A Year-End Google Business Profile Checkup: Holiday Hours, Photos and Tracking

A Year-End Google Business Profile Checkup: Holiday Hours, Photos and Tracking

Read time: 5 minutes. In short: Between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, customers check your Google Business Profile before they call, drive over or book. Set special hours for each holiday, refresh your photos and details, look for duplicate listings, and prepare for the AI Ask feature that replaced Q&A. Most of this takes under an hour.

The holidays change how people find local businesses. Hours shift, schedules fill up, and customers want to know before they leave the house whether you're open.

Most of them will check your Google Business Profile first. If it's wrong, the cost is a customer standing at a locked door, or calling the competitor whose profile was right.

Here's the seven-step checkup we run before the end of the year.

1. Set Special Hours for Every Holiday

Google lets you set special hours for specific dates without changing your regular schedule. For 2026, the dates to cover are:

• Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26 (and the day after, if your hours change)

• Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, December 24 and 25

• New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, December 31 and January 1

A few details from Google's guidelines that trip people up:

• Confirm holidays even when you're open normal hours. Google suggests it, because it tells customers your hours on that date are accurate.

• Special hours only show if your profile is set to "Open with main hours." If your regular hours aren't set, your special hours won't appear.

• Special hours cover up to six days in a row. For a longer closure, Google points you to marking the business temporarily closed instead.

• No single set can run past 24 hours. For events that run overnight, split the time across two dates.

To set them, open your profile, select Edit profile, go to Hours, and choose Edit next to Special hours.

2. Confirm the Basics

While you're in the profile, check the details customers act on:

• Business name, which should match your real-world name on signage and your website, with no keywords or city names added

• Regular hours, in case anything changed during the year

• Phone number, and whether someone answers it during holiday hours

• Website and booking links, including whether they still go to the right pages

• Business categories and description, so they match what you offer today

3. Refresh Your Photos

Photos are often the first impression a customer gets. Replace anything outdated: an old storefront, former staff, retired products or a renovated space that no longer looks the same.

Add a few current photos of your team, your work or your location. If you decorate or run seasonal services, a holiday photo shows the profile is actively managed.

Google accepts JPG or PNG photos between 10 KB and 5 MB and recommends 720 by 720 pixels. More important than size: in focus, well lit and true to what customers will see.

4. Post Your Holiday Plans

A short post on your profile can carry what hours alone can't: holiday specials, booking cutoffs, gift cards, or when you'll be back from a closure.

Keep it simple. One post that answers "what's different this month?" is better than several that repeat your hours.

5. Prepare for Ask, the Feature That Replaced Q&A

If you used to answer customer questions in your profile's Q&A section, that section is going away. Google confirmed in December 2025 that it was retiring Q&A on Maps in favor of an AI-powered Ask feature built on Gemini.

Instead of reading old answers, customers ask a question and get an AI-generated response. That response is drawn from information Google has about your business, including your profile details, reviews and photos.

What that means for your checkup:

• Complete every field you can. Services, attributes, description and hours all feed the answers.

• Answer common questions on your website. An FAQ page gives Google clear, accurate information to work from.

• Ask it yourself. Search for your business in the Google Maps app, and if the Ask option appears, try the questions customers ask you most. Fix whatever it gets wrong at the source.

6. Check Ownership, Access and Duplicate Listings

Start with who controls the profile. Confirm the business itself holds the primary owner account, and remove former employees and old agency accounts that no longer need access. It's much easier to sort out before people leave for the holidays.

Search for your business name, phone number and address on Google Maps. Look for a second listing you didn't create.

This isn't hypothetical. When we checked MOJO's own presence this month, we found an unclaimed second listing for our business at a slightly different street number, with the same phone number.

Google's policy is that multiple profiles for the same business aren't allowed. Duplicates split your reviews, calls and direction requests, and a duplicate can even outrank your real profile.

Google offers two main fixes:

• If both profiles are in your account, you can remove the duplicate. Removing a profile deletes its reviews, photos and posts, so be sure you're removing the right one.

• If the duplicate isn't yours, report it on Google Maps and suggest a merge. When Google merges two profiles, their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost.

7. Make Sure Your Profile Traffic Is Being Counted

The holidays are a good time to measure how much business your profile sends. That only works if your website and booking links are tagged.

We covered this in detail earlier this week: Why Your Google Business Profile Traffic Is Hiding in GA4 (and How UTM Tags Fix It). The short version: add UTM tags to your profile links so GA4 can separate profile visits and leads from the rest of your search traffic.

Before the busy season starts, write down a baseline: views, calls, direction requests and website clicks from your profile's Performance report, plus leads from your tagged links in GA4. It won't prove what caused a change, but it makes January's comparison meaningful.

Your Year-End Checklist

Step

Where

When

Set special hours for each holiday

Edit profile, Hours, Special hours

Before Thanksgiving

Confirm name, hours, phone, links and categories

Edit profile

This week

Replace outdated photos, add current ones

Edit profile, Photos

This week

Post holiday plans or specials

Add update

Mid-November

Fill in services, attributes and description

Edit profile

This week

Review owners and managers; remove old access

Profile settings, People and access

This week

Search Maps for duplicate listings

Google Maps

This week

Tag website and booking links

Edit profile

This week

Record a baseline from Performance and GA4

Performance report, GA4

Before Thanksgiving

Start the New Year With an Accurate Profile

A Google Business Profile isn't something you set up once. Hours change, features come and go, and duplicates appear without warning. A short checkup before the holidays keeps customers from finding out the hard way.

Google Business Profiles are a core part of MOJO's digital marketing work. If you'd like a second set of eyes on yours, request a quote.

For more on where local search is headed, read Local SEO in the Age of AI Search: Does "Near Me" Still Matter?

Sources and Further Reading

• Google Business Profile Help: How to set special hours

• Google Business Profile Help: Edit your opening hours

• Google Business Profile Help: Resolve duplicate profiles and ownership issues

• Google Business Profile Help: Fix duplicate profiles on Google Maps

• PPC Land: Google replaces Q&A with an AI-powered Ask button

• Whitespark: With Google Q&A gone, you need a Maps Ask a Question strategy

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