The owner's guide to your Google profile.

You get one primary category and up to nine secondary ones, chosen from Google's list of roughly four thousand. The primary carries the most weight, so it should match the search you most need to win, not the broadest description of what you are.

This is the multi-service dilemma from our analysis pieces, solved: a facility that does cages, lessons, and camps can't be primary in all three. Make the primary the service with the most demand you can actually serve (type keywords into the category picker and choose the most specific match that exists), then add the rest as secondary categories. Nothing gets dropped. It gets ordered.

Name, address, phone, hours, website. Machines treat these as trust signals, and inconsistency is how you lose that trust. Use your real business name (stuffing keywords into the name field violates Google's policy and can get the profile suspended), keep the phone identical to the one on your site, and maintain hours honestly, including holidays and season changes.

If lessons happen at fields you don't own, use the service-area settings rather than pretending an address. Honest beats clever here, every time.

The services section is where multi-service facilities win back what the single primary category can't say: cage rentals, private hitting lessons, pitching lessons, arm care, camps, team training, each as its own entry with a plain-language description and, where you're willing, a price.

Remember what we watched ChatGPT do: it recommended a lessons business because “they specifically mention arm care routines.” The words you put in these fields are the words the machines quote back to parents.

Real photos of your actual facility, cages, mounds, and coaches at work beat any stock image. Parents are checking whether this looks like a place for their kid; machines are checking whether this looks like a real operating business. Add new ones regularly, especially around camp season, so the profile never looks abandoned.

In every AI capture we ran, review count and rating were the stated reason a business got recommended: “5.0 stars with 58 reviews” printed right next to the name. Reviews are not a vanity metric. They are the ranking factor, said out loud.

So stop leaving them to chance. Ask at the right moment (right after a visible win: a kid's first over-the-fence hit, a great first lesson), make it effortless (the direct review link, texted), and reply to every single one, good or bad, like a human. Never buy reviews or trade discounts for them; that violates Google's policy and reads as fake to everyone.

In November 2025, Google discontinued the Q&A feature on Business Profiles. In its place, AI-generated answers respond to customer questions using your profile data, your reviews, and your website.

Read that again, because it's the whole game in one product change: you no longer answer questions directly. Your published data answers for you. Every field in this guide, plus the service pages and FAQs on your own site, is now the raw material for how Google's AI describes you to a parent. Thin data means the machine guesses. Rich data means the machine quotes you.

Profile posts won't move your ranking on their own, but they keep the profile visibly alive and give the machines fresh, dated statements about what's happening: summer camp registration open, new pitching machine, holiday hours. If you take bookings online, connect the booking link so a ready-to-buy parent never has to hunt.

Once a month: search your business name and your main service plus your city, in a private browser window. Check that your pin, hours, and photos look right. Then ask an AI assistant what a parent would ask (“best batting cages near [your city]”) and see whether you're named and what it says about you. That last check is the one almost nobody does, and it's where the next five years of customers are coming from.