QR Code for Google My Business

Google Already Makes You One, and Nobody Mentions It

Search this topic and you get a page of generators. Every one I opened starts by asking for your link. Not one of them starts by telling you that Google gives you the code for free, inside the profile you already own, because that sentence costs them the sale. So here it is first.

1. 1
   Open Your Business Profile on a Computer

   Sign in to the Google account that manages the business and search for your own business name, or go to the profile from Google Maps. The phone app will not do, and that is the whole reason people give up at this point.

2. 2
   Select Read Reviews, Then Get More Reviews

   Google shows the review link and a QR code together in the same panel. Copy takes the link. The QR code sits next to it as an image.

3. 3
   Right-Click the QR Code and Save Image As

   That is the download, and Google says so plainly. There is no export menu, no size options and no vector file. You get whatever pixels the panel is showing.

4. 4
   Scan It Before You Send It to a Printer

   Use a phone that is not signed in to the Google account that manages the business. You want to see what a customer sees, which is not what you see.

Two limits are worth knowing before you build a print run around it. Google states the desktop-only restriction itself, on its help page for creating a link or QR code to request reviews. And the download is a right-click on an image, so what you get is whatever pixel dimensions that panel happened to be rendering. That is fine for a sticker and wrong for anything a print shop touches, where you want a vector file that stays sharp at any size.

If you are printing one card for the counter, use Google’s code and stop reading. Genuinely. The rest of this page is for the cases where that image is not enough, and for the decision it hides from you, which is which address ends up inside the pattern.

Six Addresses Point at Your Business. Two Open the Review Box

This is the part that actually goes wrong. Google will hand you at least six different addresses that all lead to the same business, and they split into two groups that do very different jobs.

A review link opens the review box with the stars already on screen. A listing linkopens your Business Profile, where the customer sees your hours, your photos, your directions and everything else, and has to go looking for the button that writes a review. Both are useful. Printing the second one under the words “leave us a review” is the mistake, and it is the one that fills the Business Profile community threads.

The rule is boring and it works: read what your card says, then encode the address that does that. Directions sticker on the van, Maps link. Review card in the takeaway bag, review link.

What Each Address Costs in Printed Millimetres

Every character you encode becomes modules, and modules become printed width. So the address is not just a routing decision, it is a size decision, and it is measurable. The table below encodes all six with this site’s engine at build time and reads each symbol back with a decoder before publishing the numbers.

The result I did not expect is in the top three rows. The review short link, the Maps share link and the Maps CID link all land on the same version 3 symbol, even though one is ten characters longer than another, because they fall inside the same capacity band. The standard advice is to shorten your link. Between those three, shortening buys you exactly nothing.

Where it does bite is the place ID link, which most older guides still tell you to build by hand, and the full Maps URL out of the address bar. That last one needs 26mm at level M and 34mm at level H against about 15mm for the code in your own profile panel. On a business card that is the difference between a code that reads and a code that people give up on. If you want the full arithmetic behind those millimetres, the minimum print size guide works it back from scan distance rather than repeating a number.

What Happens When a Customer Scans It Signed Out

Nobody writes this bit down, so we went and requested each address with no Google session and recorded where it ended up.

The middle row is the expensive one. A review link with a wrong token does not return an error. It redirects once and drops your customer on the Google homepage, looking exactly like a scan that worked. You would never know from the print proof, from the PDF, or from glancing at the code.

So test the finished code rather than the link you copied. Scan it, read the address in your phone’s preview banner before tapping anything, and do it on a phone that is not signed in as the business. If the printed artwork is all you have, reading the code back out of the image shows you the exact string inside the symbol.

The Version I Would Actually Print

Here is the opinion, and it is the last row of that table: encode a short path on a domain you already own, and point that path at Google’s review link.

It is the smallest code on the page at 13.2mm, it reads back cleanly, and it is the only option on the table you can change your mind about. That last part is not hypothetical. Google has already retired one link format: business short names, the g.page/yourname shape people printed on menus for years, can no longer be created or edited, and Google says the existing ones still work but are no longer shown on the profile. Anyone whose printed code went through their own domain shrugged at that. Anyone who encoded the raw address was one policy change away from a reprint.

No domain, or no appetite for setting up a redirect? Then a dynamic code does the same job here for free, with no account, and gives you a scan count as a side effect. Read the trade honestly first: a dynamic code works only while the service answering that redirect keeps answering, which is true of every dynamic provider including the ones charging monthly. The static versus dynamic comparison measures what that redirect costs and buys.

And if the code is going on something you reprint every few months anyway, a table tent or a seasonal flyer, skip all of this. Encode the review short link straight from your profile. The reprint you were doing regardless is your safety net.

The Rules Google Enforces, Quoted Rather Than Summarised

The code is the easy half. The wording next to it is where local businesses get their reviews wiped, and three lines from Google’s policy for contributed content on Maps decide most of it. Quoted rather than paraphrased, because the paraphrases in circulation are softer than the original.

Read the second one twice if you have ever been pitched a review funnel. A landing page that filters by star rating before it decides whether to show you Google is sold as a feature, and this line is what it runs into. The QR code is not the problem. What sits behind it is.

The third quote is the one people find unfair, so it is worth being precise. A code printed on a card and left on the counter is not pressure. A staff member holding out a phone while the customer types is. Google goes further in the same section and names review targets per shift, and asking for a server’s name in the review. A policy only bothers to name a practice that is happening.

Where It Goes, and Two Places It Does Not

The usual version of this section is sixteen surfaces in a bulleted list, every one of them recommended. Here are six with a view attached, including two we would argue against.

Whichever surface wins, the size rule does not care about it. The review short link needs about 15mm of width at level M, and about 18mm once a logo forces you to level H. Those figures assume a phone held close in decent light. Double them for anything read across a room, and leave the quiet zone clear. A printer trimming into that blank margin is the failure that catches people out, because the code still looks untouched afterwards. The four ways a code fails has each threshold reproduced and read back.

What This Does and Does Not Do for Local Rankings

A QR code is not a ranking factor.

Nothing on your card gets read by Google, and no page gets stronger because you printed one. What the code can do is raise the number of reviews you collect, and reviews do count. Google’s own guidance on local ranking lists relevance, distance and prominence, and says prominence is based partly on how many reviews you have, with more reviews and positive ratings able to help your local ranking. That is the whole mechanism. A shortcut to the review form, feeding a factor Google has confirmed in writing.

The same page flags it as important that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Remember that the next time someone quotes you a monthly fee for a QR code that will fix your Maps position.

What QRMakery Makes Today

There is no Google Business Profile tool on this site, and this post is not a soft sell for one. The closest thing is the review code page, which measures the four review link forms against each other so you can see which one opens the star form and what each costs to print. Behind it is the general generator, which takes the review link you copied and shows you the minimum print width for that exact string, refusing the download if it cannot read the finished image back. If you want your logo in the middle, the logo page caps the covered area against the error-correction budget rather than letting you cover whatever looks right. For a chain, the bulk generator takes a column of review links and returns a ZIP of named codes, each decoded before it is packed.

What we do not do is read your Business Profile, look up your place ID for you, or manage your reviews. Those are three separate products and we have built none of them. The honest version of this page is that Google gives most local businesses everything they need in four clicks, and the reason to bring the link here is print quality, colour and scale, not access to anything Google is withholding.