The sixty-second answer
Yes, you still need a site. A Business Profile is the best free listing a Canadian small business can have, but it is a listing: it cannot carry your prices, policies, consent language or substantiated claims, and it is maintained by a system you do not control. Keep the profile; own the destination.
What the profile is genuinely good at
Start with the credit it deserves. A verified Business Profile puts you on the map, shows your hours, gives someone a tap-to-call button, and collects reviews in the place people look for them. For a local trade, a clinic, a restaurant or a shop, it is often the single highest-return free thing you can do online. If you have not claimed and verified yours, do that before you do anything discussed on this page.
It also does something a website cannot: it inserts you into a moment of intent. Somebody searching for a plumber three streets away is shown a shortlist, and you are on it or you are not. No amount of writing changes that placement.
So the question is not whether the profile is worth having. It is what happens after someone taps it.
The four things a listing cannot do
1. It cannot explain you. A listing has a category, a short description, hours and photos. It does not have room for scope — which jobs you take, which you refer out, which towns you actually drive to, what you charge for a callout. That is the information that turns a search result into a phone call, and there is nowhere to put it.
This matters more in a market shaped like Canada's. As of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses here and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small [1]. In New Brunswick, 20,256 of 20,631 businesses are small [1]. A listing tells a searcher that fourteen businesses in the category exist nearby. It does not tell them which one does their particular job, and the one that answers that question in writing wins the call.
2. It cannot hold your prices safely. Publishing prices is good practice and it is increasingly how AI assistants decide whether to name you. But price display is regulated: subsection 74.01(1.3) of the Competition Act treats a price that is not attainable because of fixed obligatory charges as a false or misleading representation, carving out only charges imposed under an Act of Parliament or a provincial legislature [2]. You need room to say what is included, what is extra, and whether tax is on top — and tax depends on the customer's location, since the CRA is explicit that the rate to charge depends on the place of supply, illustrating it with a Vancouver store charging 13% HST on a delivery to Toronto [3]. None of that fits in a listing field. See how should I display prices with GST/HST? and what should a small business website cost in Canada?.
3. It cannot carry your policies or your consent. The moment you take an enquiry with a name and a phone number attached, PIPEDA's Schedule 1 applies: identify your purposes before or at the time of collection, obtain knowledge and consent, and make your policies readily available to the individuals concerned [4]. A listing gives you nowhere to publish that. Likewise, if you ever want to email past customers, CASL prohibits sending a commercial electronic message without consent and requires the prescribed information in subsection 6(2) [5] — and consent is captured on a form, on a page, that you own. See does my small business website need a privacy policy? and what does CASL require on a signup form?.
4. It cannot make claims you can defend. Certifications, warranties, insurance, guarantees, response times — these are representations to the public, and section 74.01(1)(b) requires a performance or efficacy claim to be based on an adequate and proper test, with the proof lying on the person making the representation [2]. Claims need context and evidence around them. A one-line listing description gives you the claim and none of the support. More in what can I legally claim on my website?.
You do not control the listing
A profile is data about your business held in someone else's index. It can be edited through third-party suggestions, merged with a duplicate, recategorised, or suspended pending review, and your recourse in each case is a support queue rather than a right.
Compare a domain name, where the rights are written down. Under the ICANN Transfer Policy, Registered Name Holders must be able to transfer their domain registrations between registrars, and a Registrar of Record may deny a transfer only in a short list of enumerated instances — evidence of fraud, a reasonable dispute over identity, non-payment for the previous registration period, or a request inside sixty days of creation or a prior transfer — and must give the reason to both the holder and the gaining registrar [6]. That is the difference between being listed and being present. The full treatment is in who owns my website and my domain?, and the naming question in should a Canadian business use .ca or .com?.
How assistants actually decide to name you
Listings supply the skeleton: name, category, address, hours. Pages supply everything else. When someone asks an assistant which local company handles a specific job, the answer is assembled from text that can be fetched, parsed and attributed — service descriptions, service areas, price ranges, qualifications, and plainly written answers to the questions buyers actually ask.
That is also why the mechanics matter. Facts in real text rather than baked into images, labelled form fields, headings in order and decent contrast are simultaneously accessibility practice and machine-readability practice. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas in which barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [7]. See how do I get AI assistants to recommend my business? and what are the accessibility requirements for a Canadian website?.
Keep them consistent, and pick a winner
Decide that the website is the authoritative record, then make the listing match it exactly — same legal name, same address format, same phone number, same hours, same service area. Mismatches are worse than gaps, because they make both sources look unreliable and there is no way for a machine to tell which one is current. When something changes, change both the same day.
Where we sit
A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; beyond that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each and extra hours are $40 per hour, always quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable. Turnaround is 48 hours from your written brief — see what do I need ready before someone builds my website? — and media can follow at any time.
Keep the profile. It is doing real work. Just give it somewhere to send people that says more than a category and a phone number, and that stays yours whatever an index decides tomorrow.