the work itself changes with the season.

All of it is reasonable. It is also a batch of changes arriving at once, which makes any problem that follows harder to trace. And it lands in the weeks where being invisible is the most impactful.

Recent data on reinstatement puts it anywhere from about three business days for a clean case to fourteen or twenty for a complicated one. Six weeks happens. Start that clock in the first week of December and a complicated case keeps you dark through a good chunk of the peak shopping season.

The difference between the short end of that range and the long end is mostly evidence: whether you can show Google what it asks for, on the first try, without a round of follow-up questions.

Google is blunt about the mechanics here. Its own instructions say that once you open the evidence form, you have 60 minutes to submit it, or your documents will not be attached to the appeal at all.

That is not a countdown on your profile. Miss it and you have lost nothing permanently; you have simply filed an appeal without the evidence that would have settled it quickly, which is how a three-day decision becomes a three-week one. That is three more weeks of people picking from a shortlist you are not on.

Which is the whole argument for getting organized before anything goes wrong.

Ten minutes of gathering now, and you are prepared whenever it happens:

Which of those last two matters most depends on your setup. With a storefront, permanent signage and the exterior do the work. Without one, your vehicles, equipment, and paperwork are the proof instead.

One detail worth the extra minute: your business name and address should match how they appear everywhere else, including your website, your invoices, and your licenses. Mismatches are a common reason a two-day appeal becomes a five-week one.

If customers come to you, check that you do not have two Business Profiles pointing at the same address. Duplicates happen after a move, a rebrand, or a well-meaning employee, and more than one profile at a single address is a common way Google suspends both. If you run several locations, holiday hours can be set in bulk rather than one profile at a time, which is worth knowing before you do it twenty times by hand.

If you go to your customers, check the address field. Your street address should be hidden and your service areas listed instead. A visible home address on a business that works at customer locations is one of the most common reasons Google suspends a Business Profile. It is a setting, not a violation.

Google’s own guidance is that the business should hold primary ownership, and that employees and outside help should have manager access instead.

It is common to find the primary owner is a former employee, an old agency, or an email nobody can get into. That is a bad thing to discover on the day you need to file an appeal, and it is a five-minute fix today.

Getting your Google Business Profile back is not the same as getting back what was on it. Profiles return with reviews missing, service lists emptied, and performance history gone. Visible again is not the same as restored.

That gap matters more than it sounds. In the same 2026 research, 65% of consumers who rejected a business did so for a review-related reason, and that includes having no reviews or only old ones. A profile that comes back without its history is still carrying a cost.

Ten minutes of preparation, before December.

Talk soon,

Iulia Vasciuc

CEO, ScaledOn