How to Write a Google Business Profile (GBP) Description

Google's help documentation describes the description as a brief explanation of your business that shows in the 'From the business' section of your profile. Google says it helps potential customers learn what you do and what makes your business unique.

It sits alongside fields that are mostly facts — your name, address, hours, categories, photos — and it is the only one where the wording is entirely yours. Because customers are comparing several profiles at once, a vague description wastes the one place you can explain yourself.

To edit it, open your profile, choose Edit profile, and select Edit beside Description. Google notes that changes usually take about 10 minutes to show up, but in some cases it can take up to 30 days, so don't judge an edit by the first hour.

Google's list is short and practical. Describe what you offer, what makes you special, how long you have been in business, and anything else that is helpful for customers to know.

Read that list as the four questions a stranger has when they land on your profile: what do you do, why you rather than the one next door, can I trust you, and is there anything I need to know before I call. If a sentence in your description doesn't answer one of those, it is probably filler. Only mention how long you've been in business if the number is accurate and you could prove it.

Google's guidance on the description has three things to avoid: do not include URLs or HTML code, do not exceed 750 characters, and focus primarily on details about your business instead of promotions, prices or sales. Separately, its general guidelines ask you to represent your business as it is recognized in the real world, which in practice means no claiming services you don't provide.

The table below puts Google's wording next to what it means when you sit down to write. The third column is our advice, not a Google rule.

Google says local results depend on three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well a profile matches what someone is searching for, and Google advises providing complete and detailed business information to help it understand your business and match it to relevant searches.

We found no Google statement that a particular wording in the description raises your ranking, so we wouldn't promise that. The safer way to think about it is as a relevance and conversion field: it helps Google understand what you do, and it helps a customer decide to call. Stuffing it with keywords helps neither, and that part is our advice rather than a rule.

A good description is plain and specific. A reliable template is: what you are and where, what you offer, what is genuinely different, and one verifiable fact. Fill each part with your own details; never copy another business's wording, because it describes their business, not yours.

The three examples below are fictional businesses. The weak versions break Google's guidance or say nothing useful; the stronger versions follow the structure above and stay far below the limit. Use them as patterns, never as text to copy, and only keep a claim like 'licensed' or 'since 2014' if it is true of your business.

Google itself now offers this. Its help page says you can use AI to suggest a description based on information from your profile and other sources such as your website, that the feature is available only in select regions and languages, and that you should review the result for accuracy.

The free Google Business Profile writer on this site drafts a description from your business name and primary category, and it deliberately invents nothing: no prices, awards, history or services it can't know. The consequence is that the draft is accurate but general. Treat it as a starting structure and add the specifics only you know — your neighborhood, your specialty, your real years in business — before you publish.

Google states the limit as 750 characters. The simplest way to stay inside it is to count every character, including spaces and punctuation, in a word processor or in the generator's counter, which shows how close you are to 750. Staying a little under is safer than landing exactly on the limit, and short descriptions that say something specific usually beat long ones that repeat themselves.

A description mostly affects what customers do once they see your profile, so measure actions rather than ranking: profile views, calls, direction requests and website clicks on the Performance page of your profile. Record those numbers before you edit, change the description in a batch of its own rather than together with photos and categories, and compare after 90 days.

Our guide to measuring local SEO results walks through the baseline step by step, including a worked return-on-investment example. If calls rise while views stay flat, the description may be doing its job; if neither moves, your problem is probably elsewhere — reviews, photos or categories.

The common ones are easy to avoid once you know them. Pasting an advertisement with a discount breaks Google's guidance about promotions and prices. Putting a web address or code in the text breaks the URL and HTML rule. Listing keywords reads as spam to customers and, as far as we can find, earns nothing. Copying a competitor's description describes the wrong business and may promise things you don't offer. And leaving details out of date — a service you stopped offering, a year you can no longer back up — erodes the trust the description exists to build.