Google Business Profile Post View Counts Are Back After Three And A Half Years

Google Business Profile posts have view counts again, three and a half years after the metric was removed. You can now see how many times each individual post was viewed across Search and Maps, going back 18 months. If you have been posting on faith since early 2023, you are about to find out whether any of it was working.

What Came Back

Google announced on September 10, 2026 that per-post view metrics are returning to Business Profiles. Google called it "one of our most requested features yet," which tracks with how loudly local marketers complained when it disappeared.

The metric was discontinued on February 20, 2023, alongside post click counts. That left a long stretch where you could publish posts and have no idea whether anyone saw them.

Here is what the restored metric covers.

• Where it shows up. On individual post cards inside the Posts section of your Business Profile dashboard.
• How far back it goes. Posts published within the past 18 months, on a rolling basis.
• Which posts count. All post types, including updates, offers, and events.
• Where the views come from. Combined views from both Google Search and Google Maps.
• Who can see it. Business Profile owners and managers, viewing their own dashboard.

The Limitations

It is not in the API yet. Google's bulletin says the feature is currently rolling out globally and is not yet available through the API, and it did not say whether it eventually will be. If you report on local performance through a tool that pulls the API, you are still waiting.

Google also has not clarified whether a view means a unique user or a total impression. That is a meaningful gap. A post with 400 views could be 400 people or 40 people who saw it ten times, and those two things lead to very different decisions.

The help documentation had not been updated as of the announcement date either, so the definitions may get clearer over the next few weeks.

What To Do With The Data

The 18 month lookback is the part I would use first. You are not starting from zero. You have well over a year of posts sitting there with numbers attached, which means you can run a real review this week instead of waiting for data to accumulate.

Here is the process. Open your Posts section and sort through the last 18 months. Look at which post types pulled the most views, whether offers beat updates, and whether posts with images outperformed plain text ones for your business.

From there, look at timing. If your event posts consistently outperform everything else, that tells you what your local audience actually wants from the profile.

Keep in mind, views are not customers. A post can rack up views and drive nothing. Use the view count to decide what to publish more of, then judge the business result separately.

My Take

I have always thought Google Business Profile posts were underrated for local businesses, and the missing metric is a big reason people gave up on them. It is hard to stay consistent with something you cannot measure.

Now you can measure it, so my recommendation is simple. Go back through 18 months of posts, find the three that did best, and figure out what they had in common. Then post more of that.

One of the biggest mistakes I see with Business Profile posts is treating them as an announcement channel for things nobody asked about. Hours changed. New logo. Office closed Monday. Those get published and forgotten. The posts that work are the ones tied to something a customer actually wants, which usually means an offer, an event, or a specific service.

If you are rebuilding your approach here, start with the fundamentals in this Google Business Profile best practices guide before you worry about post frequency.

And remember that posts are one piece of a much larger picture. Your profile competes on a lot of signals at once, which is why it is worth understanding the full set of local SEO ranking factors rather than optimizing one feature in isolation.

Question to Answer:

Looking at your last 18 months of Business Profile posts, which three got the most views, and what did they have in common?

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