How often should I update my Google Business Profile?

At minimum, check it every quarter. Update your hours whenever they change, add a photo every month or two, and post something when you have news, a seasonal offer, or a new service. Google treats activity as a signal that the business is open and engaged. Quarterly is the floor, monthly is better.

Does it really matter if my Google category is slightly wrong?

Yes, more than most people realise. Category is one of the primary signals Google and AI assistants use to match your business to search queries. A sparky listed under 'contractor' or a physio listed under 'health' will miss searches that a correctly categorised business would catch. It takes two minutes to fix.

My business gets most of its work through referrals. Does my Google profile still matter?

Referral customers still look you up before they call. They want to confirm your number, check your hours, see a photo of the place. If what they find doesn't match what they were told, some of them hesitate. And referrals slow down as word-of-mouth networks age. New customers in your suburb will not find you the same way the old ones did.

Your Google profile hasn't changed. Google has.

A profile you set up years ago and never touched isn't just outdated, it's working against you in ways that weren't possible eighteen months ago.

There’s a sparky in Brisbane I spoke to a few months back. Good tradie. Been in business eleven years, solid reputation, all his work comes through word of mouth and the odd job from a real estate agency he’s known forever. His Google profile exists. He set it up maybe five years ago, verified it, added his number, and moved on. He’s busy. That’s the whole story.

He told me he’d been meaning to update it. Add some photos. Fill in the services properly. He just hadn’t gotten around to it.

I didn’t tell him he was doing it wrong. He wasn’t doing anything. That’s the point.

* * *

Here’s what’s actually happening to a profile like that right now.

Google has been pushing local businesses to treat their Business Profile as an active channel, not a listing. Posts, photos, question responses, service updates, opening hours kept current. These are documented ranking signals. Google says so in its own support documentation. The weight it puts on freshness and engagement has been climbing. A profile with a photo from five years ago and no posts in three years doesn’t look the same to Google’s algorithm as it did when it was first created. It looks abandoned.

And the cost of that isn’t static. It compounds.

* * *

There’s a layer to this that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.

When someone asks an AI assistant to find a sparky in their suburb, or a dentist open on Saturdays, or a cafe that does breakfast past ten, the assistant doesn’t browse. It cites. It pulls from what it knows, which is built partly from Google’s index and partly from the signals in your profile. Category matters. Services listed matter. Photos matter because they’re part of what tells the system what kind of business you are.

If your category is wrong, or your services are half-filled, or your hours haven’t been updated since before you changed your Saturday trading, the assistant cites the wrong version of you. Confidently. To someone who has no reason to doubt it.

That person might arrive at a closed door. They might call a number you’ve stopped using. They might decide, from a description of services you stopped offering two years ago, that you’re not what they’re looking for.

The profile didn't get worse. The gap between the profile and reality got wider.

BrightLocal published research showing that 56% of consumers have used Google Business Profiles to find contact details for a local business in the past year. More than half. That’s not a fringe behaviour. That’s where people go. And a growing slice of those searches now pass through an AI layer that summarises and selects before the person ever sees a list of results.

The businesses that show up in those summaries are not necessarily the best ones. They’re the ones that look current.

* * *

The silence is the hardest part to reckon with.

When a customer walks past your shopfront and doesn’t come in, you see them walk past. When someone calls and hangs up, you hear the call. But when someone searches, finds a version of your business that doesn’t match reality, and moves on, you don’t know. Nothing in your day changes. No one calls to say they looked you up and chose someone else. It’s invisible.

I’m not going to tell you this is a crisis. It isn’t, not yet, not for most businesses reading this. But the sparky I mentioned, the one who’s been meaning to update his profile? He told me his last three jobs came from a single referral chain. He’s fine right now. But the referrals are getting older and he knows it, and the next generation of customers in his suburb will not find him the same way the last ones did.

* * *

The ground shifted. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But it shifted, and a profile that was merely a bit out of date eighteen months ago is now carrying a real cost.

If you’ve been meaning to sort yours out, the best time to do it was a year ago. The next best time is now, before Google weights freshness any harder than it already does.

If you want to see exactly where yours stands, run a free GBP audit at varoo.com.au. It takes two minutes and it shows you the specific gaps, not a generic checklist.

Your Google profilehasn't changed.Google has.