Apple Business Connect is now Apple Business: how to manage your Apple Maps listing

If you have an iPhone, try this: open Apple Maps and search for your own business. What comes up is your place card, the panel with your hours, phone number, photos and a button for directions. A lot of business owners have never looked at theirs, and some are surprised to find old hours, a missing website or a stock photo of the street.

That card is what every iPhone user sees when they look you up in Maps, ask Siri for directions or tap a business name in Safari. Apple doesn't publish how many local searches run through Maps, but in Canada iPhones are a big share of the phones in your customers' pockets, so it's worth twenty minutes to get right.

What happened to Apple Business Connect?

Apple Business Connect was Apple's free tool for claiming and editing your place card. In March 2026 Apple announced it was folding Business Connect, Apple Business Manager and Apple Business Essentials into one service called Apple Business, which launched on April 14, 2026.

If you had already claimed your location in Business Connect, your listing and account moved across on their own. You sign in with the same Apple Account as before and manage everything from Apple Business. If you never claimed your listing, Apple Business is now where you do it, and it's still free.

The device management side (setting up company iPhones and Macs) is part of the same service now, but you can ignore it if all you want is your Maps listing.

Claiming your listing

1. Sign in to Apple Business with an Apple Account. Use one tied to a business email address you'll keep, not a personal address that leaves with an employee.
2. Search for your business. If Apple already has a place card for you, which is likely if you've been around a while, claim it. If not, add a new location.
3. Verify that you're allowed to manage it. Apple usually asks for a phone call to the business number or a document such as a utility bill or business registration.
4. Fill in the details and submit them. Apple reviews changes before they go live, which can take a few days.

What to fill in

Start with the basics and make them match your Google Business Profile and your website word for word: business name, address (or service area if customers don't come to you), phone number, website and hours. Apple, Google, Bing and the AI assistants all cross-check these details. When they disagree, at best a customer gets confused and at worst a listing gets filtered out.

Then the parts most businesses skip:

• Category. Pick the most specific one Apple offers for your main service.
• Photos. Add a logo and a cover photo, plus real pictures of your premises, team or work. Apple shows a header photo prominently, so choose one that looks good small.
• Holiday and special hours. Set them before each holiday so nobody drives to a locked door on Victoria Day.
• Action links. These are buttons on your place card that open your own booking, ordering or quote page. Point them at a real page on your site, not the homepage.
• Showcases. Short promotions, such as a seasonal offer or an event, shown on your card for a set period. They need approval, so submit them a few days ahead.

Ads on Apple Maps

The other big change in 2026 is advertising. Apple launched ads in Apple Maps for businesses in Canada and the US in August 2026, managed from inside Apple Business. A small business can promote its place card in Maps search results with a photo and a short message, and set its own budget with no minimum spend. Businesses with more than five locations are pointed to the full Apple Ads platform instead.

Is it worth trying? It depends on how your customers find you. A restaurant, salon, garage or shop that gets walk-in traffic from people searching nearby is a natural fit. A business that works mostly by referral, or sells to other businesses, will probably get more from its Google profile and website first. If you do try Maps ads, start small and watch calls and direction requests in the Insights section before raising the budget.

Why bother with Apple at all?

Plenty of owners assume Google covers everything. It doesn't. When an iPhone user asks Siri for "a mechanic near me", taps a business name in a text message or uses CarPlay, the answer comes from Apple Maps data, and Apple's data comes partly from what you submit and partly from third-party sources that may be years out of date.

Claiming the listing also gives you Insights: how many people viewed your card, tapped to call, asked for directions or visited your website. It's a quick way to see whether Apple users are finding you at all.

Keep it current

Put a reminder in your calendar for the first week of every quarter. Check hours, phone number, photos and action links, and set holiday hours for the months ahead. While you're there, do the same on Google and Bing Places. Consistent details across all three also help AI assistants describe your business correctly, which we cover in our guide to AEO and GEO.

If you'd like us to handle the listings for you, it's part of our Google Business Profile management service, which covers Apple and Bing as well.