Do You Need a Website If You Have a Google Business Profile?

Quick read: Yes — a business with a Google Business Profile still needs a website. The Profile gets the click; the website earns trust, supports search rankings beyond the local pack, and provides the structured content AI assistants pull from when recommending businesses in 2026.

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Most small businesses that ask this question aren't trying to cut corners. They're trying to understand what's actually required. The Google Business Profile (GBP) exists, it's free, and it shows up when someone searches for you. The question of whether you also need a website feels reasonable to ask.

The honest answer: yes, you need a website, and the gap between "GBP only" and "GBP plus a real website" grew significantly in 2024 — for two reasons worth understanding.

What a Google Business Profile actually does

A Google Business Profile is your listing on Google Search and Google Maps. It controls what shows up when someone searches your business name: your address, phone number, hours, photos, reviews, and a short description. For local discovery — someone looking for a plumber near them, a café open on Sunday — a well-maintained GBP is often what wins the first impression.

None of this is a small thing. GBP is worth having and worth maintaining.

But a profile is not a website. It's closer to a directory listing you control. The things a GBP cannot do:

• Rank for service-level or informational queries ("how much does a roof repair cost," "what to look for in a commercial cleaning company")
• Tell the story of your business in more than a paragraph
• House the proof that earns trust — detailed work examples, credentials, team backgrounds, before-and-after
• Show up on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or any search engine that isn't Google
• Get cited by an AI assistant when someone asks for a recommendation

That last point is the one that changed in 2024.

The 2024 pivot: Google deleted its own solution

For a few years, Google offered a built-in website builder inside Business Profile — a simple one-pager at a .business.site address. Thousands of small businesses used it as their entire web presence. It wasn't much, but it was something: a URL to link to, a place to describe services.

On March 1, 2024, Google shut it down. Redirects to the GBP itself lasted until June 10, 2024. After that, anyone visiting those old addresses got a "page not found" error. (Search Engine Journal reported the timeline as it unfolded.)

The lesson was uncomfortable: if your web presence lives inside someone else's free tool, it lives at their discretion. Google built a solution, businesses relied on it, Google sunset it. No warning sirens. No grace period worth the name.

The businesses that had a real website alongside their GBP noticed nothing. The ones that had used the Google builder as a substitute found out their web presence had quietly evaporated.

Why AI made the case stronger

The second shift is more durable.

As of 2024 and into 2026, a growing share of the questions people used to type into Google are now being asked of AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's own AI Overviews, Gemini, and others. As we wrote in AEO: the second search, these tools don't return a list of links. They give an answer, with citations.

A Google Business Profile entry cannot be cited by an AI assistant. There's no page for the AI to link to. There's no content for it to quote. A GBP tells the AI "this business exists" — which is useful, but not enough to appear in an answer.

To show up when someone asks "what's a good website maintenance service in St. Louis" or "what does monthly Search Engine Optimization actually include," you need pages that answer those questions. You need service descriptions structured so machines can parse them. You need FAQ content. You need schema markup. You need a site that behaves like a source.

Google has stated that its AI Overviews follow the same core technical requirements as regular Search — authoritative, clearly structured content that demonstrates Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. (Infinite Media Resources summarizes Google's own guidance on this.) A GBP profile checks none of those boxes.

Meanwhile, two out of three Google searches end without a click to any website at all. The businesses that survive that shift are the ones Google and AI tools treat as the authoritative source. Sources have URLs. GBPs don't.

The two jobs, clearly separated

Here is how to think about the two things:

Google Business Profile handles discovery. Someone searches your name or your category near their location. Maps, the knowledge panel, phone-call-from-search, directions, reviews. This is the "find me" layer. A well-maintained GBP does this job well.

A website handles everything else. Non-Google traffic (Bing, directories, referrals). Informational and service-level search. AI citation. Detailed service pages. Trust-building content. The content that turns a stranger who found you on Maps into someone who books.

The GBP is the storefront window. The website is the store. You can have a great window display, but at some point the customer needs to come inside.

What this means in practice

If you have a GBP but no website, your business exists on exactly one platform — owned by a company that shut down its own website builder without much warning. You don't rank for anything other than your own name. You can't be cited when AI tools recommend services. And you're one Google policy change away from a different outcome.

If you have both — a properly built website alongside an active GBP — they do different jobs and they do them well together.

The businesses showing up in Google's local pack and in AI-generated answers are almost always maintaining both. The ones that dropped off the map in 2024 are often the ones that assumed a GBP was enough.

It wasn't in 2024. It's less enough now.

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If your site needs to be built or brought up to standard — fast, structured, and built to be cited — that's the Build. If you already have one and need it to stay current month to month, that's the Care plan.

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FAQ

Can I have a Google Business Profile without a website?

Yes, and many businesses do. A GBP without a website can appear in local map results, collect reviews, and give customers your phone and address. What it cannot do is rank for service or informational queries, show up in non-Google search engines, or get cited by AI assistants. For very small operations that get all their business through direct referrals and local Maps, the gap is manageable. For anyone relying on search to generate leads, GBP-only leaves significant opportunity untouched.

Does Google still offer a free website with a Business Profile?

No. Google shut down its Business Profile website builder on March 1, 2024, and redirects to Business Profile pages ended on June 10, 2024. Any business that had been using Google's built-in .business.site pages as its entire website now needs a standalone site.

Will my business show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity if I only have a GBP?

Unlikely, except in the loosest sense. AI assistants can acknowledge that a business exists using signals from directories and review platforms, but they cannot cite a GBP as a source for a detailed answer. To be cited as the answer to a question — "best accountant for freelancers in Memphis," "what does monthly website maintenance include" — you need content with a URL. That means a real website.

Does a website replace my Google Business Profile?

No. They do different jobs. Your GBP controls how you appear in Google's local results, Maps, and the knowledge panel. A website gives you content that ranks for broader queries, builds trust with visitors, and is citable by AI tools. Treating them as alternatives to each other is how you end up with neither working properly.

How does a website help with Google's AI Overviews?

Google has stated that AI Overviews follow the same core technical requirements as standard Search: structured, authoritative content that signals expertise, experience, authority, and trust. A GBP doesn't carry content that satisfies those signals. A website with clear service pages, FAQ sections, schema.org markup, and accurate credentials does. None of this guarantees inclusion in an AI Overview — Google controls that — but it's the prerequisite work.

How important is a website for local businesses specifically?

More than most local owners assume. Local AI queries — "plumber near me," "best website designer in [city]" — are exactly the queries where AI Overviews appear frequently, because they're answerable with structured local data. If your site has clear location signals, a LocalBusiness schema, and service-level content, you're competing for those citations. A GBP alone puts you in the running for the Maps result; it doesn't put you in the running for the AI answer.