Google's eligibility test is one sentence, and many B2B companies fail it. What the rules say, the three ranking factors, and the statistic with no source.
Google’s eligibility rule for a business listing is one sentence, and a large share of business-to-business companies do not satisfy it.
“If your business either has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are, you can create a Business Profile on Google.”
And the companion page adds the operative test: “To qualify for a Business Profile, a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours.”
A consultancy whose clients are never in the building and who is never in theirs meets neither branch. Nor does a company whose product is delivered entirely remotely. Google’s own exclusion list is explicit that “Brands, organizations, artists, and other online-only businesses” do not qualify, and neither do “Lead generation agents or companies.”
That does not mean local search is irrelevant to every B2B firm. It means the first question is not how to rank, it is whether the rules apply to you at all. Everything below is quoted from Google’s live documentation, checked in September 2026.
The address rules that disqualify more companies than the eligibility test
Three published rules catch companies who assumed they were fine.
Mailbox addresses. “P.O. boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations aren’t acceptable.” And the enforcement page is blunt: “Merchants that set their business address at a P.O. Box will have their profile suspended.”
Virtual offices. “If your business rents a physical mailing address but doesn’t operate out of that location, also known as a virtual office, that location isn’t eligible for a Business Profile.”
Coworking spaces. This is the one most B2B companies get wrong: “Businesses can’t list an office at a co-working space unless that office maintains clear signage, receives customers at the location during business hours, and is staffed during business hours by your business staff.”
Three conditions, all required. A desk in a shared space with the operator’s name on the door does not qualify.
There is also a signage rule that applies to any listed address: “Businesses showing their address on Google should maintain permanent fixed signage of their business name at the address.”
And if you serve clients at their premises rather than yours, the rule inverts: “If you’re a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers.” Google’s own example is a plumber operating from home.
The three factors Google publishes, and the entire industry that is not in them
Google’s only official page on local ranking names three factors and defines each in one sentence.
“Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity.”
Relevance is “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for.”
Distance is “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.”
Prominence is “how well-known a business is”, and Google adds that it is “based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.”
A small oddity worth noting: the opening sentence says “popularity” while the section heading on the same page says “Prominence”. Google uses two words for the same factor in one document.
What matters more is what the page does not contain. There is no weighting between the three. There is no distance figure, no radius, no mileage. There is no review count threshold and no target rating, only “more reviews and positive ratings can help”. And there is no mention at all of keywords in the business name, posts, questions and answers, attributes, update frequency, or directory citations. The entire apparatus commonly sold as local ranking factors is absent from the only page Google publishes on the subject.
Google also closes one door explicitly: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google. We do our best to keep the search algorithm details confidential to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.”
Note as well that the page separates advice from factors. Responding to reviews, adding photos and adding products appear under a heading about improving your presence, and are tied to none of the three factors.
If your company is eligible, one rule matters more than the rest, because breaking it carries a stated consequence.
“Including unnecessary information in your business name isn’t permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile.”
Google publishes its own examples of what counts as unnecessary, and the category that catches B2B firms is services and products. Its examples convert “Midas Auto Service Experts” to “Midas”, and “Verizon Wireless 4G LTE” to “Verizon Wireless”. Location works the same way: “Equinox near SOHO” becomes “Equinox SOHO”.
Also prohibited: marketing taglines, store codes, trademark symbols, all-capitals spelling, opening hours, phone numbers and web addresses. And a rule added since March 2025, which was not in the guidelines a year and a half ago: repeating the same business name in two scripts or languages, even where the storefront sign does exactly that.
Special characters and legal suffixes now require evidence. The current text: “To include special characters or legal terms in your Business Profile name, you must provide real-world proof (e.g. signage, business cards, invoices) that consistently displays those elements as part of your business name.”
The categories rule has a similar trap. Google’s own test is: “Select categories that complete the statement: ‘This business IS a’ rather than ‘this business HAS a.’” And stacking categories is unnecessary, because “when you select a specific category like ‘Golf Resort’, Google implicitly includes more general categories like ‘Resort Hotel’, ‘Hotel’, and ‘Golf Course.’”
One more, for anyone whose listing is managed by an agency. Google’s third-party policy requires the owner’s express consent and states plainly that “Verbal consent isn’t sufficient”, that you must be able to disassociate the managing account within seven business days of asking, and that if a fee is charged the agency “must let end customers know that Business Profile is a service provided at no extra cost.” Guaranteeing top placement is listed as a violation.
