The question comes up constantly and the answer is yes, with conditions worth understanding before you start, because getting this wrong is one of the quicker ways to have a profile suspended later.
Google's name for what you are is a service-area business, meaning a business that visits or delivers to customers directly but does not serve them at its own address. A caterer, a plumber, an event planner, a shortlet manager, a photographer, a makeup artist who travels to the client. If you also receive customers at your address some of the time, Google calls that a hybrid business and it is handled slightly differently.
You still enter an address, you just hide it
This is the part people get wrong. There is no option to skip the address. Google's instruction is to turn off the setting that shows your business address to customers, which assumes an address was entered in the first place.
The reason is verification. Google needs a real place it can check. So you enter your actual operating address, which for a lot of small businesses is a home, and then you hide it and list your service areas instead. Google gives the example directly: if you are a plumber running the business from your residential address, clear the address from your profile.
Service areas are set by city, by postcode or by other places you serve. If you hide your address and do not set a service area, Google picks a local area for you, which is rarely the one you would have chosen.
One rule to respect. Google says you should only choose not to show your address if you genuinely are a service-area business. Hiding a real shopfront to seem bigger than you are is a guidelines problem waiting to happen.
How verification works now
Google lists five methods: phone or text message, email, a live video call, a video recording, and post. Which ones you are offered is not your choice. Google says the options available depend on your business type, your public information, your region and your opening hours.
Postcards still exist but are not available for every business. When they are used, Google says most codes arrive within fourteen days and that codes expire after thirty. In a country where postal delivery is uneven, that is worth knowing before you pin your hopes on it.
Where video verification is offered, Google recommends taking it. The requirements are specific: one unedited, unbroken recording of at least thirty seconds. It has to prove three things, which are where the business is located, that the business is real and trading, and that you are the person who runs or represents it. Google's own suggestion for that last part is to record something only a member of staff could do, like opening a till, a kitchen or a storeroom.
Service-area businesses record something different. Rather than a shopfront, you show where the business operates: street signs, nearby landmarks, anything that identifies the area. Google explicitly accommodates home-based businesses here, saying you can record landmarks and signs in your immediate neighbourhood.
Verification reviews take up to five working days, and occasionally longer.
Addresses that will not work
Four rules, all published, all broken often.
A PO box or a mailbox in a remote location is not acceptable. It appears both in the address guidelines and in the list of businesses that cannot be listed at all.
A virtual office is not eligible. Google defines this as renting a physical mailing address you do not actually operate from. Several services in Lagos sell exactly this as a way to get on Maps. It is against the rules.
A coworking space works only under three conditions. The office must have clear signage, must receive customers during opening hours, and must be staffed during those hours by your own people. A hot desk does not qualify.
A home address is fine, and is the normal answer for a service-area business, as long as you hide it.
The businesses that cannot be listed at all
This is the part most articles skip, and for some readers it is the whole answer.
Google's eligibility rule is that a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours. Working from that, it names several kinds of business as ineligible: rental or for-sale properties such as holiday homes and vacant apartments, though sales and leasing offices are eligible; an ongoing service or class at a location you do not own or represent; lead generation agents and companies; and brands, organisations, artists and other online-only businesses.
That last one deserves reading twice. If you sell entirely online and never meet a customer in person, you are not eligible for a Business Profile. Not restricted, not harder, not eligible.
There is also a specific rule that businesses selling age-restricted products such as alcohol, cannabis or weapons cannot be service-area businesses without a storefront.
A few exceptions run the other way and are eligible despite having no staffed premises: ATMs, video rental kiosks and express post drop boxes, seasonal businesses with permanent year-round signage, and delivery-only food brands under certain conditions.
What to do with this
If you deliver or travel to customers, set the profile up properly as a service-area business and hide the address. If you are entirely online, stop trying to force a Business Profile and put that effort into the places that will actually carry you, which means your own site and the profiles you do qualify for.
Our free deep digital audit checks how findable your business actually is on Maps, in search and in AI answers, from the outside, with no access to your accounts.