Guides · 5 min read · updated 2026-11-10

What should a bookstore's Google listing have?

Someone looking for a bookstore is usually looking for a book, a kind of book or a plan for the afternoon. Your listing has to say what kind of bookstore you are before they buy it online.

You compete with buying online

Anyone who wants a book can order it from a phone and get it in a few days. If they go looking for a bookstore it's because they want something that doesn't give them: having it today, leafing through it first, or someone to recommend one.

Your Google listing — the Business Profile, formerly Google My Business — has to tell them they'll find that with you. A listing with just a name and an address gives them no reason to leave the house.

What kind of bookstore you are

A general bookstore isn't a used bookstore, a children's one, a comic shop or one for school and university textbooks, and someone looking for one doesn't want the others. Google has categories for several of them: pick the one that describes you as primary and add the others that apply.

In the description, your strengths: fiction, essays, poetry, children's books, books in other languages, independent publishers. And if you buy or take in used books, say so: it's a separate search.

If you don't have it, can you get it?

It's the question that decides many purchases and that almost no listing answers. If you take special orders, write it down, with the approximate wait.

And say how to ask about a title. A WhatsApp number where someone replies «yes, we have it, I'll hold it for you» converts better than any photo: it removes the customer's fear of going and not finding it.

Events, book clubs and coffee

Book launches, reading clubs and story time are what an online store can't offer. Publish them as updates on the listing, with date and time, and remove the ones that have passed.

If you have a café inside the bookstore, add it as an additional category and tick the attributes that apply. Some people are looking for somewhere to read for an afternoon, not for a specific book.

Photos and hours

• The shelves and the new-releases tables, showing what kind of books you carry.
• The children's corner or reading area, if there is one.
• The storefront with the sign, so people can find you.
• Sunday and holiday hours, which is when most people have time to visit a bookstore and when most listings are wrong.

What makes you quotable by an AI

Our study did not measure bookstores, so we have no figure of our own for your trade. What we did see in the four categories measured is that assistants cite pages with text — guides, editorial pieces, directories, the business's own site — and none of their sources was Google Maps.

For a bookstore that works in your favour: a city's cultural guides and bookstore lists are exactly that kind of page. A page of your own with your specialities and your events calendar, written as text, gives whoever compiles those lists — and an assistant — something to cite.

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