Ottawa & the National Capital Region
Google Business Profile setup and management, listing and citation cleanup, review handling and monthly reporting for businesses across Ottawa and the NCR. Plus the photography and the 360-degree tour that go on the profile once it is right. Bilingual English and French. Indicative plans run $275 to $425 a month, quoted in writing before anything is touched.
The audit costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You keep the findings whether you hire us or not.
About the practice
Ottawa Business Profiles works with independent operators, professional practices, trades, clinics and multi-site businesses across the National Capital Region. The scope is deliberately tight: the profiles your business already owns on Google, Apple, Bing and the Canadian directory set, the accuracy of the information on them, the reviews attached to them, and the monthly report that tells you what any of it did.
Google documents three things behind a local result: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is the searcher's location, not yours, and no supplier can move it. That leaves relevance, which is decided by how completely and precisely your profile describes what you actually do, and prominence, which is built out of reviews, links and mentions across the web. Both are work, both are ordinary, and both are almost always half-finished on a profile that was set up once and left.
Our crew has spent years inside Ontario local search across trades, clinics, professional services and retail, on both sides of the Ottawa River. We work inside your own Google account rather than a dashboard you cannot export from, and every engagement is scoped in writing before access is requested.
We are a marketing practice. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Google, Apple, Microsoft or any listing platform, and we do not promise particular rankings or search positions. What we commit to is the work, on a schedule, reported.
Why owners switch
Six commitments. Every one is a process promise rather than a credential claim, which means you can test all six inside the first month.
You hold ownership. We are added as a manager and removed the day you say so, with the profile intact and every field we wrote still in place. Nobody should be able to hold your listing hostage, and a supplier who takes ownership can.
Google, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and the Canadian directory set have to agree with each other. Splitting them across suppliers is how a business ends up with three phone numbers and two addresses on the open web.
A flat monthly figure tied to a stated number of profiles and a stated scope of work. Hourly billing on maintenance work rewards the supplier for taking longer, which is the wrong incentive on a retainer.
Profile views, calls, direction requests, website clicks and rank movement, dated and compared to the month before. When a number goes the wrong way it is in the report, with what we think caused it.
No gating, no incentives, no reviews written by anyone connected to your business. Those three tactics are the ones that get profiles suspended and, in Canada, they are also the ones that attract the Competition Bureau.
Month to month with 30 days notice. On exit you get the credentials, the citation register, the review response archive and every asset we produced, in a format you can hand to someone else.
What we do
One half keeps the information on your profiles correct and current. The other half produces the imagery that sits on them. Most suppliers sell one or the other, which is why so many Ottawa listings are accurate and ugly, or handsome and wrong.
Claiming a profile is the easy half. The half that goes wrong is verification, and it now usually means a single continuous video showing your signage, your interior and a member of staff actually working. Get it wrong and the profile sits unverified and invisible while you reshoot. We prepare the shot list, sit through the attempt with you, and then build out every field on the profile rather than the four that fit on the setup screen.
Indicative range: $395 to $650 one-time for a single profile, scoped after the audit.
Most Ottawa listings are illustrated by whatever a passing customer photographed on a phone, or by a Street View frame of the building taken in a season you would rather not show. If you upload nothing, Google fills the gap for you, and it fills it with somebody else's judgement. A shoot is the cheapest correction available: a half-day covers the approach from the street, the entrance, the interior, the team and the work actually being done, which is the shot list Google itself recommends building.
Everything is delivered to Google's published photo standards rather than to a print spec, because the two are not the same job. Google asks for JPG or PNG between 10 KB and 5 MB, recommends 720 by 720 pixels with 250 by 250 as the floor, and requires the image to be in focus, well lit and free of significant alteration or heavy filtering. Its wording is that the image should represent reality, and it names excessive use of AI in the same breath. A folder of heavily retouched hero shots is the wrong deliverable and can be removed.
