Are Google Posts Worth the Effort for a Trade Business?

Somewhere in the country there is an electrician writing his forty-third weekly Google Post. Nobody has ever read one. He has been told that if he stops, his profile goes quiet and his rankings slide.

That advice is a fossil. It describes something Google genuinely did until January 2021 and has not done since.

This article goes through what Google's live documentation actually says, the one published ranking test anyone has run, and the only decent dataset on whether posts get clicked. Some of it is more useful than you would expect. None of it supports the weekly treadmill.

The short version

• Posts are archived after six months, not seven days. Google's own help page says so.
• Google's page on improving your local ranking does not mention posts at all.
• The only published test found no ranking effect. The 2026 expert survey files posts under "little impact".
• Posts get clicked between 0.2% and 0.6% of the time, depending on type. Offers do best by a distance.
• Posting weekly to hold rankings has no documented basis anywhere.

What is a Google Post, and who actually sees it?

A Google Post is a short update you publish onto your own Business Profile. It shows to people who have already found you and clicked through. It does not appear in the map pack, and it does not appear in search results. That single fact decides most of what follows.

Google's help page on creating and managing posts is specific about placement. On a phone, posts sit in the "Updates" or "Overview" tabs of your profile on Search and Maps. On a computer, they sit in the "From the owner" section.

So the audience is people already looking at you. Someone comparing three roofers, not someone deciding whether to consider you at all.

The three types

Google offers Updates, Offers and Events. Updates take a description, photo or video, and a button. Offers require a title and dates, and automatically get a "View offer" button, plus optional coupon codes and terms. Events need a title and start and end dates, defaulting to 24 hours if you leave the times off.

Posts can also be scheduled ahead and set to repeat weekly or monthly. That is a scheduling option in the interface, not Google recommending a cadence.

Do Google Posts improve your local pack ranking?

No, on all three lines of evidence available. Google's own ranking guidance does not mention posts. The only published test found no measurable movement. The best-known expert survey puts post quantity in its list of factors with little impact. Nobody credible argues the other way.

Start with Google. Its tips for improving your local ranking explain the three inputs, relevance, distance and prominence, then list what to add to your profile. Address, hours, category, attributes, photos, products, review responses.

Posts are not on that list. Not lower down, not as a minor factor. Absent.

The only published test found nothing

Joy Hawkins at Sterling Sky ran the test in Do Google Posts Impact Ranking?, published July 2021. Three listings, two service-area marketing companies and one storefront physical therapist. One post a week for nine weeks, written deliberately about the keywords being tracked. 441 keywords monitored per location across the top ten local positions.

Result: "adding Google posts to Google My Business (GMB) listings had no measurable impact on rankings in the local pack." Where rankings did move, Sterling Sky traced it to filtering and job pack changes, not posts.

Be honest about the limits. Three listings is a small sample and the test is from 2021. It is also the only one anybody has published, which tells you something in itself.

The expert survey files posts under "little impact"

Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 is the industry's long-running survey of local SEO practitioners. According to BrightLocal's summary of the local ranking factors, updated January 2026, "quantity of Google posts/updates" sits in the group of profile factors with little impact on local pack rankings.

Its neighbours in that group are geo-tagged photos, keywords stuffed into review responses, keywords in your business description, and Q&A volume. A list of things trades get sold constantly.

The top ten in that 2026 edition are primary category, proximity, keywords in the business title, a physical address in the city of search, being open at the time of search, star ratings, address visibility, additional categories, review count with text, and map pin placement. Posts appear nowhere near it.

Where did "post every seven days" come from?

From a rule Google genuinely enforced and then quietly removed. Until January 2021, every post type except Events dropped out of your profile after seven days. Post weekly or go blank was accurate advice. Google changed it, and the advice carried on without the reason.

BrightLocal reported the change on 21 January 2021, after Brodie Clark spotted posts from months earlier showing by default. In Clark's words at the time, posts "would show for 7 days previously, then 'expire'". The example doing the rounds was a Brighton burger restaurant showing a post from the previous August.

Practitioners in the same week reported still receiving "your post is about to expire" emails from Google after the behaviour had changed. That is probably how the rule outlived itself.

What Google's documentation says now

One sentence on the help page settles it: "Posts older than six months are archived unless a date range is set."

Six months. Not seven days.

The same page never mentions seven days, and gives no recommended posting frequency at all. Neither does any other Google documentation reviewed for this article. If you have been posting weekly because a tool or an agency told you Google requires it, nobody has been able to point at where Google requires it since early 2021.

Do people actually click on Google Posts?

