You just spent money on a new website. Clean design, fast load time, the works.

A new customer calls a week later. You ask how they found you.

"I searched you on Google and just called from there."

They never opened the website. Never scrolled past the homepage you paid to redesign. For a lot of local businesses, that's not the exception — it's closer to the norm.

Your website is something you own and fully control. It can tell a longer story, show a full portfolio, handle bookings, host a blog — whatever depth your business needs.

Your Google Business Profile is different. It's not your property; it's Google's, and it shows up directly inside Search and Maps results — often before your website ever gets a chance. For a lot of local searches, especially the fast, "I need this now" kind (a plumber, a place to eat tonight, a shop that's open), the profile is where the actual decision gets made. Hours, photos, star rating, a couple of recent reviews, a call button, a directions button — that's frequently enough information for someone to decide, without a website click involved at all.

That doesn't make your website irrelevant. It means the two aren't competing for the same job. The profile handles the fast, local, "should I bother" decision. The website handles the deeper "tell me more" one — a bigger purchase, a service that needs explaining, a brand someone wants to research before committing.

The mistake is treating them as equally urgent when a customer's actual behavior often isn't.

I looked for a clean, verifiable statistic on exactly what percentage of Google Business Profile interactions skip the website entirely. I couldn't find one worth citing — the numbers floating around online for that specific claim range from roughly 4% to over 60% depending on which marketing blog you read, and none of them link back to a disclosed methodology or an original study. That's not a number I'm going to hand you dressed up as fact.

What I found instead, and trust more, is BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 — a named research firm surveying a representative panel of 1,002 US adults in February 2026, with its full methodology published. It found that 41% of consumers now say they "always" read reviews when browsing for a business, up from 29% the year before, and 31% will only consider businesses rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17%.

The same survey adds real precision to the website question: 54% of consumers visit a business's website after reading positive reviews — up from 32% when BrightLocal last asked in 2019 — but that's a second step, taken once the reviews have already done the work of getting someone interested. And BrightLocal's separate research on small-business marketing found only about 40% of local businesses have a dedicated website at all, meaning for a meaningful share of local searches, there's no website to visit even if a customer wanted to.

Put together: the profile is increasingly where the initial filtering happens — rating, review volume, recency. The website, when it exists and gets visited, is usually the follow-up step for people who are already leaning toward yes.

I wouldn't tell any business to neglect its website. I would tell most local, quick-decision businesses to stop assuming the website is the priority by default.

Think back on your last 10 new customers. How many of them actually visited your website, versus calling or getting directions straight from Google? Most owners have never asked this question about their own business. The honest answer — even without a big data study behind it — usually tells you more than any generic benchmark would.

If time or budget is genuinely limited, and your business depends on fast local decisions (most home services, restaurants, retail, and appointment-based businesses do), I'd put the free work first: a complete, accurate, actively managed Google Business Profile. It's the thing more likely to be open on a customer's phone in the moment they're deciding. (We covered exactly what "complete" means in Issue #1.)

Some businesses are the exception. Higher-consideration purchases, multi-step services, anything where a customer genuinely wants to research before committing — that's where a strong website earns its keep, because the decision isn't happening in the 15 seconds someone spends looking at a map pin.

Whichever one you prioritize, don't let them contradict each other. Mismatched hours, addresses, or phone numbers between your website and your profile don't just confuse customers — they undercut the trust signals Google uses to decide how prominently to show you at all.

Your website is where interested customers go to confirm the decision. Your Business Profile is where most of them decide whether they're interested at all. If you can only fix one this month, fix the one doing the initial filtering.

If this was useful, forward it to a business owner who just redesigned their website and hasn't looked at their Google Business Profile in months. Want a free, honest look at your own profile? Free Business Visibility Audit →