Indicative range: $450 to $1,200 for a session, by scope and site count.
A flat photograph answers what a place looks like. A 360-degree tour answers a different question, which is what the place is like to be inside: how the entrance relates to the counter, whether the waiting area is cramped, where the accessible route actually goes. For a clinic, a restaurant, a studio, a showroom or a fitness space, that is the question standing between a search result and a booking, and it is the one a still image cannot reach.
Panoramas are captured in equirectangular projection at the resolution and 2:1 aspect ratio Google requires, published with the photo-sphere metadata that lets Google recognise them as spheres rather than as wide photographs, then linked into a navigable tour and pinned so the arrows lead where a visitor would actually walk. Google asks that indoor collections stay within 100 photos and allows up to four days for published tour links to process, so the go-live date is scheduled rather than promised for the same afternoon.
Stated plainly, and this is the differentiator: we are not a Google Trusted Photographer, and in 2026 nobody is. Google retired that programme on 31 December 2024 and withdrew the badge, the branding and the for-hire photographer directory with it. Any Ottawa supplier still displaying it is either working from stale marketing or counting on you not to check. Publishing to Google Maps is open to any competent operator now, so judge this work the way you would judge any other trade: on the portfolio, on references, and on whether the last tour they published still looks right.
Indicative range: $350 to $950 one-time, by panorama count.
Your name, address and phone number are sitting on dozens of sites you have never logged into, and a good number of them are wrong. Old suite numbers, a phone line you dropped, a legal name nobody searches for, duplicate entries created when a staff member set up a second listing by accident. Search engines read the disagreement as uncertainty. We audit what exists, correct what is wrong, suppress the duplicates and then build out the directories that are missing.
Indicative range: $445 to $895 one-time for a cleanup and build, then maintained inside the monthly plan.
Reviews move both rankings and decisions, which is exactly why the shortcuts are so tempting and so dangerous. Platform policy prohibits incentivised reviews, review gating, reviews from anyone connected to the business, on-premises pressure and staff quotas. In Canada the Competition Act reaches the same conduct, and the Competition Bureau has warned businesses about employee-written reviews. We run the programme the slow way, which is the only way that survives.
Indicative range: $300 to $700 a month standalone, or included in the monthly plans.
A profile that is being worked on should be measurable, and a supplier who only reports in the good months is telling you something. Profile views, calls, direction requests and website clicks are all published by the platform. Rank is measured across a grid of points in your stated service area rather than from one location, because a single-point rank check flatters everyone.
Indicative range: included in every monthly plan. Standalone reporting builds are quoted on scope.
Ottawa is the capital of an officially bilingual country and the City has run a bilingualism by-law since 2001, with those obligations written into the City of Ottawa Act in 2017. Gatineau is a fifteen-minute drive. A profile that only speaks English is answering half the market in a language it did not ask a question in. This is a genuine local advantage and most listings in the region do not use it.
Indicative range: $225 to $395 one-time as an add-on to a profile build. Ongoing bilingual work is inside the monthly plans.
Swipe for all seven services
Tick what is already true of your Google Business Profile. The score weights each item by how much it actually affects eligibility and completeness, and names the two biggest gaps. Nothing is sent anywhere until you choose to send it.
Profile health self-check
0 / 100
Unbuilt
Tick the items above that are already true and the two biggest gaps will be named here.
Profile health self-check: 0 / 100
Indicative pricing
No rate card was supplied for this build, so every figure below is a range derived from published market data rather than a quoted price. The numbers can be audited and replaced the moment a real rate card exists.
Move the two sliders and pick a language setting. The plan, the indicative range and the reason it landed there update as you go. Nothing is submitted until you choose to send it.
Indicative match
Foundation
$275 to $425
a month, indicative
Foundation plan: 1 location, 25 directories, English only
Your match
For a single-location Ottawa business competing on service terms in its catchment. Covers one primary profile across every surface, the citation set, the review programme and monthly reporting.
