How to read this reference
The ID scheme, the five verdicts, the verification stamps and the re-probe cadence behind Part V — and how to cite an entry so the date travels with it.
What the Places API will and will not give you
The hard limits of Google's public place data — how deep a search reads, how many reviews you get, what is missing from the public record, and what the owner-only endpoints return.
The GBP capability matrix
What every Google Business Profile API actually does in 2026 — alive, dead, or never worked — with the probe, the date, and how to tell an empty endpoint from a retired one.
Storing Google data legally
What Google's published terms permit you to store from the Places and Business Profile APIs — every clause quoted verbatim with its section number and revision date, plus the questions the documents do not answer.
Write limits and failure modes
The write-side catalogue — character caps, media rules, the video-in-posts 500, native scheduling, the shared edit budget, and why an HTTP 200 is not a publication.
What Google's own reporting hides
Nineteen verified facts about the shape of Google's performance and keyword data — thresholding, aggregation windows, omitted rows, missing days — and what each one breaks in a report.
AI engine probe recipes
Reproducible recipes for testing whether an AI engine recommends a business — prompt construction, geo-anchoring, run counts, how to record a result, and the failure modes that fake one.
The local search changelog
Dated local-search changes since 2020, each with the API or endpoint it touched and what it broke — sourced from Google's own change logs and from live probes.