Google Business Profile optimization mostly comes down to four fields: category, claiming, reviews and completeness. Those are the four our free profile check measures, and the rest of the profile is closer to trim. In this guide I go through them in the order I'd fix them, with a concrete step for each.
Most of the advice out there was written when the profile had one job, which was winning a spot in the map pack. That job hasn't gone away. But there's a second one now, because your profile is one of the most structured, most trusted records about your business that an AI assistant can read, and it may well read it before deciding whether to say your name. As far as I can tell, the same four fields matter for both.
Why does the profile matter more than it used to?
When an assistant answers "best plumber in Denver," it isn't ranking ten blue links. It's putting together a short answer from sources it trusts, and for a local business the Google Business Profile is about the densest, cleanest, most machine-readable source there is. Name, category, address, hours, rating, review count, photos, and whether a real owner has claimed it, all sitting in fields instead of buried in marketing copy.
Google AI Overviews named 8.07% of the businesses Google Maps returned for the same questions, the most of the four assistants we measured across 48 US markets.
What stood out to me in that data is that Google's own assistant named the most businesses. It's Google's own product, so it may lean on Google's own profile data more than the others do. We haven't measured that link directly, so treat it as my reading and not a finding. Either way, the profile isn't the only thing that decides who gets named, but it's the cheapest thing to fix, and you can go from "present" to "complete" in an afternoon.
The four things, in order
1. Claim the profile
An unclaimed profile is a record nobody vouches for, and I'd expect anything reading it, Google included, to trust it a bit less. Claiming is also the gate for everything else on this list, because you can't fix categories, hours or photos on a listing you don't control.
If you aren't sure whether yours is claimed, or an old agency claimed it and then disappeared, start with claiming and verifying your Google Business Profile. It's the one step on this list that's procedural rather than editorial.
2. Get the category right
This is the field I think is most underrated. Google runs a fixed list of categories. Your primary category tells it which market you compete in, and secondary categories widen the set of searches you can show up for without watering down the primary one.
Businesses get this wrong in both directions. Some go too broad ("Contractor" when you only do roofs), others too narrow (one very specific category and no secondaries). Both cost you searches. I go into the detail in Google Business Profile categories, explained.
3. Build reviews that are recent, not just numerous
Review count is the number everyone watches, but recency and a steady pace tell a reader things a total can't. Fifty reviews spread across four years reads differently from fifty in the last twelve months, and anything trying to answer "is this place good right now" is likely to weigh that difference.
You can see where you stand against two competitors with the free review gap checker, and my reasoning on what to aim for is in the reviews that actually move AI answers.
4. Fill in the rest, because gaps get noticed
Hours, photos, services, attributes, description. None of these decides anything on its own. Together they're the difference between a record that answers a question and a record that raises one. If a profile has no photos and no hours, the reader, human or machine, has to go look somewhere else, and somewhere else is where your competitors are.
It's also the cheapest work on this list. It's about an hour of typing, once.
What won't this do?
Fixing your profile won't make an assistant recommend you. What it does is remove the reasons not to. Assistants also seem to lean a lot on what other sites say about you, meaning review sites, directories and community forums. That's a separate piece of work, and I cover it in the sources AI trusts and in the broader playbook, how to get recommended by ChatGPT.
You also can't fix the profile once and walk away. Categories change, competitors add reviews, and Google adds fields. The habit I'd build is to read your own profile the way a stranger would, every so often, and ask whether it still answers what a buyer is asking.
If you'd rather see your profile and your AI visibility side by side instead of checking by hand, run your first scan.