Google says you're open. Your door says you're closed

Last month I looked up eleven shops along College Avenue and checked each one's hours in four places: Google, Apple Maps, their own website, and whatever app takes their orders or bookings. Four of the eleven matched everywhere. Seven disagreed with themselves, and three of those had a Sunday marked open in one place and closed in another.

Not one of those owners knew.

Your hours live in about seven places. You control six of them. Google writes to the seventh on its own, using information you never gave it. Auditing all seven takes fifteen minutes and costs nothing, and it runs the same way as the fifteen-minute broken website test: open a surface, look, mark it pass or fail, fix the failures in one sitting.

Hours are the detail customers check most and owners audit least, because you already know when you open. You wrote it on the door in 2019 and moved on.

Your Google profile holds three sets of hours, not one

Open your Business Profile, click Edit profile, then Hours. There are three sections, and most owners have only ever filled in the first.

Main hours. A normal week. Everybody has these.

Special hours. Temporary changes. Google's help doc defines them as a temporary adjustment to your hours, or a closure of six days in a row or fewer. Holidays, inventory day, the week you retile the bathroom.

More hours. Separate times for one part of what you do. Kitchen close, delivery window, pickup, senior hours, drive-through, service department.

That third section is where restaurants lose money. Your dining room closes at 10. Your kitchen stops taking orders at 9:15. Leave More hours blank and Google tells a family in Fishers you are open at 9:40, so they drive twenty minutes for a locked kitchen and a manager apologizing at the host stand.

Before you leave that screen, look at the color of the text. Google's help page says blue text marks information Google changed, not you. Google assembles those changes from "user reports and licensed content," and the same page adds a line worth reading twice: "You can't manage all Google updates through your Business Profile."

Someone who has never worked a shift in your shop can suggest your Saturday hours, and if enough strangers agree, Google takes their word over your silence.

Why does Google change my hours by itself?

A blank looks worse to Google than a guess does.

Three things feed the guess. Customers submit edits from Maps. Google reads other listings and directories carrying your name. And Google fills what is left from its own systems, including the phone calls it now places to shops directly, which I wrote about when Google started calling small businesses to confirm their details.

The risk runs both directions. One wrong community edit costs you a Saturday. A stack of conflicting edits can flag the whole listing, which is how a lot of the 2026 suspensions started. Accurate hours are the cheapest insurance you can buy against either one.

Turn on profile notifications before you close the tab. Then the next change lands in your inbox rather than in a one-star review.

Apple Maps, which you have probably never claimed

Ask Siri for directions and you get Apple Maps. Nobody changes that default, and Apple never asks Google.

Apple's listing tool used to be called Business Connect. On April 14, 2026 Apple merged it into one free platform called Apple Business, and moved every claimed location, place card, and photo across automatically. Old logins still work. New ones start at business.apple.com.

If you never claimed a listing, Apple has a card for your shop regardless. Apple built it from data you did not supply, and the hours on it came from a source you cannot see. Search your own name in Apple Maps on a phone right now. Wrong hours there stay invisible to you and stay obvious to everyone holding an iPhone.

Claiming runs about twenty minutes, once. Apple's guide to adding a location covers the whole path. There is a special-hours field on that side too. Fill it in.

Bing, because that is what the chatbots read

Almost nobody in Broad Ripple searches Bing. The reason to care is that ChatGPT and Copilot pull local business data out of Bing's index, which I broke down in ChatGPT reads Bing, not Google.

A customer asks an assistant whether you are open on Sunday, and the answer often comes out of a Bing Places listing you have never logged into. Go to bingplaces.com, search your name, claim it, set the hours. Ten minutes. You will never visit that page again. The assistants will.

Facebook, Yelp, and the listings you forgot

Facebook hours go stale faster than anything else on this list, because the page usually still belongs to whoever set it up in 2016. Check the About tab, and check who has admin rights while you are in there.

Yelp carries your hours whether you claimed the page or not, same as Apple.

Then come the industry directories. A vet sits on pet-care directories. A contractor sits on Angi and Houzz. A restaurant sits on four delivery apps, each with its own idea of when you close. You do not have to fix all of these today. Fix the ones that appear when you search your own business name in an incognito window, because that search is the actual list of what a customer sees.

Your own website usually holds two or three copies

Websites store hours in more than one spot, which is why this is the surface people get wrong most often:

• The footer, repeated on every page.
• The contact page.
• A theme setting or plugin field that prints hours into a sidebar or banner.
• Structured data in the page code, which Google reads as openingHoursSpecification.

Most people update one of those and miss the rest. Load your homepage, your contact page, and one interior page on a phone. Numbers that disagree mean you found a leak. If you cannot edit any of them yourself in under a minute, you found a bigger one, and fixing that is most of what we do for new clients.

None of this replaces the profile itself, by the way. For a walk-in business the profile still outranks the website for this exact question, which is the argument I made in your Google profile beats your website.

The app that takes the order

Toast, Square, Clover, DoorDash, Resy, Booksy, Vagaro, Calendly. Each one keeps its own hours, and each will cheerfully accept a booking outside the hours on your Google profile.

A salon in Zionsville ran online booking until 7 on Vagaro against a Google profile that said 5. For two years, customers booked 6:15 slots and got a phone call the day before asking them to move.

The door and the voicemail

Free, and everybody skips them. Walk out front and read your own sign. Then call your own number and sit through the outgoing greeting to the end. One shop I know still said "closed Mondays" on that greeting fourteen months after they started opening Mondays.

What to set before Labor Day

Labor Day lands on Monday, September 7, 2026. Google publishes a list of holidays where it warns customers that your hours might differ, and Labor Day is on it. Skip the special hours for that date and anyone searching you over the weekend gets that warning instead of an answer.

Set them now, even if nothing changes. Google's own guidance is to confirm holiday hours even when they match your normal week. A confirmed Monday reads as open. An unconfirmed one reads as maybe.

The fifteen-minute version

#	Where to look	It passes if
1	Google Business Profile ? Hours	Main, Special and More hours are all filled, and no blue text appeared that you did not approve
2	Apple Maps, on a phone	Listing claimed, hours match, special hours set
3	Bing Places	Claimed, hours match
4	Facebook About tab and Yelp	Hours match and someone still at the shop has admin access
5	Your website: footer, contact page, one interior page	Every copy agrees, and you can edit them yourself
6	Your booking or ordering app	The last bookable slot matches your real closing time
7	Door sign and voicemail greeting	Both current

Run it twice a year and after any change. That is half an hour annually to stop sending people to a locked door. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, tell us about your shop.

The bike shop at the north end of the Monon has a hand-lettered card taped inside the glass listing winter hours, summer hours, and a number to call if the door is locked and the lights are on. It has been there for years. Somebody wrote it because people kept turning up at the wrong time, and it still works better than most of the software on this list.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Edit your business hours (Google Business Profile Help)	The three hour types, and the definition of special hours as a temporary change or a closure of six days or fewer.
2	Understand Google updates on your Business Profile	Blue text marks info changed by Google; updates come from "user reports and licensed content"; you can't manage all Google updates.
3	About holidays on Google	Google shows a warning that hours might differ on listed holidays unless you set special hours.
4	Introducing Apple Business (Apple Newsroom, March 2026)	Apple Business launched April 14, 2026, free, replacing Business Connect, with claimed locations migrating automatically.
5	Add a location in Apple Business (Apple Support)	How a business claims and adds a location and its place card details.
6	Local business structured data (Google Search Central)	openingHoursSpecification is the property Google reads for hours on your own site.