$650 to $1,200 a month, indicative
Your match
$275 to $425 a month, indicative
Sole operators and single-location businesses that need the profile maintained, not campaigned.
Your match
$1,400 to $2,600 a month, indicative
Competitive verticals, or businesses running several locations across the NCR.
$395 to $650 one-time
A profile that has never been claimed, or one that needs rebuilding from the ground up.
$445 to $895 one-time
A business whose details are wrong or duplicated across the open web.
$450 to $1,200 one-time
Any business whose listing is illustrated by customer phone photos, or by nothing.
$350 to $950 one-time
Premises a customer wants to see inside before booking: clinics, restaurants, studios, showrooms, gyms.
$900 to $1,900 one-time
A profile being built from nothing, where the photography should happen in the same visit.
$145 to $245 a month, indicative
Multi-site businesses adding profiles to an existing plan.
$95 to $150 an hour, indicative
Suspension appeals, migrations, one-off audits and training your own team.
Every band above was set by collecting published 2026 rates for the same work in the same market, discarding the outliers at both ends, and placing our range inside what remained. Where an Ottawa-specific rate existed it was weighted above a national one. Amounts marked USD were treated as an upper reference rather than converted, which is the conservative direction. You should be able to audit this rather than take it on trust, so the whole derivation is printed here.
| Service | Published market evidence | Our band | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed Google Business Profile, per profile | Canadian managed service published at $285 and $475 a month with no setup fee. North American guides put professional management at $125 to $475 a month per location. Software-only tools start near $30 a month. | $275 to $425 a month (Foundation) | Inside the published band, below the top of it. |
| Profile setup and optimisation, one-time | Published setup fees cluster at $300 to $500. One vertical specialist lists a $399 one-time setup. | $395 to $650 one-time | Starts at the top of the published cluster because the band includes the video verification attempt and a full photo set. |
| Local SEO, Ottawa, monthly | Ottawa guides published in 2026 give $500 to $2,000 for ongoing local SEO, $750 to $5,000+ for professional SEO, and a tiered read of $500 to $1,500 basic, $1,500 to $4,000 standard, $4,000 to $10,000+ advanced. One Ottawa agency publishes $1,064 to $4,257 CAD for local SEO. | $650 to $1,200 (Visibility) and $1,400 to $2,600 (Authority) | Visibility sits in the lower half of the entry band. Authority sits inside the standard band, below its midpoint. |
| Citation cleanup and building | Cleanup-and-build packages published from $399 for roughly 35 general and 7 industry listings. Custom builds priced near $4 per general and $5 per regional or industry citation, plus a per-location fee. Cleanup-only services published at $497. Package ceilings around $999. | $445 to $895 one-time | Between the entry package and the ceiling, sized for a Canadian directory set. |
| Review and reputation programme | Canadian providers publish $500 to $1,500 a month for monitoring and review generation, with fully managed packages from $497. A wider survey puts small-business reputation work at $500 to $2,500 with a median near $830. | $300 to $700 a month standalone | Below the published Canadian entry point, because the scope here is review handling only rather than full reputation repair. |
| 360-degree tour, one-time | An Ottawa digital marketing supplier publishes Google virtual tours from $377. A Montreal specialist publishes 360 and Matterport tours at $295 to $995 by floor area. North American 360 providers publish entry tours from $350, and tiered packages at $550 for up to 10 panoramas, $750 for 10 to 15 and $1,850 for 21 to 40. | $350 to $950 one-time | Opens at the North American entry point, below the published Ottawa figure, and closes below the Montreal ceiling. The $1,850 tier was treated as an upper reference and excluded, because it prices a 21-to-40 panorama site that this band does not claim to cover. |
| Business photography, per session | Ottawa corporate event photography published at $1,000 to $1,400 for a half day and $1,800 to $2,400 for a full day in 2026, with the same source noting Ottawa sits below Toronto and Vancouver. General commercial photography published at $200 to $300 an hour, or roughly $400 for four hours covering interior, exterior, staff and product. | $450 to $1,200 a session | Deliberately below the Ottawa event band. Event coverage is a harder brief than a listing shoot: it is unrepeatable, it runs to a fixed clock and it delivers 50 to 100 edited frames an hour. Pricing a listing shoot at event rates would not survive a prospect who checks. |
