Google is adding booking links to listings, and some break
A "Book Online" button is showing up on Google Business Profiles that never set one up, and some of those links fail.
Google is automatically adding booking links to Google Business Profiles, the free listing that shows up in Search and Maps. Some of those links do not work.
Joy Hawkins (@joyannehawkins) says her colleague @brandonschmidt spotted a "Book Online" link on a home care business that has no booking software installed or connected to its listing. He saw the same thing on a home services client. Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) then wrote the sighting up, so this is not a one-off report from a single account.
The part that breaks
It depends on where the button sends people. If the business already has its own booking link or booking software set up, Hawkins says the link works fine. If the link points to Google's own "maps/reserve" program instead, it shows a 500 error, which is the page failing to load at all.
That is the problem in one line. A customer taps a button that Google put on your listing, and instead of a booking form they get an error page. Most people will not try again. They will go back to the results and tap the next business.
This follows earlier reports of the same broken button.
What to do
Open your own Google Business Profile the way a customer sees it. Search your business name on a phone, look for a "Book Online" button, and tap it. If it loads your real booking page, you are fine. If it errors out, you now know, and you can tell customers who say they could not book that it was not your website.
If you take appointments and have no booking link set up at all, this is the nudge to add one. A link Google controls is worse than a link you control, and right now the Google one is the one failing.
How sure is this
Hawkins asked other people in the industry whether they were seeing it too, and a few said yes. Nobody has said how many listings are affected or when Google started doing this. Google has not commented in these reports, and no fix has been announced.
It is worth checking because the fault is invisible from your side. Nothing changes in your dashboard, nothing shows up in your website analytics, and no customer emails to tell you the button is broken. The only way to find out is to tap it yourself.
if the link goes to Google's "maps/reserve" program - its showing a 500 error
spotted "Book Online" links in the wild for a home care business that does not have a special software installed & configured with GBP
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.