Google's Ask Maps is coming to the Netherlands: how to prepare your business

On 12 March 2026 Google launched a large update to Maps. With Ask Maps you put a question in plain language. Instead of a list of ten businesses you get a personal recommendation of only one or two firms back.

The technology behind Ask Maps is Gemini, Google's family of AI models. In the United States and India Ask Maps started on 12 March 2026, and at the beginning of August 2026 it got a roll out to more than 150 countries and territories. The Netherlands is not named separately in that announcement and the roll out is described in English, so check for yourself whether you see it in your app. Whoever prepares now is ready for it.

The difference from traditional search is large. You used to type "painter Oisterwijk" and get three results. Gemini understands context. A question such as "who can paint my facade with sustainable paint" leads to personalised suggestions on the basis of:

• Services listed in the business profile
• Terms customers use in reviews
• Photographs and captions of comparable projects

Important: the Local Pack keeps showing three results. What changes is that Ask Maps gives a recommendation of one or two businesses alongside it instead of a list, and that in that view there is therefore no third place to move up into.

The annual Local Search Ranking Factors study by Whitespark shows that eight of the ten most important ranking factors come straight from the Google Business Profile. That makes your profile no longer a business card but the engine of your local visibility. Source: Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors. Whitespark sells local SEO tooling itself, so not a neutral party, but it is the standard reference in the trade.

Many owners fill their Google Business Profile in once and never look at it again. That used to be acceptable, as long as you had enough reviews and local presence.

With Ask Maps that approach changes fundamentally. The AI judges relevance on the basis of detailed profile information. Two plumbers with the same ratings get ranked differently when one lists specific services such as "leak detection", "boiler servicing" and "drain clearing", while the other has only filled in "plumber".

Google also intends to show AI summaries of businesses in Maps. Those summaries are assembled from reviews, services, photographs and descriptions. The more complete your information, the stronger that summary turns out.

Specify your services

Go to "Edit services" and list every service specifically. Not "painting", but "exterior painting", "wood rot repair", "window frame lacquering" and "wallpapering".

Use the business description

Use the full 750 characters. Describe your specialisms, service area, experience and what sets you apart, in natural language.

Check the attributes

Switch on every attribute that applies to you, such as "free quote", "available at weekends" and "emergency call out".

Keep your opening hours current

Make sure your details are up to date. Whether you are open at the moment of the search sits at number five of the ten heaviest factors for the Local Pack in the Whitespark study; Google itself names only relevance, distance and prominence. If you cannot work it out yourself, our service improving SEO helps you get profile and website in order together.

The AI reads review text literally. A review saying "five stars, recommended!" is worthless. A detailed description such as "complete bathroom renovation in three days, tidy work" does give the AI relevant context.

Action: ask customers to describe which work you carried out. And reply to every review with a substantive remark. If you serve customers in the United Kingdom, note that since 6 April 2025 writing, commissioning or hosting fake reviews is a banned practice under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority. Ask for reviews, never buy them.

Negative reviews are not necessarily damaging. A professional reply actually shows that you take customers seriously. Not replying at all is far more damaging.

Upload photographs of your work regularly, at least monthly. Add descriptions, for example: "Complete facade renovation of a 1930s house in Oisterwijk. Woodwork stripped, wood rot treated, durable exterior paint applied."

A statistic, and the correct version of it: businesses with more than a hundred images on their profile get 520 per cent more telephone calls than the average business. That figure is from BrightLocal and not from Google, and the comparison is with the average business and not with businesses that have few photographs. Source: BrightLocal, Google My Business Insights Study.

Avoid stock photographs. That Google recognises them and penalises you for it is stated nowhere; what does count is that your customer sees the difference. Do not forget the website behind your profile either: a slow site costs you visitors who click through from Maps. Read in our article on Core Web Vitals and website speed how to check that.

One to two hours of work lays the base. Here is the checklist for this week:

• Services: log in and add eight to ten specific services
• Reviews: message three to five customers asking for a detailed review
• Photographs: upload at least five photographs of your work with descriptions
• Attributes: check and switch on every applicable attribute
• Maintenance: put half an hour a month in the diary for updates

That same profile is what the paid side of Maps leans on. Demand Gen is bringing promoted pins to the map, built from the photographs, reviews and location data you are updating this week, and what such a pin is made of is set out in Google Maps is getting adverts. More practical explanation about local visibility and AI search is in our knowledge base, which is in Dutch.

