Google shut down Business Profile websites: what US restaurants should do now
Google switched off the free websites it built from Business Profiles in March 2024. Until June 10, 2024, visitors were bounced to the Business Profile instead; after that, the old business.site addresses simply return “page not found.” If you never replaced yours, every menu, flyer and Instagram bio that still carries that address now sends customers to an error page.
What happened
For years, setting up a Google Business Profile also gave you a one-page website on a business.site address. It was free and automatic, and for a lot of independent pizzerias across the country it was the only website they ever had.
Google announced the shutdown in early 2024, turned the sites off in March, and kept a redirect to the Business Profile running until June 10, 2024. Since then, the addresses are dead. Google’s advice at the time was to build a site elsewhere and update the website field on the profile. Custom domains that forwarded to a business.site page broke at the same time.
What to do this week
- Type your old address into a browser. If it fails, every printed piece that carries it is now wrong.
- Open your Business Profile and check the website field. An empty field loses you the click; a dead link loses you the customer and looks abandoned.
- Search your pizzeria’s name on your phone and follow the first link. That is exactly what a hungry customer does at 6 p.m.
- Put up something that works, then point the profile at it. One page with your menu, hours, address and a tap-to-call number beats an error.
The lesson underneath it
This is not really a story about Google. It is about what happens when your only address online belongs to someone else. Products get discontinued, terms change, accounts get suspended, and there is no one to call, because you were never the paying customer.
A domain name registered in your own name costs about what you charge for a large pie, per year, and it is the one asset in this whole business nobody else can switch off. Everything behind it, the site, the ordering, the analytics, can be swapped in an afternoon as long as you own the address people type.
It keeps happening, too. Free tools come and go, ordering widgets get retired, marketplaces change their fees. The specific product changes; the pattern doesn’t.
What a replacement actually needs
Less than most owners fear. The old Google site was one page. What made it useful was that it showed your menu, your hours, your address and a phone number that dialed when tapped, and that Google could read all four.
The six steps to replacing it, and the first one, registering a domain in your own name, is the step that keeps this from happening again.