What Happened to Business.site? An Obituary for Google's Free Websites

If you are searching for what happened to business.site, here is the short version: Google shut it down. Websites made with Google Business Profile were turned off in March 2024, the temporary redirects stopped working on June 10, 2024, and every business.site URL now returns a page-not-found error. This post is the long version — an incident report for a product that served millions of very small businesses and no longer exists.

We keep this document current because business.site is the single most instructive event in the category this site covers: website builders that exist as side products of very large companies. It is what the risk section of every review here is quietly about.

What business.site was

Google Business Profile websites were free single-page sites generated automatically from a business's profile data — hours, photos, phone number, a map — and hosted on the business.site domain, with negocio.site serving Spanish-language sites. Setup took minutes because there was nothing to set up: Google assembled the page from information the business had already handed over.

For a very large number of very small businesses — the count was widely reported as "millions," though Google never published an official figure — this was the entire web presence. The URL went on business cards, takeout menus, vehicle wraps and printed QR codes. It was free, it came from Google, and it required no maintenance. Those three properties made it feel permanent. Two of them said nothing about permanence, and the third was the problem.

The shutdown timeline

The sequence, as documented at the time by Search Engine Land, ran as follows — and it ran quickly.

Websites made with Google Business Profile were turned off in March 2024. Until June 10, 2024, visitors to business.site addresses were redirected to the business's Google Business Profile. After June 10, 2024, the URLs return "page not found." — the shutdown record, per Google's notices

There were adjacent deadlines. Advertisers pointing Google Ads campaigns at business.site URLs were told to change the destination before March 1, 2024, or the campaigns would be paused — Google's advertising arm declining to sell traffic to pages Google's small-business arm was about to delete. The switch-off itself was observed complete by March 5, 2024, though the exact day it began was reported variously as March 1 and "by March 5."

Note the proportions: roughly fourteen months from announcement to shutdown, then a three-month redirect window, then nothing. Every backlink, directory citation and printed QR code pointing at a business.site address has resolved to an error page since June 10, 2024. The QR codes are still out there, laminated to shop counters, working exactly as printed.

What Google told users to do

Google's official migration advice was to build a new site with a third-party builder and update the website field on the Business Profile to point at it. The notice named names: Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Google Sites, Shopify and WordPress. Five of the six recommendations were competitors; the sixth was another Google side product.

That list rewards a moment of staring. The company that had been hosting your website recommended, in writing, that you take the relationship elsewhere. The one piece of continuity: a Business Profile can still link out to any URL you like. The website field survived the website product.

The platform-risk lesson

business.site is the control experiment for every product in our register of big-tech website builders: a free tool from one of the largest companies on earth, used by millions, deleted on about fourteen months' notice with a three-month redirect window. Nothing about scale, brand or a $0 price tag protected it. It was a side product, and side products are features. Features get deprecated.

The lesson generalizes uncomfortably well. Google Sites — the in-house replacement Google itself suggested — has no export function and no migration path; if it ever follows business.site, rebuilding from scratch is the documented exit. Adobe Express publishes pages that live only on Adobe's own domain. Building on a side product means assuming the business.site scenario is possible and pricing it in, which mostly means: own your domain, keep copies of your content somewhere you control, and inspect the exits before you enter the building.

What to use now

If your business.site page is long gone and you are choosing a replacement in 2026, the options sort neatly by budget and ambition.

Free, from Google: Google Sites is the closest in-house equivalent Google still offers, and today a Business Profile simply links out to whatever site you name. It costs nothing with any Google account, connecting a custom domain is free, and it is genuinely limited — no commerce, rigid section-based design, and the same no-export lock-in noted above. The trade-offs are catalogued in our full Google Sites dossier.

Paid, and structurally safer: Google's own migration list led with Wix and Squarespace, and for a small business that wants forms, selling and an owned domain under one bill, either is the boring, correct choice. We note the irony that permanence felt implied last time too — the structural difference is that a paid platform's incentive is to keep you subscribed, not to trim a cost center.

Whatever you pick, register a domain you own and print that on things instead. A domain in your name survives any vendor's strategy meeting; a vendor subdomain does not, and June 10, 2024 is the citation. When a free tier starts to pinch, the graduation paths are mapped in our guide for when you've outgrown them.

business.site, 2017–2024. It required nothing of its users, and in the end it left them nothing either. File closed; lesson open.