Business Profile QR codes and the marketing kit Google gives you free

Google generates the review QR code for you, inside your own Business Profile, and charges nothing for it. The search phrase this page targets asks for a third-party generator, and the job it is being asked to do is a control Google documents in three steps on one help page. The constraint worth knowing first is that you have to be at a computer.

The generator you are looking for is a control in your profile

Google’s page for this is “Create a Google link or QR code to request reviews”, and the route on it is short. “Go to your Business Profile”, then “Select Read Reviews Get more reviews”. From there, “You can share the link or QR code directly or use the other options.”

Two separate controls come out of that screen. For the address, “To copy the review link, select Copy”. For the image, Google’s instruction is literally a right-click: “Right-click the QR code. Select Save image as…”

Nothing on that page mentions a price, a plan, a trial or an upgrade. The pricing claim lives on Google’s Business Profile product page, the one titled “Get Listed on Google - Google Business Profile”, which opens on “Stand out on Google with a free Business Profile” and answers the question outright in its FAQ: “Yes, creating a Business Profile and listing your business on Google is free.”

We are not naming or linking a third-party QR generator here, because we fetched none of them and will not recommend a tool we have not read. The structural point matters more than a recommendation anyway. A generator encodes a string you paste into it, so it cannot produce your review link; it can only wrap the one Google already gave you. Which leaves one question to ask before anything goes to print: does the image encode Google’s link directly, or a redirect on the vendor’s domain that stops resolving when your subscription does?

What Google’s code actually points at

Google describes the destination as an action rather than an address. The help page tells you to copy the link and save the image, and never prints the URL the code encodes. It also states no file format, no pixel size, no minimum print dimension, and offers no vector or PDF version. Those are negative findings about the page we read.

Two consequences follow for printed material. The code is not reproducible by hand: with the encoded URL unpublished, you cannot rebuild an identical code from a documented string, only download it again from the profile. And it has to be tested the way a customer meets it, by scanning the saved image with a phone that is not signed in to the account managing the profile and checking that it opens the review box for the right location.

The desktop-only limitation, in Google’s words

One sentence on that page settles whether you can do this from a phone:

Currently, reviews QR codes can only be generated on a computer browser, not on mobile devices.

Three things in it repay attention. It is about generating, not scanning, so a code made on a laptop works perfectly on the phones it is pointed at. It is scoped to the QR code, and the copy control for the link beside it carries no such note. And “Currently” is Google’s own hedge, attached to no date: it describes today’s product, not a promise either way.

The working version: make the code once at a computer and keep the image with your print assets.

Printing and placement

Google’s placement suggestions sit on the same page, and the one that matters for a physical code is “Print and display the QR code in your store”. Receipts get their own line, “Include it on your receipts”.

That is the extent of it. Google suggests where the code goes and nothing about how to produce it, so size, contrast, mounting height and the wording beside it are yours. The one word worth borrowing is Google’s own: the code is displayed, a printed thing a customer can walk past, not a screen held out at them.

The marketing kit, and what we found instead

This article’s title promises a marketing kit, so here is the correction rather than the promise. We looked for a current Google marketing kit page on 19 September 2026 and could not find one.

What we checked. The old address, marketingkit.withgoogle.com, no longer serves a kit: it redirects to google.com/business and lands on the Business Profile product page, which sells the profile and carries no poster, sticker, table tent or download. Google’s Business Profile Help pages covering review requests tell you to print the QR code yourself, which is the only printing instruction we found from Google. Searching the help centre for a kit article returned nothing we could fetch and cite.

Walkthroughs of a kit are not something we fetched, so we cannot say what they still describe. We have not seen that tool, cannot confirm it still runs, and instructions for a retired one are worse than none.

So what Google hands you free is the pair on that one help page, a link and a QR code, inside a profile its product page calls free. Smaller than the kit this page went looking for, and the part that can be cited.

What happens to the code when the profile changes

Google publishes no lifetime for the code or for the link behind it, so treat every printed copy as perishable. What Google does document is what happens to the profile underneath it, which is what the code depends on.

“Move your reviews across Business Profiles” opens on the mechanism: “When you make changes to your business, you can request to move your reviews from an old Business Profile to a new one, or we might move reviews automatically for you.” It adds a warning that is really about printed material: “Do not create a new Business Profile because of a change in a physical location or ownership.” A new profile is a new profile, and the code on your window still points at the old one.

Relocation and new management are both covered, and in both the profile survives. “If you move to a new address and keep the same business name, Google will transfer your reviews automatically.” And: “If a business has a new owner or manager but keeps the same name, the reviews remain.” Closure changes what a scan can do rather than where it goes: “Customers can leave new reviews for temporarily closed businesses but not for permanently closed ones.” A code on the door of a business marked permanently closed can no longer collect one, whatever it opens.

Suspension is the case that kills the code outright. Google’s page on suspended profiles states the effect of a removal plainly: “The public can’t go to the profile.” A code in your window is then a dead link in physical form, and the instinct it provokes is the one Google prohibits on the same page: “Do not create a new Business Profile for the same business while your appeal is under review.”

So: re-download the image and re-scan it after an ownership change, a relocation, a suspension or a reinstatement, and once more before any print run.

After the scans turn into reviews: responding to negative reviews, replies Google rejects, fake reviews, removal, and review management software.

Google’s QR code generator is the Get more reviews control in your own Business Profile: desktop-only by Google’s own note, delivered as an image you right-click and save with no documented dimensions, and with no current Google marketing kit page to go with it. Generate it there, test it on a phone that is not yours, and buy nothing to get the code.