Google Business Profile Websites

» see business.site as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In June 2017 Google told everyone with a business listing that they now had a website. The page already existed, assembled out of the name and the opening hours sitting in the listing, and it lived at yourbusinessname.business.site. Google's own framing for why it bothered was that sixty percent of small businesses had no site whatsoever. A barber in a side street was not going to hire anybody to make one, and this took about four minutes.

What you got was deliberately small. One scrolling page, a headline you could edit, a short description, a photo strip, the opening hours, a map, and a button that dialed the phone. You could buy a real domain and point it at the thing. You could not add a second page, which was the whole design: the pitch was that a small business does not need a site so much as it needs to be findable and callable.

On 9 January 2024 the notice went up inside the Business Profile dashboard. Starting 1 March 2024, it said, customers visiting these websites would be redirected to the Business Profile instead. Owners got a second date to write down: the redirect would run until 10 June 2024, after which the page would simply show as unavailable. No migration tool and no export, because there was nothing to export that was not already in the listing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who it was for ~

The population here was not startups. It was the dental practice and the auto shop whose entire web presence was a Maps pin and a phone number, in a part of the world where that is enough. Turkey is thick with that class of business, and the Google listing has been the real front door for a lokanta or a kuaför for years: the hours, plus the photos customers took themselves. The business.site page was a thin skin stretched over the same data, which is exactly why it could be removed without anything visibly breaking.

The complaint from marketers after the announcement was not that the pages were good. It was that millions of businesses had printed one address on a van or a shop window, and that address was about to stop resolving. Google's answer was the redirect, which handles the car with the sticker on it and does nothing for the printed menu.

~ the redirect window ~

The hundred days between 1 March and 10 June 2024 are the interesting part of this death. Google could have 404'd everything on the first day. Instead it kept a forwarding address open for a season, long enough that anyone who noticed their site had become a Maps card still had time to buy a domain and put something at it. Then the forwarding stopped too.

business.site itself is still answering today. It sends you to the Business Profile marketing page, in whatever language your address suggests, which is a tidy summary of the whole arrangement: the domain survived because Google owned it, and the pages did not because nobody else did.

~ what it says about free ~

Google My Business is already buried on this site, retired in July 2022 when the app came off the stores and the work moved into Search. The websites outlived the dashboard that made them by nineteen months, which is a strange order for a product and its own front end. Both endings were the same decision taken twice: a listing is a feature of Google rather than a thing a shop owner keeps.

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