Google Posts: are they still worth anything?
No serious study measures the effect of posts on ranking, and Google's documentation does not mention them. On clicks and contact, the story is different.
Business Profile posts — Google Posts — have no ranking effect demonstrated by any serious study, and Google's documentation does not list them among the things that build prominence. What they do occupy is space on a profile that is already being shown, which can influence clicks and contact. In short: a poor position lever, a conversion lever worth testing on your own profile.
Ranking effect: why no study measures it seriously
Posts are the subject where the gap between what is asserted and what is measured is widest. You will regularly read that posting weekly "improves local SEO". None of the available ranking factor studies produces a correlation for this field.
There is a technical reason. Published correlations cover characteristics observable at scale: review count, photo count, category count, completeness. Posting cadence is hard to record at scale and, more importantly, varies over time, which makes it poorly comparable between profiles.
There is a deeper reason too: posts expire. Data that disappears after a few days lends itself badly to measuring association with a position observed at a point in time.
What is measured is the practice
According to Visionary Marketing's 2026 statistics, the average profile publishes 1.7 posts per 30 days, with a median of 0. In other words: more than half of all profiles publish nothing at all, and the average is carried by an active minority. That is a practice benchmark, not a ranking factor.
What Google actually documents about prominence
The Business Profile help documentation describes three factors — relevance, distance, prominence — and states what feeds the third: how many websites link to the business, articles, directories, and how many reviews it has.
Posts are not among them. That is not proof they have no effect — absence from a help page demonstrates nothing — but it is the only stocktake available, and it does not support the claims made elsewhere.
The reasonable position is therefore: do not post for ranking. If posting has value, it is somewhere else.
Effect on click-through and calls
This is where the subject gets interesting again. A post occupies visible space on a profile that is already being displayed: an image, a short text, an action button. It does not bring more people to the profile — it works on the people already there.
Three uses stand clearly apart, because they carry information the rest of the profile cannot.
Avantages
- Perishable information: special hours, closures, building works, a new service
- A dated offer, with a booking or ordering button
- An answer to a recurring objection: lead times, coverage area, payment methods
- An event: open day, trade show, seasonal promotion
Inconvénients
- Reposting your logo or a photo already in the gallery
- Copying a social media post with no bearing on local search
- Posting "to post", to keep a weekly cadence
- Stacking keywords into text nobody reads
The action button is the most frequently neglected element: it is what turns a post into a contact. A post without a button is a display; with a button, it is an entry point.
Post types and lifespan
The available formats change as the interface evolves, but the logic is stable: news posts with a short lifespan; offers, with a start and end date; events, tied to a date.
The practical consequence is that a post is not durable content. It does not get indexed as a page, it does not accumulate, it builds nothing over time. What does build — the services list, the photos, the questions and answers — lives elsewhere on the profile, and is the subject of the optimisation guide.
A realistic cadence for a small business and for a network
Since the ranking effect is not established, cadence is not set by some supposed freshness requirement, but by how many things you genuinely have to say.
| Situation | Sustainable cadence | What you publish |
|---|---|---|
| Small business, stable trade | 1 to 2 a month | Special hours, a new service, an answer to a common objection |
| Seasonal retailer | Weekly in season, nothing out of season | Dated offers, events |
| Multi-location network | A national base plus a local variant | A shared campaign, localised with local information |
| No real news | Publish nothing | The time goes into photos and reviews |
The last row is the one nobody dares write, and it is the most common. The average profile posts 1.7 times a month and one profile in two posts nothing: not posting does not put you behind the market.
Measuring the effect on your own profile
No study will answer for you, but you can measure on your own profile. The protocol has five steps and takes eight to sixteen weeks.
Before / after protocol
- Record 4 to 8 weeks of baseline with nothing changed: top 3 share of voice, median position, calls, direction requests, website clicks.
- Date the start of the posting campaign precisely, and change nothing else on the profile for the whole test.
- Post at a constant cadence for 4 to 8 weeks, in a single format — mixing them makes the result uninterpretable.
- Record the same metrics over the same duration, with the same measurement setup and the same locations.
- Write down the confounding factors before concluding: a competitor arriving or leaving, your trade's seasonality, any algorithm update over the period.
The last step is not optional
A before/after test on a single profile, with no control group, cannot isolate a cause. It can tell you whether the effort is worth it for you — which is the only question that concerns you. The metrics to record and how to calculate them are set out in the local SEO KPIs.
The answer, in one sentence
Post when you have something dated and useful to say, with an action button, and measure contact rather than position. The rest of the time, that weekly quarter of an hour produces more on photos, the services list, and replying to reviews.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help — Improve your local ranking on Google: the three factors and what feeds prominence. Posts are not among them.
- Visionary Marketing, 2026 — Local SEO Statistics 2026: posting cadence across the profile population (average 1.7 per 30 days, median 0).