Hospital Google Business Profile Study: What 216 Indian Listings Show

Data collected on 5 November 2026 by Gaurav Phogat. Method, coding rules and dataset are published below.

I read 216 Google Business Profile listings of Indian hospitals across 12 cities, using the top Google Maps results for each city. The basics are almost always done: 96% link a website and 97% show a phone number. Effort falls away after that. Only 34% show an owner post from the last 90 days, 23% replied to none of the reviews I sampled, and one to three star reviews get answered less often than happy ones.

This article is part of the healthcare digital growth series, best read in order from the pillar.

Last updated: 5 November 2026.

For many patients and attendants, the Google listing is the first page of the hospital they ever see. It carries the phone number, the way to the gate, the rating and a stream of strangers talking about your staff. Marketing teams know this, yet listings rarely get the attention a website redesign gets. So I wanted to see what the top results look like on one ordinary day.

Key findings

1. 207 of 216 listings (96%) link to a website and 210 (97%) show a phone number. The basics are largely covered.
2. Only 73 of 216 (34%) show an owner post from the last 90 days. 104 listings (48%) show no owner posts section at all.
3. 45 of 197 listings (23%) replied to none of the reviews I sampled. At the other end, 94 (48%) replied to 80% or more.
4. 38% against 60%. Reviews of one to three stars got an owner reply 38% of the time. All other reviews got one 60% of the time.
5. Median reply share: 90% at national chains, 55% at standalone hospitals. Seven of the 8 government listings replied to none.
6. 20 of 216 (9%) have a word such as “best” inside the business name, and 53 (25%) add keywords or descriptors beyond the plain name.
7. 63 of 207 website links go to a location or inner page. The rest go to a homepage, including 118 of the 119 standalone hospitals with a link.

How I did this

Sample. I searched Google Maps for “hospital in [city]” in 12 cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Ahmedabad (grouped here as metros), plus Jaipur, Lucknow, Kochi and Indore (tier 2). I took the first 18 organic results that were hospitals, skipping sponsored results. That gives 216 listings: 127 standalone, 47 national chain, 28 regional chain, 8 government and 6 teaching. I skipped a small list of brands for independence reasons and moved to the next result. Hospital type is my own coding, based on the listing name and website, and treats branches of one group as separate listings because each has its own profile.

What I recorded. For each listing I read the public panel in a desktop Chrome browser on 5 November 2026: primary category, rating, review count, website link and where it points, phone, whether an owner photos tile appears, whether a claim or “add missing information” prompt appears, visitor updates, a Q&A section, an owner posts section and the age of the latest post.

Reviews. On the Reviews tab I chose the Newest sort and read up to the first 20 reviews that loaded, with star rating and whether an owner reply was shown. For reply templates, I compared the opening 70 characters of each reply within a listing. I report reply numbers for the 197 listings where I could read at least 10 reviews (188 of them gave me the full 20). I did not store reviewer names or review text.

Limits. This is the top of Maps for one query on one day from one logged in browser, so it leans towards visible, larger private hospitals and contains few government sites. Results vary by person and location. The Newest sort did not appear to hold on every listing, so treat the reviews as a sample of what loads first rather than strictly the latest 20, and I have left review freshness out of the findings for that reason. Maps no longer shows a public photo count, so I could not report one. My readings of opening hours and booking links turned out unreliable once I checked them, since nearby listings and buttons confuse a text read, and I have left both out. Post age comes from the first date near the owner posts section and could be off in a few cases. Government and teaching groups are small, so read those counts, not the percentages.

The basics are done. Fresh activity is not

Nobody at the top of Maps is missing a website link for lack of trying. Nine listings had none, and six had no phone. Only 3 of the 216 showed a prompt to claim the business, and 12 showed Google’s “add missing information” prompt.

Posts are where the field splits. 112 listings show a “From the owner” section, and of the 106 where I could read a date, 69 had posted in the last 30 days. Posting tends to be a live habit or not done at all. Twenty seven listings had their latest post between three months and a year old, and 6 had nothing newer than a year. By type, 39 of 47 national chain listings show the section, then 16 of 28 regional chain, 56 of 127 standalone, 1 of 6 teaching and none of the 8 government listings.

Compare that with what visitors do. 162 listings (75%) show updates from visitors, more than the 112 that show anything from the owner. On a lot of these profiles, the public is the more active publisher. On photos, 186 listings (86%) at least show an owner photos tile, but only 1 of the 8 government listings does.

None of the 216 showed a Q&A section in the panel I read. If your Google Business Profile checklist still has a line for seeding questions and answers, check whether that section still appears for your listing before spending time on it.

Review replies: common at chains, patchy elsewhere

I sampled 3,850 reviews on 197 listings, and 2,168 of them (56%) had a reply from the owner. The median listing replied to 75%. But this is a split population. Nearly half reply to almost everything and nearly a quarter reply to nothing.

If you are working on this now, read it alongside Google Business Profile vs website, Local SEO vs Google Ads for clinics and Hospital Website Chatbots: I Tested 27 Indian Sites.