Rarely, and it depends heavily on the type. The best available dataset put click-through rates between 0.2% and 0.6%. Offer posts topped it at 0.6%. Plain Update posts, the sort most trades write, managed 0.3%. Small numbers, but not zero, and the gap between types is large.

Sterling Sky analysed over 1,000 Google Posts across a range of small businesses and published the results in February 2023. Click-through rate was measured as clicks divided by views.

Post type	Click-through rate	Average clicks
Offer	0.6%	3.06
Update	0.3%	0.76
Event	0.2%	1.46

Read the Offer row twice. An Offer post got roughly four times the clicks of an Update post in that sample. If you are going to post at all, post something with a deal in it.

What made posts get clicked

The same 2023 analysis compared variables within the sample. Custom photos beat stock images by 5.6 times, 2.13 clicks against 0.38. Images with text on them got 2.03 clicks against 0.59 for plain images. Posts with a title got 1.90 against 0.99 without one. Titles in normal capitals beat ALL CAPS, 1.92 against 1.13.

By topic, specials and discounts led on 6.04 average clicks, ahead of calls to action on 2.71 and urgency messaging on 2.68.

Two caveats. That data is from 2023 and the sample was American. Treat the ranking of the options as sound and the decimal places as history.

Do Google Posts show up in AI Overviews?

There is no published evidence either way, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. No Google documentation reviewed for this article states that posts feed AI Overviews or AI Mode. No test from Sterling Sky, Whitespark or BrightLocal addresses it. That is an open question, not a reason to post.

Be wary of the argument doing the rounds that posts help because AI systems read "fresh signals". It is untested. If it turns out to be true, it will be true because someone measured it, not because it sounds plausible.

What will get your post rejected?

Putting your phone number in it, mostly. Google's content policy for photos, videos and posts states plainly: "we do not allow your post content to include a phone number." Use the Call now button instead. Sterling Sky's rejection guidance from October 2022 adds street addresses in post text to the same list.

For a tradesperson this is the single most common own goal. Your instinct is to end every message with your mobile number. In a Google Post it gets the post binned.

Sterling Sky also documented a list of words that trip Google's automatic filters, published back in October 2018. Two on it are ordinary trade vocabulary: "tool" and "stripping". Worth knowing if a post disappears for no obvious reason, though that list is old and may well have changed.

So are Google Posts worth it for a trade business?

For most trades, they are a low priority done occasionally, not a weekly ritual. They will not move you up the map pack. They reach only people already on your profile. But an Offer post costs ten minutes and is the one thing on your profile you fully control, which is worth something when a customer is comparing three of you.

Here is the honest ordering. Reviews, categories and being reachable when the phone rings sit far above posting. BrightLocal's July 2026 survey of 1,227 consumers researching local businesses found the top things people check are proximity at 44%, star rating at 38%, review count at 37% and complete information at 34%. Posts do not feature.

Clear pricing and offers came in at 29%, and unclear pricing was a deal-breaker for 32%. That is a US sample, so read it as direction rather than gospel. It does square neatly with Offer posts outperforming everything else.

If you have a quiet January, a boiler service promotion, or a genuine reason to say something, post it. If you are posting because a calendar reminder says Tuesday, stop.

Frequently asked questions

Will my rankings drop if I stop posting?

No evidence says they will. Sterling Sky's 2021 test found no ranking movement from nine weeks of weekly posting, and Whitespark's 2026 expert survey lists post quantity among factors with little impact. Google's own ranking guidance does not mention posts.

How long do Google Posts stay visible?

Google's help page states posts older than six months are archived unless a date range is set. The old seven-day expiry ended in January 2021.

Which post type should I use?

Offers, if you have one worth making. They achieved the highest click-through rate at 0.6% in Sterling Sky's 2023 analysis of over 1,000 posts, against 0.3% for standard Updates.

Can I recycle the same post across months?

Google allows scheduled and recurring posts in the interface. Whether repetition helps is untested, so treat any confident claim about it with suspicion.

What to do this week

1. Cancel the weekly posting reminder. Nothing in Google's documentation or in any published test justifies it.
2. Check your last posts for a phone number. Google's content policy bans them outright, and it is the most common reason a trade's post vanishes.
3. Write one Offer post, not an update. A seasonal service, a quiet-month rate, something real with dates on it.
4. Use your own photo, taken on a job. Custom images got 5.6 times the clicks of stock in the 2023 data.
5. Give it a title in normal capitals, and put readable text on the image.
6. Spend the time you just freed up on reviews. Review count with text sits in the 2026 top ten ranking factors. Posts do not.

At Business Opt we would rather a client sent three review requests this week than wrote three posts, because one of those is measurable and the other is a habit inherited from a rule Google deleted five years ago.

Post when you have something to say. That is the whole policy.