Google Business Profile for pubs and restaurants: setup, hours and posts

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts your venue on Google Maps and in local search results. For a pub, bar, restaurant or cafe, getting it right means claiming and verifying it, choosing the most specific category, keeping regular and special hours accurate, adding your menu and booking link, uploading real photos and posting now and then. Google says nobody can pay for a better local ranking.

#How do you set up a Google Business Profile for a restaurant or pub?

Search your venue's name and town in Google Maps before you create anything, because there may already be a listing waiting to be claimed.

There are three routes from there, all set out on Google's add or claim page:

• If a listing exists and nobody has verified it, open it in Maps, choose "Claim this business" and then "Manage now".
• If someone else has already verified it (an old manager, a previous tenant, an agency you stopped paying years ago), request ownership from the current owner through the same process.
• If there's no listing at all, start at business.google.com/add.

Then Google asks you to verify. The options depend on your type of business, your public information, your region and your hours, and Google decides which ones you see: phone or text, email, a live video call, a recorded video or a postcard with a five-digit code. Google recommends video if you're eligible. Reviews take up to five business days, postcards usually arrive within 14 days, and codes expire after 30 days, so don't let the postcard sit in a pile of brewery invoices.

Google also says instant verification is possible if your website is already verified in Google Search Console.

#Which category should a pub or restaurant choose?

Pick one primary category that describes the whole business, then add a small number of extra categories for genuine departments or services. Google's guidelines ask you to use as few categories as possible and to choose ones that are "as specific as possible, but representative of your main business."

The list is fixed, so you choose from what Google suggests as you type. A pub that does serious food might take a pub category as primary and the closest restaurant category as an extra. A cafe that turns into a wine bar after six could add a bar category. A restaurant that only does pizza should pick the pizza category over a vague "restaurant" one; Google's own help page uses "Pizza restaurant" as its example of a primary category.

Don't use categories as keywords. Google says they shouldn't be used "solely as keywords or to describe attributes of your business", so dog friendly, live sport and beer garden go in attributes, the description and your photos. Changing or adding categories later can trigger a fresh verification too, which is a bit of a faff in the run-up to Christmas.

#Name, phone, description and links

Your business name has to be your real-world name. The same guidelines rule out marketing taglines and unnecessary extra information, so "The Brass Heron" is fine and "The Brass Heron, Best Sunday Roast in Town" isn't. Use a phone number that rings at that venue (Google prefers a local number to a central call centre line) and one you control.

The edit profile page covers the rest:

• The description can be up to 750 characters, with no links or HTML.
• You can add up to two extra phone numbers.
• You can add one social link per platform, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
• A new venue can enter its opening month and year up to a year ahead, and Google starts showing it 90 days before.

Write the description the way you'd describe the place to someone on the phone: what you serve, what's different (the garden, the open fire, the screens) and which part of town you're in.

#How do you set special hours for bank holidays?

Set special hours for every bank holiday and every one-off change, even when you're keeping your normal times. Google's special hours page says it's "a good idea to confirm your hours for official holidays, even if they're the same as your regular hours." Special hours cover a temporary change or closure of up to six days in a row, they only appear on the dates you set, and they only show if your main hours are set to "Open with main hours".

Seasonal venues (beach cafes, garden bars that shut for winter) can use their in-season hours as regular hours and mark the profile temporarily closed off-season, according to Google's guidelines.

There's also a "more hours" option for when different parts of the business keep different times. That's where I'd put kitchen hours, because "open till 11" and "food till 9" are very different promises to someone deciding where to eat.

Christmas 2026 needs more thought than usual, because Boxing Day falls on a Saturday and the bank holiday moves to the Monday.

For 2027, Good Friday is 26 March and Easter Monday 29 March (not a bank holiday in Scotland), per GOV.UK. The rest of the year is in our hospitality marketing calendar for 2027.

#Menus, booking links and attributes

Add your menu to the profile itself. Google's menu editor is open to food and drink businesses: add sections and items with descriptions and prices, or upload a photo or PDF of the menu. Changes can take 24 to 48 hours to show on Maps and Search, and if your menu already reaches Google through an ordering or menu provider, the editor may not be available.

Links are separate. Google's local business links page says you get one menu link, and up to 10 links per category for booking and ordering. If you use more than one booking system, mark the one you want as the preferred link so it sits at the top. Booking partners can add links automatically; if one points somewhere you don't want, ask the provider to remove it (Google says they must do so within five days of a request).

Attributes are the yes or no details: outdoor seating, Wi-Fi, payment types, accessibility. Google says certain attributes can help your business appear in searches for places with those features (attributes help). Be strict with the accessibility ones. Google only wants "wheelchair-accessible seating" ticked if the main area has no steps and there's room to sit at a table, and it says to choose No if the tables are standing height. Some attributes are filled in from what customers report after visiting, so check them every few months.

#Photos and Google posts: what to add and how often

Upload photos that help someone find you and decide to come. Google's photo guidelines ask for JPG or PNG files between 10 KB and 5 MB, recommend 720 by 720 pixels and set a minimum of 250 by 250. Videos can be up to 30 seconds and 75 MB, at 720p or higher.

Start with a logo and a cover photo, then the shot people need most: the front of the building as it looks from the street, so they recognise it when they arrive. After that I'd add the bar, the main room when it's busy, the garden or terrace if you have one, and five or six of your best dishes and drinks in daylight. Our guide to food photography on your phone covers the dishes.

Posts come in three types: updates, offers and events (Google's posts page). They can carry text, photos or video, and posts older than six months are archived unless they have a date range. Leave phone numbers out of the text, because Google may reject posts with numbers it can't verify.

How often? Google doesn't say. My suggestion is one post a week, ideally an event with a date range: quiz night, a big match, a tasting menu, a bank holiday opening. The copy you'd put on Instagram works fine here, and our guide to promoting pub events has plenty of ideas. If you plan your Instagram and Facebook posts in Venuesmith, reuse that copy; it doesn't publish to Google, so this bit is a quick copy and paste.

#What has Google removed from Business Profiles?

Chat and call history went first. Google's changes page says that as of 31 July 2024, both stopped being available, with records downloadable until 30 August 2024. If an old poster or your website still says "message us on Google", take it down, and make sure the phone number on the profile is answered.

Questions and answers are less clear. Google discontinued the Q&A API on 3 November 2025; that's what third-party tools used to read and post answers. In March 2026 it launched Ask Maps, a Gemini-powered way to ask Maps questions, in the US and India, drawing on information about more than 300 million places and reviews. Meanwhile Google's Maps help page on answering questions still describes the old feature (checked October 2026), so what you see will depend on your profile.

Either way, if questions still appear on your listing, answer them. Then put the answers people keep asking for (dogs, step-free access, children, kitchen times, parking) into your attributes, your description and your website, where they'll be read whatever Google does next. More on that in our guide to local SEO for pubs and restaurants, and on the reviews side in how to respond to restaurant reviews.