A Guide to Google Business Profile Posts - BrightLocal

Google Posts: How to Create Better Google Business Profile Updates

Last updated: April 2026

Google Business Profile Posts were rolled out by Google in 2017. Since then, there’s been a lot of confusion about the best practices for using Google Posts.

Plus, Google regularly changes the way Google Business Profile Posts (shortened to Google Posts) are populated, who they’re available for, how and where they display across devices and platforms, and even their functionality. So, we’ve gone ahead and written this guide to be your ‘one-stop shop’ for making the most of Google Business Profile Posts. After all, Posts is a prime opportunity for gaining eyeballs, clicks, and customers!

So whether you’re a multi-location business, a chain, or a single-location store, we’re here to spill the beans on GBP Posts.

What are Google Posts?

Google Posts are updates, mostly created and controlled by the business, that generally contain an image/video, text, and link. They can be used to promote offers, events, and general ‘news/update’ items.

What does Google tell us about Google Posts?

Google provides some solid resources on Google Business Profile Posts. As always, be sure to read these first.

“You can post updates on your Business Profile to share announcements, offers, updates and event details directly with your customers on Search and Maps. When customers find your latest business updates on your Business Profile, it helps them decide to visit your business.”

– Google, Google Business Profile Help Center

I’m always surprised by how many people skip over information that’s coming directly from the horse’s mouth. Personally, I do like to bookmark these resources to refer back to. Sometimes, when you notice changes to Google’s literature, it can give you a clue as to where Google is going with the feature, so keep your eyes peeled!

Which business types are Google Posts available to?

Much like Google Products, GBP Posts are not available to all businesses. One of the most high-profile industries that lamented the inability to add Google Business Profile Posts was the hotel and lodgings industry, who were unable to use Google Posts until 2021.

Google used to restrict organizations with multiple locations from creating Google Posts en masse. This changed in light of the pandemic and the ongoing requirement for chains to make quick and easy updates regarding both health and safety measures, and opening times.

Google has since decided to allow chains the ability to create Google Posts via the API on an ongoing basis. A multi-location business could set up its own access to the API. Or, it could use a third-party tool, like BrightLocal’s Google Business Profile Post Scheduler, to schedule its Posts via the API.

Google Business Profile Post Types

There are currently three Post types you can choose from, which can be found in the ‘Add Update’ tab in the Google Business Profile dashboard (also known as the NMX). They are Update Posts, Offer Posts, and Event Posts.

Update Post

This Post type can include images, some copy, and a CTA.

You might be tempted to re-purpose blog content as an update post—especially as GBP posts were touted as ‘micro-blogs’ when they first emerged.

However, the audience for update posts is very different from an audience that might keep up to date with blog posts. Viewers of these posts will usually be ‘top of funnel’ in terms of their purchase journey.

Use update posts to differentiate your business from the other businesses that your potential customer might be considering. Awards, unique selling propositions, and anything else that might encourage a potential to consider you over the competition should be used here.

Offer Post

My favorite Post type! Whenever I’m working with a new client, I’ll work through the types of offers they can post. They might already have an established schedule for offers (for example ‘May half-price sale’) or it might be that they hadn’t thought about offers before.

Keep an open mind about what constitutes an ‘Offer’; it doesn’t have to be a discount. It could be something that you give away for free, such as a download, a white-paper, or a brief consult. If you have an ‘evergreen’ offer (something you offer year-round), make it into an Offer Post with a long valid period.

Many businesses fail to package their ‘value added’ elements into an offer, and these are great opportunities to populate an evergreen Offer Post. For example:

Offers have to include a start date and an end date (with an option to also add timings). The maximum you can run your offer for is 12 months from the offer start date. Google Posts can be scheduled for publish at a later date.

You can also set Offer Posts on Google to repeat on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

The ‘Add more details’ fields are optional, but I’d always suggest adding a link to the relevant offer content on your website in the ‘Link to redeem offer’ field. That way you can gauge the success of the Offer Post in terms of driving visits to the website and any subsequent conversions.

Here, you can also add Terms of the offer, or a coupon code if needed for customers to redeem the offer.

If you have multiple Offer Posts that are valid on a mobile device, Google will show them all, so for greater impact I’d recommend sticking with one or two that are valid at the same time.

Event Post

An Event Post can include a photo, the event title, start date and end date (with optional start/end times), optional description text up to 1,500 characters, and an ‘Add a button’ CTA for a link.

On a desktop, Event Posts will show in the business profile while they’re in their valid date range, but after that they’ll no longer show in the ‘carousel’ (but they will show if you select ‘See all’).

On a mobile device, they’ll show in the ‘Updates’ tab.

Note: Event Posts do not populate the ‘Events’ section in a business profile (as seen below):

Instead, this section is populated by events found by Google and associated with your business. These can come from a range of sources. So, if your business offers events, it’s worth creating a page on your site for that event and marking it up with event schema. Then you can create a GBP Event Post, and link it to that page.

Where do Google Business Profile Posts appear?

Up until September 2018, Google Posts enjoyed a great level of visibility, appearing high up in the business profile. Since then, though, Google Posts have been moved to the bottom.

