Google shut down Business Profile websites: what now?
Google turned off the free websites it generated from Business Profiles in March 2024. For a while, visitors were redirected to the Business Profile instead; then that stopped too. If you never replaced yours, every card, menu and Instagram bio pointing at that address now goes nowhere — and nobody tells you.
What happened
For years, creating a Google Business Profile also gave you a simple one-page website on a business.site address. It was free, it took no effort, and for a great many small restaurants it was the only website they had.
Google announced the feature was going away, switched the sites off in March 2024, and redirected the old addresses to the Business Profile as a grace period. That redirect has since ended. The addresses now simply fail.
What to do this week
- Type your old address into a browser. If it fails, every printed thing you own is now wrong.
- Check what the Business Profile links to. An empty website field loses you the click entirely; a dead one is worse.
- Search your own business name and follow whatever link appears. That is the journey your customers actually take.
- Put up something that works, then point the Business Profile at it. Even a single page with a menu, hours and a phone number beats an error.
The lesson underneath it
This is not really a story about Google. It is a story about what happens when your only address on the internet belongs to somebody else: the product gets discontinued, the terms change, the account gets suspended — and there is nobody to appeal to, because you were never the customer.
A domain name costs about £10 a year and is the one asset in this whole business that nobody can switch off. Everything else — the site, the ordering, the analytics — can be replaced in an afternoon if you own the address people type.
It is worth noticing that this keeps happening. GloriaFood's ordering platform is widely reported to be retiring in April 2027; the specific product changes, the pattern does not.
What a replacement actually needs
Not much, and less than most people fear. The Google Business site was one page. What made it useful was that it had your menu, your hours, your address and a phone number that dialled when tapped — and that Google could read all four.
The six steps to replacing it — and the first one, buying a domain in your own name, is the one that stops this happening to you again.