If you use business links on your Business Profile, you’ll need to follow the guidelines below as well as our prohibited & restricted content policies.
About business links and eligibility
Business links allow customers to do things like book appointments with your business or place orders online. Not all businesses are eligible for business links. For example, hair salons might allow customers to book appointments, but are not eligible for online ordering links.
Tip: Some countries and regions aren't eligible for certain business links.
Guidelines for businesses
Business link can't be added or updated
Invalid business link
You may receive an error that the link is malformed or contains invalid characters. Common reasons for this include:
- The link contains spaces or symbols
- The link contains backslashes (\)
- There's an invalid protocol in the link (for example, a duplicate http://)
To fix this error, check your link and remove any spaces, symbols, backslashes or other issues.
Profile not verified
Your business must be verified before you can add a link. Once your business is verified and the link edit is approved, the changes will be published on Google Search and Maps.
Dedicated landing pages
Local business links must lead to a dedicated landing page for your business. For businesses with multiple locations, action links must lead to a website for a specific location. Avoid general landing pages or a landing page for another location of the same business.
Direct action completion
Local business links must allow customers to complete the designated action. For example, an "order" link must allow the customer to complete an order. Local business links cannot be:
- Social media sites
- Messaging links
- App store links
- Link shorteners
Link verification
Google will regularly check whether the business links you have provided are in compliance with our policies, and we may remove any non-compliant links. Checks will be performed daily at most and may be done with a combination of automated tools and manual processes.
Links that cannot be crawled by our automated tools may be removed. For more information on how to ensure that your business links are accessible by Google's automated crawlers that perform verification checks, learn more about the business links crawlability policy.
Maximum number of links per transaction type
Businesses are permitted to have a maximum of 20 links per transaction type. To view your links:
- Go to your Business Profile.
- Select the transaction type, such as Booking, Food ordering, or Pickup and delivery.
If your business already has 20 links for a transaction type, for example booking, you won't be able to add any additional links. To add more links, you'll need to remove existing links.
Business link already exists
The link you provided is a duplicate of a link that has already been entered by the business or by a third-party provider. Choose a different link.
Domain already exists
You can only add one link per domain and the domain you chose is already in use. It may have been provided by your business or by a third-party provider. Select a different domain to add a link.
Third-party domain already exists
If you add a third-party provider link that has the same domain as one that was added by your business or the third-party provider we’ll remove the new link you added.
For example, if you add the link “website.com/123” for online ordering, and “website.com/456” already exists, your link will not be accepted. This is to help simplify things for customers.
Business links crawlability policy
To ensure business information on Google is accurate and trustworthy, we verify the links you provide on your Business Profile. Our automated crawlers will visit these links daily at most to confirm they lead to a valid and relevant webpage. If a link cannot be accessed by our crawlers, we cannot verify it, which may lead to the removal of the link. This policy explains how to ensure your links are accessible to our systems for verification purposes.
Definitions
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Link crawlability: The ability of Google’s automated systems, like crawlers or bots, to access the content at a given URL. This includes the ability to follow redirects and access all necessary resources like images, scripts, and stylesheets.
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Automated bot protection: Any mechanism employed by a website to block, throttle, or limit access by automated systems. This usually prevents malicious activity, scraping, or excessive server load. This includes, but is not limited to:
- robots.txt files that disallow access to specific paths
- Rate limiting or request throttling
- CAPTCHA challenges or other forms of verification
- IP address blocking
- User-Agent string restrictions
- Content cloaking or serving different content to bots than human users
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User-Agent: Identifies the type of client, like browser or crawler, that is accessing a web resource.
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HTTP status codes: Numerical codes returned by a server to indicate the status of a request. For example, a 404 error code indicates that the page wasn’t found and a 500 error code indicates a server error.
Crawlability requirements
Important: To enforce this policy, these business link verification crawlers don’t follow robots.txt rules.
All business links used in your Google Business Profile must meet the following criteria:
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Unrestricted access: Links must be accessible to our automated crawlers without restriction. This means that the website must not:
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Block bot traffic identified by the User Agent Google-BusinessLinkVerification. See Google Webmaster documentation on how to identify traffic from Google crawlers.
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Implement rate limiting or throttling that prevents our crawlers from accessing content.
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Require CAPTCHAs, login, or other forms of verification for our crawlers to access content.
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Implement IP address blocking that prevents our crawlers from accessing content.
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Use content cloaking to serve different content to crawlers versus human users.
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Functional links: Links must resolve to a working webpage that returns a valid HTTP status code.
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The link must return a “200 OK” status code or a similar successful code.
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The link must not return error codes such as:
- “404 Not Found”
- “403 Forbidden”
- “500 Internal Server Error”
- “503 Service Unavailable”
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Complete loading: Our crawlers must be able to fully load the page. This includes all resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript.
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No geoblocking: The page must not be blocked by a DNS provider or by any geo-based mechanism.
Request a review
If you believe your link was denied or removed in error, you can contact us to request a review.