| 3D walkthrough, referred or added | Matterport tours in Ottawa published at $200 to $500 by property size, with $250 to $350 typical for 1,500 to 2,500 square feet. Ottawa media bundles combining photography, drone, 3D tour and floor plan published at $600 to $1,200. | Not sold standalone. Quoted on scope inside the bundle band. | Recorded so the bundle ceiling can be defended. The bundle tops out at $1,900 against a published Ottawa bundle ceiling of $1,200, and the gap is the 360 publication work, which those bundles do not include. |
| Hourly consulting | Ottawa SEO consulting commonly published at $75 to $150 an hour. Reputation agencies reported at roughly $107 an hour. | $95 to $150 an hour | Inside both. |
One deliberate omission. Several suppliers in this category publish a promise that results will arrive or you do not pay. No such promise appears here at any price, for the reason set out in the checklist above: it is a performance representation, and under the Competition Act a performance claim has to rest on adequate and proper testing before it is made, not after it is challenged.
A second one. Vendor statistics about what photographs do to a listing circulate widely in this category, and several of them trace back to marketing Google itself has since withdrawn. None appears on this page. A percentage uplift attributed to a service we sell is a performance representation too, and the argument here does not need one: the published photo standard, the retired badge and the Competition Act sit underneath the whole page on their own.
Indicative pricing note. Every figure on this page is an indicative range based on published market data for local search and business listing services in Ottawa and Canada. It is a general guide, not a quotation, and not an offer to contract. Your price depends on the number of profiles managed, the condition of your existing listings, the number of directories in scope, whether review handling is included, whether the work runs in one language or two, the competitiveness of your primary categories, and, for imaging work, the floor area of the premises, the number of panoramas or photographs required, the number of sites and the travel involved in reaching them. All amounts are in Canadian dollars and exclude applicable HST. A firm figure is issued in writing after an audit, and it does not change once you approve it.
The cost of a neglected profile
Nobody neglects a profile on purpose. It gets set up once, during a week when three other things were on fire, and then it quietly goes out of date while continuing to send people places.
A customer who drives to a closed business does not call to check. They go to the next result and they rarely come back. Hours and holiday hours are the single most consequential field on the profile, and they are the one most often left on last year's schedule.
Two listings for one business means reviews, photos and mentions divided between them. Search engines read the disagreement as a reason to be less confident about either record, and Google does not merge them on your behalf.
Upload nothing and the platform supplies the imagery itself, usually a Street View frame of the building or a customer's phone photo. Somebody else's judgement becomes your storefront, and you will not be asked first.
Keyword stuffing in the business name, an address that does not meet the rules, category misuse, review manipulation. Suspension removes you from the map entirely, and reinstatement runs on the platform's timeline rather than yours.
Before you appoint anyone
Educational, not comparative. The left column is the standard we hold ourselves to. The right column is what we would ask any supplier in this category, including us.
How onboarding works
No implementation fee, no lock-in, and no request for account access before you have approved a written scope.
Send the form with your business name and where you work. We check which profiles exist, whether each is verified and who controls it, how the categories are set, and what your citation set looks like. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
You receive one figure for any one-time build or cleanup work, and one for the monthly plan, with the number of profiles and the scope of work they are based on written down beside them.
You add us as a manager on your own profiles. We build out every field, correct the citation set, suppress duplicates and, where imaging is in scope, book the shoot before the first monthly cycle begins.
Posts, photo refreshes, review responses and corrections run on schedule, and a dated report arrives with what changed, what moved and what did not. Flat months are reported the same way as good ones.