Before you start, first the part sellers leave out. There is no sign up button for Ask Maps. Nor is there an advertising slot inside the recommendation itself. There is no setting in your Business Profile labelled take part in AI search. Do you get an email from an agency promising to put your business into Ask Maps? That agency is selling something that does not exist. This is not bad news. It is exactly the reason a one person business stands a chance here against a chain with a marketing budget.

Google has not published a separate list of ranking factors for Ask Maps. What does exist, and has for years, is the help page about local rankings: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what is being asked. Distance is how far you are from the person searching, and that is the only part you cannot solve with words. Prominence is how well known your business is, online and offline. As long as Google publishes nothing else, that is the only list you can base yourself on. Anyone selling you an Ask Maps factor is selling you a hunch.

What does change is how much of your relevance is asked for. In a list of ten, a half filled profile still lands at number seven now and then. In an answer of one or two names, half filled is the same as not mentioned. Everything that follows is therefore about that one word: relevance, and how you write it down in fields you control yourself.

And then the part that tempts people: no, your business name is not a keyword field. Google writes in the guidelines for representing your business on Google that you represent your business as it appears in the real world on your van, your frontage and your letterhead, that you keep the number of categories limited to your core activity, and that there is one profile per business. Turn that into Painting Contractors Van Loon Utrecht Amsterdam Cheap Emergency and you risk having the profile suspended. That is not a penalty on your position, that is your whole profile offline. Last checked on 25 August 2026.

Fill in your services more specifically is advice that applies to everybody and is therefore concrete for nobody. The question the customer asks differs per trade, so which field weighs heaviest differs as well. Four situations that cover most readers of this page.

Emergency work: locksmith, plumber, breakdown service

With an emergency the question is short and the patience shorter: somebody is standing outside their own front door. Two things win here. Opening hours that are correct, including the evening and the weekend if you really work them, because a profile saying closed while you are answering the phone takes itself out of the answer. And attributes that describe the emergency situation. Do not promise a response time you cannot meet: with emergency work the disappointment comes back as a review within the hour. What you can do is write in your description which area you reach within the hour and which area you cover by appointment.

Planned trade work: painter, landscaper, window firm, installer

Here the question is long and descriptive instead, because the customer has time to compare. Every part of the sentence looks for its own field. Your advantage sits in the service list and in project photographs with a caption that says what is being shown. An approach per trade is worked out in, for example, local SEO for painters and local SEO for cleaning companies, both in Dutch.

Practices and advisers: physiotherapist, dentist, accountant, solicitor

Something extra applies here: you are not allowed to claim everything you might want to claim. Professional rules and, in healthcare, legislation about what you say regarding treatment limit your language. That is not a disadvantage in AI search, because the fields that matter here are factual: which treatments or specialisms you offer, whether you are taking on new clients, and what the waiting time is. Factual fields are exactly what a language model can use. Vague superlatives are not.

Shops and hospitality

Here your range is the service list. A question like where can I still get gluten free bread this afternoon touches three fields at once: products, opening hours at that moment, and review texts in which customers mention that product. Of all four groups this is the one that gains most from posting regularly, because the range changes and the profile is allowed to know that.

What all four share: the answer is assembled from words that are already there. If a word appears nowhere, in no service, no description, no photo caption and no review, then for Ask Maps it does not exist.

1. The catch all category

Contractor as your only category, and nothing else. Google asks you to keep the number of categories limited to your core activity, but that is something other than picking one that has to cover everything. Choose the main category that best describes your revenue, and put the rest in your service list, where no meaningful limit applies.

2. A service area covering half the country

The temptation is obvious: the larger the area, the more customers. It does not work that way. Distance is one of the three factors Google names, and a service area that is not true brings you enquiries from towns you do not drive to. Those enquiries cost you time and, if you turn them down, sometimes a review. Describe the area you genuinely serve.