Hospital type explains much of it. Chains appear to run this as a process. Of the 45 listings with no replies at all, 31 were standalone hospitals, 7 government, 3 national chain, 2 regional chain and 2 teaching. My read is that this is a capacity problem more than an attitude problem, and it is cheap to solve.

The more uncomfortable number is this one. Of the 599 sampled reviews with one to three stars, 228 (38%) had a reply. Of the other 3,251, 1,940 (60%) did. Hospitals are thanking happy patients more often than they respond to unhappy ones. Yet a calm reply to a poor review is what a prospective patient reads most closely. I cover how to run this properly in my guide to patient reviews strategy.

Templates are the other pattern. Among the 132 listings with at least five replies in the sample, 41 (31%) used half or fewer distinct openings, and 21 (16%) used one opening for every five replies or worse. This undercounts templates, because a reply that starts with the reviewer’s name counts as distinct even when the rest is pasted. Templates are fine for a short thank you. They read poorly on a complaint, when the same line goes to someone describing a bad night in the ward.

Ratings bunch up, review volume does not

The median rating was 4.6, and 150 of 216 listings (69%) sat at 4.5 or above. Only 13 were below 4.0, and government hospitals had the lowest median at 3.7 on a small base. Since most top ranked listings look alike on stars, the rating alone does little to set you apart.

Volume varies far more. The median listing had 4,047 reviews. Sixty listings (28%) had 10,000 or more, and 14 had fewer than 500. The gap between a median national chain unit and a median standalone hospital is about five to one. I cannot say from this data that review count causes rank, as I only looked at listings that already rank. What I can say is that a standalone hospital in these results is competing next to units with far larger review bases, so a steady, ethical request process matters. Metros had a median of 5,436 reviews and tier 2 cities 3,046, and both had the same 75% median reply share.

Names and categories: where listings get creative

Google asks that a listing carry the real world business name. In this sample, 53 listings (25%) add a descriptor, keyword or separator beyond the plain name, usually a phrase like multispeciality hospital in a city or a list such as an accreditation and an emergency line. Twenty listings (9%) include a word such as “best” in the name: 7 national chain, 3 regional chain and 10 standalone. Seven of the 20 were in Hyderabad.

Beyond Google’s own rule, a superlative in a hospital’s public name raises a question under Indian medical advertising rules. I walk through those in my note on hospital advertising rules in India. Have your compliance team look at it.

Primary category was simpler. “Hospital” led with 114 listings (53%), then “Private hospital” 44, “General hospital” 36, “Government hospital” 7, “Specialized hospital” 5, “Medical Center” 3 and “Heart hospital” 3. A few looked off: a multi unit hospital brand listed as “Doctor”, and one unit listed as “Internal medicine ward”. Category affects which searches a listing can show for, so spend five minutes checking yours.

On website links, chains send people to the right place. Of 47 national chain listings, 43 link to an inner or location page. Of the 119 standalone hospitals with a link, 118 go to a homepage, which is fair when a hospital has one location and a good homepage. Forty listings have query parameters such as tracking tags on the link, so some teams can likely see this traffic in analytics. If you run several units, managing profiles across hospital units covers the setup in more detail.

What this means for hospital marketers

Everything below is about digital operations and brand, not clinical content. Have your medical and compliance teams approve anything patient facing.

• Set a reply rule and start with low star reviews. A named owner, a two working day target and a short approved note for complaints. Never confirm that someone was a patient, and never discuss care in public. Move the conversation to a phone line or helpdesk.
• Write replies people can tell were read. Keep a thank you template for short positive reviews. Write complaints by hand, and refer to the issue raised without any personal or clinical detail.
• Post one factual update a month per unit. New OPD timings, a new department, a health awareness day note, a parking change. Only a third of listings here are active, so this is an easy way to look alive. The health days calendar gives you enough dates for a year.
• Use the real name. Remove superlatives and keyword strings from the business name. Put services in the description and in posts instead.
• Check the primary category per unit. Search your own listing and read what it says. Do this for every branch, because chains can drift.
• Link each unit to its own page. Add UTM tags so you can see calls and visits from the listing in analytics. My free UTM builder and profile health check help here.
• Ask for reviews with care. A neutral request after discharge or an OPD visit, to everyone, with no incentive and no script. Keep this consent aware under the DPDP Act.
• Check visitor photos and updates monthly. They appear on 75% of listings here. Flag anything showing patients or records for removal.

For a single location or a doctor’s own profile, my Google Business Profile setup guide is the practical starting point.

Download the data

The full dataset (CSV) has one row per listing in shuffled order: hospital type, city tier, primary category, rating, review count band, website link type, phone, photos, prompts, owner posts, name flags, and the review reply counts. It contains no hospital or reviewer names, exact review counts or city names, so listings stay anonymous. Collection date is in every row. It is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with credit to Gaurav Phogat and a link to this page.

How to cite this study

Phogat, G. (2026). Google Business Profiles of Indian hospitals: what 216 listings show. gauravphogat.com. https://gauravphogat.com/hospital-google-business-profile-study/. Data collected 5 November 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Questions people ask