Google offered free business listing websites as part of their Maps offering. These were domains ending in .business.site or .negocio.site.
The service has been turned off on 2024-03-05. See
For now these URLs redirect to the Google Maps business profile. On 2024-06-10 they are announced to be shut down completely and to return a 404 Not Found.
As of today, we have about 16,000 objects with a website or contact:website tag containing business.site or negocio.site.
Maybe you would like to check the POIs in your area and check if they have a proper, alternative website, or a social profile one could link to instead (using contact:facebook, contact:instagram and so on). Hereās an Overpass query which you can run for your map area:
Update: Hereās a MapRoulette challenge to replace or remove these URLs:
Iām assuming that Google owns/owned business.site and negocio.site. Is this true?
Do these sites really need any special treatment? They redirect to GMaps now, why not just remove them? We can check if a given site redirects to GMaps, or doesnāt exist anymore, before removing.
And hereās an idea: providing the affected businesses with an alternative. Itād be good PR for OSM.
Iāve started removing some after reading this but the MapComplete quest sounds good to me, especially if you can retrieve an alternative way to contact a business
Some of the former business.site sites are archived on the Wayback Machine. This is helpful if you encounter a shop with a common name and are unsure which similarly named Facebook page to replace it with, but donāt want to rely on information on Google Maps proper to distinguish between them.
Removing all these links mechanically is easy and could still be done later, letās say in a year.
I expect the shop owners need some time to realize what happened and set up an alternative website, if they care.
Just removing the dead link doesnāt add helpful information for users. Getting redirected to Google Maps is better than nothing for the time being. Once all the links become dead in June, we should try to systematically replace them with links to alternative websites, social media profiles, or finally remove them if we canāt find alternatives.
I checked a few of these locally (Texas, US) using your overpass query. Itās a shame that these links are getting broken by Google since around half of the businesses I checked have no āpermanentā online presence other than this
Isnāt it premature to clean these up? From the business point of view, it still kind of works, so while they may be working on a replacement itās not yet ready?
I let myself convince by o_andras that we should start with the cleanup rather than wait.
Google announced the sunsetting of this service in January 2024. I donāt know if the affected were notified directly, though. If business didnāt care enough or didnāt have the expertise to set up a replacement website in the past 2 months I donāt have high hopes that they will manage in the remaining 3 months.
What we can do is to save the list of affected OSM objects as of 2024-03-05. Then 6 or 12 months later one can check which of these are still without a website or social media profile and whether one has become available in the meantime.
Hereās the list of objects that went into the MapRoulette challenge:
And hereās an Overpass query to show all objects from above list which donāt have a website, contact:website or a social media contact:*. If youāre interested you can use the query to check if theses businesses have a replacement website a few months down the road.