Where we work
The work is remote, which means your supplier is not limited to whoever has an office near you. It also means the rank tracking has to be honest about geography, because a business in Stittsville and a business in Orleans are competing in different maps.
We also work with businesses in Almonte, Carleton Place, Kemptville, Arnprior, Embrun, Casselman, Russell, Aylmer and Chelsea. Eastern Ontario and Outaouais businesses outside the immediate region are welcome.
Ottawa has 18 Business Improvement Areas, each a defined commercial district with its own board, its own levy and its own main street. Naming them is not decoration. A BIA is the unit a main-street business actually competes inside, it is how the city organises its own economic development support, and the names are exactly the terms a prospect on Preston Street or in Westboro Village uses to describe where they trade.
The rules that shape an Ottawa listing
Every rule below is set by a platform or a statute, not by us. If your current arrangement is not putting these in front of you, that is the gap worth closing.
Google documents these three as the basis of a local result. Distance is the searcher's location and cannot be changed. Relevance comes from how complete and detailed your profile is. Prominence comes from how well known the business is, including how many sites link to it and how many reviews it carries.
You get a single primary category plus additional ones, and the primary carries the most weight in deciding which searches you are eligible for. The instruction that follows from that is counter-intuitive: choose the narrowest category that is still accurate, not the broadest one that might catch more.
New profiles in most regions are verified by a single continuous video showing signage, the interior and a live management action. It is one take, and a failed attempt means a re-record and more waiting. Preparing for it properly is most of the work.
Platform policy prohibits incentivised reviews, review gating, reviews from anyone connected to the business, on-premises pressure and staff review quotas. Enforcement starts with review removal and escalates to profile restriction or suspension.
Under the Competition Act, misleading representations include testimonials and reviews that do not reflect a real experience or that hide a material connection. The Competition Bureau has warned businesses about employee-written reviews and has taken enforcement action in this area.
The City has operated under a bilingualism by-law since 2001, made under Ontario's French Language Services Act, and those obligations were written into the City of Ottawa Act in 2017. That is the municipality, not private business. But it describes the market you are advertising into.
Google asks for JPG or PNG between 10 KB and 5 MB, recommends 720 by 720 pixels and sets 250 by 250 as the minimum. It also asks that the image be in focus, well lit and free of significant alteration, excessive filtering or heavy AI work, because the image is meant to represent reality. Photographs that fail the content rules can be removed, and a removed photo is worse than a plain one.
Google retired the Street View Trusted programme on 31 December 2024, withdrawing the badge, the Google-issued marketing materials, the dedicated support channel and the for-hire photographer directory. Providers were told to remove the badge and branding by that date. Existing tours were unaffected and still function. If an Ottawa supplier is still selling on that credential in 2026, the credential is not the thing they are selling you.