Sadly, as a result, businesses that had been successfully using GBP Posts to drive potential customers to their website experienced a significant drop in users from this method.

If you UTM tag up for Google Business posts (more on this below) you’ll be able to judge the efficacy of your Google posts in terms of driving conversions on your business website.

On Desktop in the Business Profile

At present, Google Posts appear on a desktop in the business profile, which appears in the knowledge panel, near the bottom of the business profile, above the link to the social profiles (if present). They can be below reviews, or under the business description for some. I call this the ‘Posts carousel’.

The most recent Posts will be shown. A click on ‘View all’ will generate a pop-out where a user can scroll through all historical Posts.

Google Maps on a Desktop

On a desktop in Google Maps, Posts show just under the primary business information. If you click on the Post, you can then scroll through all GBP Posts from that business.

In Search on a Mobile Device

When using a mobile device, GBP posts keep getting moved down the business profile. You’ll currently find them by scrolling down the page (and then probably down some more).

In the Google Maps App on a Mobile Device

On the Google Maps app you’ll see Posts if you scroll down in the ‘Overview’ tab and in the ‘Updates’ tab:

In what order do Google Posts appear?

In the ‘Posts carousel’ on a mobile and a desktop, Posts appear in the order they were published.

Before Google shifted in terms of the longevity of Posts, Event Posts always used to show first in the ‘Posts carousel’ and only shifted once the event had expired.

However, Posts now show purely in the order they were published, reverse-chronologically. Even if an Event Post or an Offer Post is still ‘in date’, newer Posts will show first. Conversely, once an event or offer has expired, if it’s one of the last 10 GBP Posts that were added, it will no longer show on the Posts carousel. It will show (in order of the date the GBP Post was added) in the ‘View all’ Posts pop-out.

How long are GBP Posts ‘active’ for?

Currently, GBP Posts are active for six months. If no Posts have been made for six months, Google shows a link that says ‘view previous updates on Google’:

When Google Posts were first launched, they would only appear in the business profile for a certain period of time, depending on the Post type—for example, seven days for an Update Post, until the end date for an Event Post, and until an offer’s expiry date for an Offer Post.

Google probably got peeved that businesses couldn’t manage to post regularly (when they’d invested in making this lovely shiny functionality). In January 2021, this changed and Google started showing GBP Posts for six months.

How to Create a Google Business Profile Post

You’ve been patient enough—now it’s time to get stuck in and create a Google Post for yourself. But how should you format it, can you automate it, and crucially, what on Earth should you post?

How to Format Google Business Profile Posts

A GBP Post can include an image, images or videos. Posts are displayed differently across devices and platforms, so there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but here are some general guidelines to start you off!

Images

Google gives us these general photo guidelines for images in Google Business Profile:

Google Posts Image Size

I’ve always used a 1200px wide by 900px tall image, and I make a Canva Post template for each of the businesses that I work with using their brand guidelines.

If your image for your Google Business Profile Post is too small, you’ll get an error message while posting telling you that images in GBP Posts need to be a minimum of 400px by 300px, with a file size of at least 10 KB.

Tips for Quick and Easy Access to Your Images for Google Posts

Canva

Use Canva to design a set of images for Posts that could be used for various Post types across the months, make them in-keeping with your brand and tone of voice guidelines.

Dropbox

You can upload your Google Posts images to Dropbox. Copy the ‘link’ to the image once it’s uploaded into your dropbox. The URL will end with this parameter:

?dl=0

Change the ?dl=0 to ?raw=1, so the image URL will look something like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v0dt55eqm1le57/sloth%20%282%29.jpg?raw=1

You’ll now be able to use that URL in Postamatic or any other third-party posting tool that requires a media URL.

Should images include text?

In her analysis of 1,000 Google Posts, Joy Hawkins found that, in her test sample of GBP accounts, images that included text performed better than those that didn’t.

In my experience, using text in images can be problematic because of the range of ways that an image is displayed across devices and platforms, so I tend to avoid text in images. This just highlights the importance of testing, testing, testing for your own business or clients.

Videos

You can, of course, use your own video content.

If you don’t have video content, a quick and easy win is to put together a slideshow of images that can be exported in a standard video format.

Google provides the following guidelines for video uploads:

How to Measure GBP Post Effectiveness

In Search

GBP Performance ‘website clicks’ data will also give you an idea of how many people clicked through to your website from your GBP listing, but this isn’t specific enough to let you know which of these was via GBP Posts versus one of the other links on your business profile.

In Google Analytics

When you tag your Google Business Profile Posts (and indeed any links to your website in GBP) with UTM tags you’ll be able to see how many visitors GBP Posts are driving traffic to your website as well as what they actually do when they reach it.

In my guide to UTM tagging for Google Business Profile, I detail the process of tagging your GBP Posts using the ‘Campaign content’ field, which will describe the content of that Post. By adding UTM tagging, a business can see which type of Posts (Update, Event, Offer) plus the content of those Posts, and can help you test what works best in terms of driving website visits, conversions, and micro-conversions.