3. Collecting reviews without text

This is the most expensive mistake, because it costs you years. Five stars without words adds nothing to the one field you cannot fill yourself. You are not allowed to prescribe what your customer writes; what you are allowed to do is ask whether they would say which job you carried out. That is how it is set out in Google's policy for user contributed content, checked on 25 August 2026. How to ask without nagging is in getting more Google reviews, in Dutch.

4. Photographs without captions, or worse, somebody else's photographs

A photograph without text is nearly nothing to a language model. A photograph with the line wood rot repaired and window frame repainted, nineteen thirties house is a service description you get for free. What you put on your profile also has to be yours: your work, your premises, your crew. The whole trade off around profile photographs is in photographs in your Business Profile, in Dutch.

5. Sorting out the profile and leaving the website alone

What Ask Maps gives is a recommendation, not a quote. The customer who is convinced clicks through or calls, and then lands on your site. If what is waiting there is a page from 2019 that looks like a fax on a phone, you have won the recommendation and lost the customer. At the very least check whether your site loads quickly enough on a phone; how to measure that is in Core Web Vitals and website speed. And make sure the service Ask Maps recommends you for actually has its own page on your site, with the same words in it.

This is the honest part, and it is shorter than you would like. Google currently gives you no report headed impressions in Ask Maps. So you cannot measure how often you were in a recommendation. Anyone who promises you that is inventing a number or reading another report wrongly.

What you do have is three sources that together give you a direction. The first is the performance overview in your Business Profile itself: how often your profile was viewed, how often somebody called, how often directions were requested and how often your website was clicked. The second is Search Console, where you follow impressions and clicks per page. If impressions stay level there while clicks fall, something is shifting in what the search page looks like. The third is the source nobody takes seriously and that says the most: ask every new customer how they found you, and write the answer down. Twenty lines in a notebook beat any dashboard.

Do one more thing before you start: record the baseline. Put today's figures for the last thirty days from your Business Profile into a file, with the date next to them. Without that starting point you have nothing to compare in six months and you fall back on the feeling that it probably did something. A free baseline on the points you hold yourself takes two minutes with the local visibility checker.

Do not expect a turnaround within a week. A profile you build out today has to be picked up first, and the reviews with text you are asking for now arrive over the coming months. Six weeks is a reasonable moment to look back for the first time, and then you look at the direction and not at one bad week.

What exactly is Ask Maps?

Ask Maps is a feature in Google Maps that runs on Gemini. You ask questions in natural language instead of typing separate keywords.

Is Ask Maps available in the Netherlands yet?

Ask Maps is live in the United States and India. The Netherlands is likely to follow within a few months.

Do I have to pay to be visible?

No, Ask Maps works through your free Google Business Profile. Advertising is not required.

How many reviews do I need?

There is no exact minimum, but content counts more than quantity. A review describing which work you carried out does more than ten five star ratings with no text.

How long does optimisation take?

The first tidy up costs one to two hours. After that half an hour of maintenance a month is enough.

Does Ask Maps affect Google Ads?

Ask Maps is organic and stands apart from Google Ads, but a good profile does strengthen your ad assets. If you advertise yourself, read our article on the migration from DSA to AI Max, which runs from September 2026 to February 2027 as well.

Source for those two months: Google's post on the upgrade from DSA to AI Max. In September 2026 only campaigns with automatically created assets and cross ad group broad match go over; the phase out of DSA itself begins in February 2027. Last checked on 25 August 2026: both dates are still there.

The uncomfortable thing about this subject is that the work has to be done before you can see whether it pays off. In the Netherlands Ask Maps is not live yet, there is no report to point at, and everything above is therefore an argument rather than a proof. What makes it worth doing anyway is that none of it is wasted if the feature arrives later than expected: specific services, reviews with text and captioned photographs of your own work improve your position in ordinary Maps results today.

Would you rather not have to guess where your profile is thinnest? Send us the name of your business and the town you work from, and we will look at it with you. We will tell you which of your fields would keep you out of a one name answer, which of them you can fill in yourself this week, and which of them are simply fine. Including when the honest answer is that there is nothing for us to do here.

You can reach us through the contact page, where you pick a slot in the calendar yourself. A first conversation carries no price and no obligation, and if you would rather have the work taken off your hands, that runs through our service improving SEO.