Swipe for all eight rules
| Rule or obligation | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Google local ranking basis | Relevance, distance and prominence. Two of the three are workable; distance is not. |
| Business name field | The real-world name only. Adding service or location keywords to it is a policy breach and a common cause of suspension. |
| Categories | One primary plus additional categories. Primary carries the most weight for query eligibility. |
| Verification | Video verification is the default for new profiles in most regions. Phone and postcard remain in limited cases. |
| Review incentives | Prohibited. Includes offering anything in exchange for a review, or for revising or removing one. |
| Review gating | Prohibited. Requests must go to all customers equally, not only those expected to respond well. |
| Reviews from connected people | Prohibited. Owners, staff and anyone with a material connection cannot review the business. |
| Competition Act, misleading testimonials | Reviewable conduct. Corporate penalties reach the greater of $10 million for a first violation, $15 million for a subsequent one, three times the benefit derived, or 3% of annual worldwide gross revenue. |
| Competition Act, performance claims | Performance representations must rest on adequate and proper testing carried out before the claim is made. |
| City of Ottawa bilingualism | By-law 2001-170, made under the French Language Services Act, with obligations entrenched in the City of Ottawa Act in 2017. |
| Profile photo standards | JPG or PNG, 10 KB to 5 MB, 720 by 720 pixels recommended and 250 by 250 minimum. In focus, well lit, and representing reality rather than a heavily filtered or AI-altered version of it. |
| 360 photo requirements | Equirectangular projection at a 2:1 aspect ratio and 4K or better, carrying the photo-sphere metadata Google reads to recognise a sphere. Indoor collections are asked to stay within 100 photos. |
| Tour publication timing | Allow up to four days after publication for linked tours to process on Google Maps. Schedule the go-live date; do not promise it same-day. |
| Street View Trusted programme | Retired 31 December 2024. Badge, branding, Google-issued marketing materials and the for-hire photographer directory all withdrawn. Published tours continue to work. |
| Use of the Google name by suppliers | Google's brand rules prohibit using its brand features in any way implying affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement where none exists, and prohibit putting Google trademarks into a business name, trade name, domain or slogan. Descriptive reference to the product is not the same as claiming a relationship with it. |
Platform policies and statutory penalties are summarised here as general guidance for Ontario businesses. Confirm how they apply to your situation with the platform's current published policy or with your own legal advisor.
Client feedback
This section exists and it stays honest. A page selling review compliance cannot open with an unverifiable testimonial, and on this vertical the hypocrisy would be the first thing a sharp prospect noticed.
Feedback in the client's own words, with written consent on file, attributed generally by sector and area, for example "Owner, clinic, Westboro". Anything specific enough to identify a business goes up only if that business asked us to name it. The same standard we apply to your reviews applies to our own.
Star ratings without a live profile behind them, aggregate review scores, invented quotes, stock photography presented as our clients, counts of businesses served that we cannot evidence, or percentage uplift figures we cannot substantiate on request. Under the Competition Act a performance representation has to rest on adequate and proper testing before it is made, not after it is challenged.
In the meantime, judge the practice on the commitments above. Every one of them is testable inside your first month, which is a stronger signal than a quote you cannot check.
Before you ask
Published 2026 rates put professional profile management at roughly $125 to $475 a month per location, with Canadian managed services commonly around $285 to $475. Broader local SEO in Ottawa is published at $500 to $2,000 a month for ongoing work, rising into the $1,500 to $4,000 band for standard campaigns. The indicative ranges on this page sit inside those bands, starting at $275 to $425 a month. Price is driven by the number of profiles, the state of your existing listings, whether review handling is included and whether the work runs in one language or two.
No. You remain the owner. We are added as a manager, which is enough to do the work and not enough to lock you out. If a supplier asks for ownership, or wants to build the profile inside their own account, that is worth refusing. Recovering a profile from a former supplier who holds ownership is a slow process, and it is entirely avoidable.
No, and any supplier who does is making a claim they cannot support. Google documents its local results as based on relevance, distance and prominence, and distance is the searcher's location. Under the Competition Act a performance representation has to be based on adequate and proper testing before it is made. What we commit to is the work and the reporting: the profile is built out completely, the citations agree, the reviews are collected properly, and you see monthly what moved.
Often, though not always, and nobody honest will tell you otherwise. Suspensions usually trace to an address that does not meet the rules, keyword stuffing in the business name, category misuse or review manipulation. The work is diagnosing the actual cause, fixing it, and filing an appeal with the right supporting evidence rather than repeatedly resubmitting the same request. Reinstatement runs on Google's timeline and can take weeks. This is quoted as project or hourly work, indicatively $95 to $150 an hour against a written estimate.
Gating is any process that filters who gets asked for a review, usually by surveying customers first and only sending the review link to the ones who responded well. Platform policy prohibits it, alongside incentivised reviews and reviews from anyone connected to the business. Enforcement starts with removing the reviews and can escalate to restricting or suspending the profile. In Canada it also risks reviewable conduct under the Competition Act. Our request flow goes to every customer on identical terms.
