Google Business Profile Post Safe Zone Checker (Free — Overlay Your Own Image)

Google accepts Business Profile post images at a 4:3 ratio (1200 × 900 px is the recommended upload size), but it does not always display them at that ratio. In the Maps carousel and the Search knowledge panel, the image is frequently presented closer to square — trimming the left and right edges and pulling in roughly 12.5% on each side. Separately, the top of the image can be cut by a preview window on mobile knowledge panels, and the bottom sits immediately above the post’s title and call-to-action button (Book, Shop, Learn More, Order, and so on), creating a second trim-risk band at the lower edge.

The practical result is that a 4:3 image has a much smaller safe area than the upload canvas suggests. Whatever you place in the outer columns or the top and bottom strips may display fine in the full-size post view — and then silently disappear on the surface most of your customers actually see.

The recommended safe area sits in the central 75% of the width and the middle 72% of the height — roughly corresponding to the 900 × 648 region of a 1200 × 900 upload. Place your logo, product, face, offer text, and any design element that needs to read clearly inside that box, and let purely decorative background fill the outer margins.

Call-to-action copy in the image itself needs special care: the bottom band is both a trim zone and adjacent to Google’s own CTA button, so text near the bottom can be visually swallowed by the button below it even when the pixel isn’t technically cropped. Keeping key messages above the bottom 16% removes that ambiguity. The same logic applies to fine-print or address text near the top — pull it into the safe centre and it will hold up across desktop Search, mobile Maps, and the full-size post view.

The readout under the preview reports one thing: how much of the total 4:3 frame each overlay zone covers — a pure geometry calculation derived from the rectangle fractions. It is not analysing your image and cannot tell you whether your subject falls inside or outside a zone. That judgment belongs to you: load your image, look at where the overlays land, and decide whether anything important is at risk.

Use the legend toggles to isolate a single zone when you are fine-tuning a layout. The per-zone notes explain what each region represents and why it matters. The safe-centre highlight shows the area that is reliably visible across the major Google surfaces — if your key content fits inside it, you have covered the most common crop scenarios. The overlays are derived from observed cropping behaviour, but Google updates its display logic independently of any third-party measurement, so leave yourself a margin rather than placing critical content right at a zone edge.