Should a marketing agency have a Google Business Profile?
Short answer
Only if it has a physical location customers can visit, or it travels to customers where they are. Google's eligibility rule is that short. A fully remote agency that works over video calls does neither, so it is not eligible, and a listing created anyway is a policy breach that can be suspended. We are in that position ourselves. We do not have a Google Business Profile, because we are not eligible for one, and we are not going to create a listing that breaks the rules we are paid to know.
Key points
Google's rule: a business qualifies if it has a physical location customers can visit, or it travels to customers where they are.
A service-area business cannot list a virtual office unless that office is staffed during business hours.
A fully remote agency working over video meets neither condition and is not eligible.
An ineligible listing is a policy breach, and suspension removes the profile rather than warning you first.
Asking an agency about its own profile is a fast and revealing question, whichever way they answer.
What does Google actually require?
The rule is one sentence. Google states that 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.
Both halves matter. A location customers visit is the ordinary case: a clinic, a workshop, a shop. Travelling to customers is the service-area case: a plumber, a mobile vet, an HVAC contractor. Either one qualifies you.
Neither describes an agency that meets its clients over video. There is no premises for a client to visit, and nobody is travelling anywhere.
Does a home office or a coworking desk count?
Not on its own. Google's guidance on service-area businesses states that they cannot list a virtual office unless that office is staffed during business hours.
A coworking membership, a registered office address supplied by an accountant, or a mailbox are all the kind of arrangement that rule is written to exclude. The test is whether there is a real, staffed place tied to the business, not whether an address exists on paper.
A home office where you genuinely meet clients is a different case, and service-area businesses are expected to hide the address publicly anyway. But if no client has ever been there, the honest answer is that the qualifying activity is not happening.
What happens if an ineligible business creates one anyway?
It usually works for a while, which is why so many do it. Verification is not the same as eligibility, and a postcard arriving at an address does not establish that customers visit it.
The risk is that suspension is not a warning system. A profile that is suspended disappears from the map, and the recovery process asks you to demonstrate the eligibility you did not have. Our guide on what to do when a profile is suspended covers the process, and the hardest cases are the ones where the underlying listing should not have existed.
There is a second cost that applies specifically to agencies. If your listing is ineligible and a prospect notices, the problem is not the listing. It is that you sell compliance work and did not apply it to yourself.
So how does a remote agency get found locally?
It mostly does not, and it should stop trying. Local search is built around proximity between a searcher and a place. An agency with no place is not competing in that system, and pretending otherwise wastes budget on a channel structurally closed to it.
What works instead is ordinary organic search, where the query is the service rather than the location, and increasingly the AI answer surfaces, where the signals are entity clarity and third-party corroboration rather than distance.
That is a less comfortable route because it cannot be bought quickly. It is also the honest one.
Is this a useful question to ask an agency?
Yes, and it is one of the fastest tests available to you.
If they have a profile and a real office you can visit, fine. If they have a profile and no premises, ask how they qualify. If they have no profile and can explain the eligibility rule without looking it up, that tells you they have read the guidelines rather than skimmed a blog post about them.
The wrong answer is not having no profile. The wrong answer is having one they cannot justify.
What we do, and why
We do not have a Google Business Profile. We work remotely across New Zealand, Australia, the UAE, the UK and the United States, we do not have premises clients visit, and we do not travel to clients. We are not eligible, so we have not created one.
We are aware that this is an unusual thing for a business that optimises Google Business Profiles to say, and we think it is the only defensible position. We ask clients to remove claims they cannot support. The same standard has to apply to us.
Related questions
Can an online-only business have a Google Business Profile?
No. Google's eligibility rule requires either a physical location customers can visit or travel to customers where they are. A business that operates entirely online meets neither.
What about a virtual office address?
Google's guidance states that a service-area business cannot list a virtual office unless that office is staffed during business hours. A mailbox or a registered office address does not qualify.
Lots of agencies have profiles. Are they all breaking the rules?
Not all. Some have genuine premises, and some do meet clients in person. But an agency with no office and a live listing is worth asking about, and the answer tells you something either way.
Does not having one hurt an agency's credibility?
It should not, if they can explain why. The eligibility rule is public and one sentence long. An agency that knows it is demonstrating the thing you are hiring them for.