We check which profiles exist for your business across Google, Apple and Bing, whether each is verified and who controls it, how your primary and secondary categories are set, how complete the fields are, what your citation set looks like across the Canadian directory platforms, and what is duplicated, missing or wrong. You receive it as a written document with the specific items listed. It costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and you keep it whether you hire us or not.
Yes. Descriptions, services, attributes, posts and review responses in both official languages. Ottawa has operated under a municipal bilingualism by-law since 2001, made under Ontario's French Language Services Act, with those obligations entrenched in the City of Ottawa Act in 2017, and Gatineau is across the river. For a lot of businesses in this region a single-language profile is answering half the market in the wrong language.
Yes. Duplicates split reviews, photos and mentions across two entries, and search engines read the disagreement between them as a reason to be less confident about either. Google does not consolidate them for you. The fix is to identify every instance, decide which record survives, then correct and suppress the rest, which is what the citation cleanup work covers. It is indicatively $445 to $895 as a one-time project depending on how many platforms are involved.
No, and we do not describe ourselves as affiliated with, endorsed by or acting on behalf of Google, Apple or Microsoft. We are an independent marketing practice that works inside your accounts. Google charges nothing for creating and managing a profile; what you are paying for here is the work of doing it properly and keeping it done.
Profile completeness edits tend to register fastest, often within a few weeks. Citation corrections propagate more slowly because they depend on each platform's own update cycle, and full syndication can take a couple of months. Review volume compounds over a longer horizon. We report monthly from the first month, including the months where nothing moved, because a flat month is information too.
Plans are month to month with 30 days notice. On exit you receive the credentials, the citation register with a URL and status for every listing, the review response archive and any content produced for you. One-time build and cleanup projects are quoted separately from the monthly plan, so bringing your listings current does not commit you to ongoing service.
Your business name as it is registered, the areas you actually serve, roughly how many locations you run, whether you know if the Google profile has ever been claimed, and whether you want the work in one language or two. That is enough to run the audit and issue an indicative figure. Manager access is requested only after you approve the written scope.
No, and in 2026 nobody is. Google retired the Street View Trusted programme on 31 December 2024 and withdrew the badge, the Google-issued marketing materials, the dedicated support channel and the for-hire photographer directory along with it. Providers were told to remove the badge and branding by that date. Tours already published were unaffected and still work, and publishing 360 imagery to Google Maps remains open to any competent operator. If a supplier is still selling on that credential, ask them when it was last issued. Judge this work the way you would judge any trade: on the portfolio, on references, and on whether the last tour they published still looks right.
Published 2026 rates in this market open around $377 for a Google virtual tour, and a Montreal specialist publishes 360 and Matterport work at $295 to $995 depending on floor area. Wider North American providers publish entry tours from about $350, with tiered packages near $550 for up to ten panoramas and $750 for ten to fifteen. Our indicative band is $350 to $950, set after a site walk, because panorama count is what drives the figure and floor area is what drives panorama count. Anyone quoting a tour price before seeing the space is guessing.
Look at whose they are. If you have uploaded nothing, Google fills the gap on your behalf, usually with a Street View frame of the building taken in whatever season the car drove past, or with a customer photo taken on a phone. Both are somebody else's judgement about what your business looks like. It is also worth checking what you have against Google's published standards, which ask for JPG or PNG between 10 KB and 5 MB, recommend 720 by 720 pixels, and require the image to be in focus, well lit and free of significant alteration or heavy filtering. Google's own wording is that the image should represent reality, and it names excessive AI use in the same sentence. Heavily retouched frames can be removed, and a removed photo leaves you worse off than a plain one.
Start here
Tell us the business name and where you work, and we will come back with what your profiles actually look like right now, in writing. It costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and the findings are yours either way.