GBPly — our sponsor and funder

Map Observer exists because of GBPly. They founded this publication, they fund it, and they are its sole source of revenue. We say that here, in the footer of every page, and at the bottom of every article, because a newsroom that hides who pays for it is not worth reading.

Who GBPly is

GBPly is a software platform for managing Google Business Profiles, built around a simple proposition: A Smarter Way to Manage Google Business Profiles. It is aimed at the same people this publication is written for — local SEO agencies managing profiles at scale, GBP specialists, and multi-location operators who need their listings accurate, consistent, and defensible across every location they run.

The full product, pricing, and feature detail lives on their own site at gbply.net. We deliberately do not maintain a feature list here — this is a disclosure page, not a sales page, and describing their roadmap as if it were our reporting would blur exactly the line we are trying to keep sharp.

What the sponsorship pays for

• Editorial production: reporting, editing, and fact-checking.
• Infrastructure: hosting, monitoring, source ingestion, and the AI tooling described in our editorial standards.
• The free reader products — the daily briefing, the newsletter, the trackers, the reference tools, the public API, and the embeds — all of which stay free and unpaywalled.

What the sponsorship does not buy

The commercial relationship stops at the door of the newsroom. GBPly does not:

• Select, commission, or kill stories.
• Review, approve, or amend copy before publication.
• See our reporting ahead of readers.
• Receive softer treatment than any other vendor, or influence how we cover their competitors.

If GBPly ships a change, gets something wrong, or is affected by a Google policy shift, we cover it on the same standard we apply to every other company in this industry. If we ever cannot report a story honestly because of who funds us, we will say so in place of the story.

How you will always be able to tell

• Every article that mentions GBPly or a direct competitor carries an inline disclosure at the point of mention.
• Sponsor placements are labelled “Sponsored” and are visually separate from editorial content.
• Links to GBPly carry rel="sponsored", the attribution search engines expect for a funded relationship.
• We have never published, and will not publish, an advertorial or a paid article dressed as reporting.

The full disclosure, including how this changed when GBPly took over funding, is on our ownership and funding page. Our ethics policy covers conflicts of interest, and corrections covers what happens when we get something wrong.