The free Google Business Profile website builder was retired in 2024
THE CIRCULATING CLAIM, PARAPHRASEDYou can create a free website for your business through your Google Business Profile.
What changed
For years, Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) included a free single-page website builder, and years of small-business guides recommended it as the fastest free way to get online. That product no longer exists.
Google announced that websites made with Google Business Profiles would be turned off in March 2024. Visitors to those addresses were redirected to the business’s Profile until June 10, 2024; after that date, the redirect ended and visitors to those addresses were shown an unavailable-page notice instead of a website. Google’s notice, as quoted identically by both outlets below, read:
“In March 2024, websites made with Google Business Profiles will be turned off… The redirect will work until June 10, 2024.”
The sourcing, stated plainly
We could not locate a live Google help-center page documenting this retirement, so the notice survives through contemporaneous trade coverage that quoted it verbatim and identically, including Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land. We treat identical independent verbatim quotation as sufficient. One caution for anyone verifying this themselves: a Google support page about a “business site builder” shutdown does exist, but it documents an unrelated, years-earlier regional product, not the 2024 retirement.
What is true now
- Google Business Profile itself is unaffected: the listing, reviews, hours, and map presence continue as before.
- The free website builder inside it is gone. Pages still recommending it are describing a product that has not existed since March 2024.
- A business following such a guide today will not find the described buttons, and a business that relied on the old free site lost that address in June 2024; rebuilding on another platform meant a new address.
Why this entry exists
Present-tense instructions for this product still circulate in guides that otherwise appear current. This entry documents the retirement so those pages can be updated, and so readers who land on them have a verifiable record of what changed and when.