You can run a Google Business Profile without a website, and Google won't stop you. But the profile only puts you on the map. When someone asks an AI assistant who to hire, the answer is built from pages it can read, and a profile gives it very little to work with.
Do you need a website if you have a Google Business Profile?
Not to exist on Google. You do need one to be chosen by anyone who checks before they call. The profile answers three questions well: where you are, when you're open and what other people said about you. It answers almost nothing about how you work, who you work with, what it costs or why you instead of the next pin on the map.
That second set of questions is what decides a service purchase. A plumber can win on the first set. A therapist, an accountant or a consultant almost never does, because the buyer is comparing three or four options and reading before they reach out.
What can a website do that the profile can't?
The profile is a form Google designed. The website is the only place where you decide what gets said and how much of it.
| What the buyer wants to know | Google Business Profile | Your website |
|---|---|---|
| Where you are and when you're open | Yes, and it's the best place for it | Yes |
| What other clients thought | Yes, through reviews | Only if you show them |
| How you work, step by step | A short description field | As much as you need |
| Who exactly they'd be working with | A name and a photo | Training, background, approach |
| Prices and what's included | Limited, depends on the category | Yes |
| Answers to their specific questions | Q&A from strangers, if any | Your own answers, one page each |
| Something an AI assistant can quote | Very little text | Every page you publish |
The last row is the one that changed in the last two years. A profile is mostly structured fields. An assistant that has to explain why it recommends you needs sentences, and sentences live on a website.
Can you have a Google Business Profile without a website?
Yes. The website field is optional, and plenty of businesses run a profile with nothing in it. Google used to offer a free one-page site built from the profile, but it shut those down in 2024, so today the field either points to a site you own or stays empty.
A profile without a website still shows up in Maps and in the local results. What it loses is the click that comes after: the person who wanted to check before calling has nowhere to go, and they go to the next result that does.
What happens to AI answers if all you have is the profile?
The assistant can confirm you exist and roughly where. It struggles to say anything that would make someone pick you. In my own work the gap between those two is the most common problem I see: businesses that are easy to find and impossible to describe.
Even having a website doesn't close the gap on its own. In September I read 54 therapy practice websites in the United States, the kind of business where buyers compare carefully. Here is how many of them had the pieces an assistant uses to confirm who it is talking about:
| On the website | Sites out of 54 |
|---|---|
| Organization or local business markup | 47 |
| A declared address | 34 |
| At least one heading written as a question | 34 |
| A real person named, not just the practice name | 25 |
| An about page | 23 |
Fewer than half named the actual person you'd be sitting with. The profile can't fix that, and a website that skips it wastes the one place where it could be said. I wrote more about this in why a machine can't confirm you're real and in ranking first on Google and still being invisible to AI.
What is the smallest website worth building?
Smaller than most people think. Four pages cover what the profile can't:
A home page that says what you do, for whom and where, in the first two sentences.
A services page with how you work and what it costs, or at least how pricing works.
An about page with your name, your background and a real photo.
A contact page with the same name, address and phone number as the profile, character for character.
That last detail matters more than it looks. When the profile and the website say the same thing, each one confirms the other. When they disagree, both lose weight. If your profile ever gets suspended, the website is also what you'll use to prove the business is real, which I cover in what to do when your Google Business Profile is suspended.
Questions I get about this
Will adding a website improve my ranking in Maps?
It can help, because Google uses what it finds about your business across the web to judge relevance and prominence. It is not a switch, and a thin site helps less than a clear one.
Is a social media page enough instead of a website?
It is better than nothing as a link from the profile, but you don't control how it's structured, and assistants read it less reliably than a plain page of text.
Should the website and the profile use the same business name?
Yes, exactly the same, along with the address and phone number. Small differences make it harder for anyone, person or machine, to be sure it's the same business.
What I can and can't claim
The 54 sites are an anonymized set of independent therapy practices in ten US metro areas, read in September 2026; the counts come from the pages I could read on each site, up to eight per site. It is one sector, so treat it as an example of how often the basics are missing, not as a rule for every business. I can't promise that a website will change where you appear in Maps; nobody outside Google can.
If you want to know which of these pieces your own site is missing, that is what the audit checks, or you can book a strategic fit call and we'll look at it together.
