Why is my business not showing up on Google?

As of October 2026: across 7 searches in 5 US metros, 0% returned a Google AI answer and every one returned a three-result map pack. If your business is not in that map pack, you are missing before the page even finishes loading.

Is your Google Business Profile verified and complete?

Start here, because it is the most common answer and the cheapest to fix. A verified profile with correct hours, a category that matches what you sell, and photographs taken inside your business is the entry ticket. An unverified listing, or one Google has suspended, will not appear no matter what your website does.

Does your name, address and phone match everywhere?

Google cross-checks your business against other sources. If your website says one number and a directory says an old one, the listing gets treated as less certain and loses to a business that agrees with itself everywhere. This isn't a technicality. It's one of the few signals Google can verify without trusting you.

Is the town in your page, or only in your address?

We checked one veterinary clinic's homepage in Parker, Colorado, in October 2026. The town appears in the H1. It appears in 0 of the 28 headings below it, and in 0 of its 5 question headings. The clinic has five question headings and not one of them carries the town, so none of them can answer “where do I take my dog in Parker”.

The fix is to write the question the way a patient or customer types it, then answer it, then name the town inside the answer. That reads like a small change. It is the difference between a page that mentions a place and a page that answers a question about it.

Does anything on the page say what it costs?

There's a particular silence about a business that won't say what it charges. You feel it before you can name it: the page is friendly, and you still don't know whether you can afford to walk in. Most people don't ask. They just try the next tab.

The same clinic says nothing at all about price. Almost nobody does, and that's why so many visits end in a different tab. You don't have to publish a full price list. You do need one honest paragraph about what a first visit costs and what changes it.

Can Google read the page without running JavaScript?

If the text only appears after scripts run, a crawler may see an empty shell. Rendering is improving, but the safe position is that your facts exist in the HTML, in plain markup, before any script fires. We test this by fetching the page raw and looking for the words.

Are you in the AI answer, not just the map?

This is the newer layer and it behaves differently. Ranking on Google does not put you in the answer an assistant gives, and our own brand proves it: GMI Grinders was on page two of Google and named in none of the four engines we tested. After the work it is named by all four (the measured before and after).

The honest limit: none of this is instant, and nobody can promise you a position. A corrected profile takes 10 to 14 days to propagate. Content changes take longer. What you can do is check the six things in order, fix the free ones this week, and measure the same way next month.

What should you do first?

Verify the profile. Make the name, address and phone identical everywhere. Put the town in a heading and answer the question underneath it. Say what a first visit costs. Make sure the text is in the HTML. Then, and only then, worry about the AI answer. Doing them out of order is why people spend money and see nothing move.

More on this: the dispensary version of this check.

Worth reading next: what happened when we ran this on our own company.

Related reading: get the six checks run on your site.