The statistic that justifies the whole exercise has no source
Before spending money on this, it is worth knowing where the number in the pitch came from.
The claim that 46 percent of searches have local intent appears in thousands of articles, invariably credited to Google. It appears in no Google publication. The chain runs like this: on 10 October 2018 an attendee at a conference held at Google’s offices posted that a Google representative had said it during a presentation. A search industry blog repeated the post the same day, with no link to any document. Everyone since has cited “Google”.
There is no underlying study, no methodology, no sample, and the figure has not been updated in eight years. It is absent from Google’s blog, its help documentation, its developer documentation, its marketing insights site and its business site.
What Google does publish, signed and dated, is a different and smaller claim. In an August 2017 document by a named vice president: “In fact, nearly one-third of all mobile searches are related to location.” The source given is internal data from April 2016, which is not verifiable, but the document is attributed, dated and still online.
The other famous figure, that 76 percent of people who run a local search on a phone visit a place within 24 hours, does have a real source. Its citation reads: “Google/Purchased Digital Diary, ‘How Consumers Solve Their Needs in the Moment,’ smartphone users=1000, local searchers=634, purchases=1,140, May 2016.” So it rests on 634 local searchers, it is ten years old, and the page that carried it now returns a dead link or an empty shell. A separate Google study from 2014 put the equivalent figure at 50 percent, on a different method. Two numbers, presented as interchangeable ever since.
What a listing actually does, on the one study that tested it
Google ran a controlled comparison in July 2014 and published it. One thousand respondents, aged 18 to 64, five categories, with a control cell shown a minimal listing and a test cell shown a complete verified listing for the same business.
Two caveats that the document itself supplies. The study was run in what it calls “a laboratory environment”, so these are stated perceptions rather than visits or purchases. And it was conducted in 2014, on the search results pages of 2014.
That is the honest scope of the evidence: a complete listing changes how a business is judged when someone is looking at it. Nothing published establishes that it changes revenue.
What to do
First, check whether you qualify. In-person contact during stated hours is the test. If nobody visits you and you visit nobody, the rules exclude you, and the effort belongs elsewhere.
If you qualify through a service area, read those rules before setting it. You cannot use a radius: “You can’t set your service area as a radius distance around your business… Instead you must specify your service-area by city, postal code, or another type of area.” You can set up to 20 areas, and the boundaries “shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based.” And if clients never come to you, remove the address.
Use your real name. The suspension risk is stated, and the gain is unquantified. Google publishes no evidence that keywords in a name help, and does publish that they can cost you the listing.
Complete the listing, and stop there. The one controlled study supports completeness. Nothing supports the weekly posting, the citation building or the category stacking, and Google’s implicit-category rule makes the last one pointless by design.
And keep a sense of proportion about the whole channel. For a business-to-business company whose buyers are not standing on a street looking for a supplier, distance is not doing much work, and prominence is a synonym for being known, which is not a local search problem. The listing is worth having because it is what someone sees when they check whether you are real. That is a genuine job, and it is a smaller one than the pitch usually suggests. Where the demand has to be created rather than picked up from a map, that is a media question instead, and our page on B2B paid acquisition sets out how a budget is pointed at buyers who are not searching yet.
Frequently asked questions
Does a B2B company need a Google Business Profile?
Only if it qualifies. Google requires either a physical location customers can visit or travel to customers where they are, and states that to qualify a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours. A company whose clients never come to the office and that never visits them does not meet the test.
Can I use a coworking space address?
Only under conditions. Google states that businesses cannot list an office at a coworking space unless that office maintains clear signage, receives customers at the location during business hours, and is staffed during business hours by your own staff.
Can I put my service in my business name?
No. Google's own examples convert Midas Auto Service Experts to Midas and Verizon Wireless 4G LTE to Verizon Wireless. It states that including unnecessary information in your business name is not permitted and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile.
What are the local ranking factors?
Google names three: relevance, distance and prominence. It defines each in one sentence, publishes no weighting between them, gives no distance figure and no review threshold, and states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
Is it true that 46 percent of searches have local intent?
There is no source for it. The figure traces to a 2018 tweet reporting an unattributed remark from a conference presentation, appears in no Google publication, and has never been updated. Google's own dated document says nearly one third of mobile searches are related to location.