Google Business Profile Posts

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Google posts are short updates published to your business listing, still widely searched for as GMB posts because of the rename from Google My Business. This page covers the post types and how each expires, why a fixed image-size number is the wrong thing to memorize, whether posts affect rankings (no credible evidence), what to write, the mistakes that recur, and what the available measurement can and cannot tell you.

What a Google post is, and why the name keeps changing

A Google post is a short update published directly to your business listing, appearing alongside your profile in Search and Maps. People still search for GMB posts and for Google My Business posts because the product was called Google My Business until it was renamed Google Business Profile, and the older name persists in everyday use and in most published guidance.

The distinction between Google posts for business and ordinary social posts is where they appear and who sees them. A social post reaches followers; posting on Google Business Profile reaches people who have already searched for you or for what you do, at the moment they are deciding. That audience is smaller and closer to acting.

What is a Google post good for, practically — and what are Google posts able to do: announcing something time-bound, answering a question that comes up repeatedly before people call, and occupying more of your own branded result. What they are not is a distribution channel — there is no feed and no sharing mechanism, so nothing compounds the way it might elsewhere.

Image size: what to know, and why a fixed number is the wrong answer

Google post size and google business post size questions are the most common thing people search here, and the honest answer is that the published specification changes and the rendered crop differs by surface. Committing a single pixel dimension to memory is how people end up with cropped text six months later.

The durable approach is compositional rather than numeric. Use a roughly square or landscape image with the subject centered and generous margin, because the visible area is cropped differently in Search, in Maps, on desktop and on mobile. Anything essential near an edge will be cut somewhere.

For the current figures — the exact GMB post image size, minimum resolution and file limits — check Google’s own documentation rather than a blog post, including this one. The GBP post image size has been revised more than once, and third-party guides go stale silently. What does not change: text burned into the image is a bad idea, because it is the first thing a crop destroys and it is invisible to anyone using a screen reader.

Compose for the crop, not the canvas

Center the subject and leave margin on all sides. Different surfaces crop differently, so the safe area is smaller than the image you upload.

Avoid text inside the image

It crops badly, it does not scale on small screens, and it is inaccessible. Put the words in the post body, which is searchable and readable.

Check Google’s current spec, not a blog

Google posts size guidance has been revised repeatedly. Third-party numbers go stale without any indication that they have.

Test on a phone after publishing

The rendered result is the only reliable check, and mobile is where most people will see it.

Posts expire, and that changes how you should plan them

Unlike a website page, a Google post has a limited visible life. Updates rotate out, offers end on their stated date, and events disappear once they have passed.

This makes posting a maintenance activity rather than a publishing one. A profile with three posts from last year looks less current than one with nothing, because the dates are visible and stale content reads as a business that stopped paying attention.

The planning consequence is to commit to a cadence you can sustain indefinitely rather than a burst. Something every week or two, permanently, beats twelve posts in a month followed by silence — and the sustainable cadence is usually lower than people initially promise themselves.

Where posts appear, and who actually sees them

Understanding the placement explains most of what follows about how to write them and how much to expect. Posts surface on your business profile in Search and in Maps, and their prominence varies by device and by how the profile was reached.

The audience is therefore people who already searched your name, or who found you in a local result for something you do. There is no feed, no follower graph and no sharing mechanism, so a post cannot travel beyond the people looking at your listing.

That constraint is worth accepting rather than fighting. It makes posts a poor awareness channel and a good one for the moment between finding you and contacting you — which is precisely where most local businesses lose inquiries to an unanswered question.

Do Google posts affect rankings

There is no credible evidence that publishing posts improves where a profile ranks in local results, and claims otherwise are usually inferred from the fact that active profiles tend to be well-maintained in other ways too.

What posts plausibly do affect is behavior once someone has found you: they occupy more of your branded result, they answer questions that would otherwise be a phone call, and they signal that the business is operating. Those are conversion effects rather than ranking effects, and they are worth having on their own terms.

Treating posts as a ranking tactic leads to posting for volume, which produces the stale-profile problem described above. Treating them as a communication channel to people already looking at you produces better posts and a cadence you can maintain.

Writing a post that does something

The format rewards being direct. There is limited space, the reader is mid-decision, and there is one action available.

Lead with the specific thing — the date, the price, the change, the answer. Avoid opening with the business name, which the reader can already see. Include one call to action rather than several, and make it the one that matches the post: call for a booking, directions for a visit, a link only where the destination genuinely adds something.

Google posts examples that work tend to read like a note to a customer rather than marketing copy. The ones that fail read like a press release, or like social content that was written for a different audience and reposted without thought.

Put the specific fact first

The date, the price, the change. The reader is deciding, not browsing.

One action, matched to the post

A booking post should call; a location post should give directions. Multiple actions dilute both.

Do not open with your own name

It is already on screen directly above the post.

Write it as a note, not a campaign

The register that works here is closer to a message to an existing customer than to advertising.

Common mistakes

The recurring problems are consistent enough to list, and all of them are avoidable at no cost.

Reposting social content unchanged, which reads as written for a different audience because it was. Text baked into images that crops or cannot be read on a phone. Offers with no end date, which either expire invisibly or sit there past their relevance. Posting in bursts and then stopping, leaving a visibly stale profile. Links that go to a homepage rather than to the thing the post described. And treating the channel as a ranking lever rather than a communication one.

One more worth naming: not checking the result on a phone. Most people will see the post on mobile, cropped, and the desktop preview does not show you what they will get.

Products, offers and events are different tools

The three dated post types get used interchangeably and behave differently, which produces some avoidable disappointment.

An offer carries a start and end date and is the right vehicle for a discount with terms; it disappears when it ends, which is correct behavior and surprises people who expected it to linger. An event has its own dates and stops showing once passed. A product post is different in kind — it persists in the profile’s product area rather than rotating out, which makes it the closest thing to permanent content available here.

For a business with a stable catalog, products are the most durable investment of the three, because the work does not evaporate on a date. Offers and events should be treated as consumable by design.

Write the post before you choose the type

The type follows from whether the content carries a date. Choosing the type first tends to produce a post shaped to fit a format rather than to say something.

Schedule replacements, not just posts

Because updates rotate out, the useful unit of planning is the replacement rather than the post. Knowing what follows this one is what keeps the profile from going quiet.

Keep a small library of evergreen updates

Service areas, parking, accessibility, what to bring. These can be rotated indefinitely and cover the weeks when nothing newsworthy happened.

Review what you posted a year ago

The dated ones show you what actually recurs annually, which is most of what a small business needs to say.

How to tell whether posting is worth the effort

The measurement available is limited, and it is worth being clear about what can and cannot be known.

The profile’s own insights report views and actions, which tells you whether posts are being seen and interacted with. What that does not isolate is whether the post caused the call, since someone who was going to phone anyway may read the post first and still phone.

The practical test is simpler than an attribution model: do the questions that used to arrive by phone stop arriving because the post answered them, and does the profile look current to someone checking you out. Both are observable without any analytics, and both are the actual job.

What posts actually do

They rarely move ranking. What they do is occupy the profile with something current at the moment a searcher is deciding, which is a conversion effect rather than a visibility one.

The expiry catch

Most post types drop off the profile after a week, so a profile posted to once and abandoned looks emptier than one never posted to at all.

Reference videos

Local search fundamentals relevant to profile management.

Frequently asked questions