Set your holiday hours now: what Maps and AI assistants do with them

Every December, plenty of accurate Business Profiles become wrong for a few days. The weekly hours are right, the shop is shut on Boxing Day, and nothing on the listing says so. Customers turn up to a locked door, and anything that reads the listing to answer "are they open?" has nothing better to go on.

Holiday hours fix this, and late October is the time to set them. It leaves room for Bing's publishing cycle, which takes up to two weeks outside North America,¹ and for a check before US Thanksgiving on 26 November.² The wider picture is in the guide to local SEO, and the case for looking after the profile at all is in why the profile does more work than your website.

Google keeps its own list of holidays by country, and on those dates a profile may show a warning that the business's hours might differ.³ The list includes days that are not bank or federal holidays: Christmas Eve in both countries, Saturday 26 December in the UK, and Black Friday and New Year's Eve in the US.³ Those days often have the oddest hours of all.

Boxing Day 2026 falls on a Saturday, so the bank holiday moves to Monday 28 December in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scotland's 2 January holiday also lands on a Saturday and moves to Monday 4 January.⁴ In the US, none of this season's federal holidays falls on a weekend, so there are no observed days to work out.²

Special hours replace your regular hours on the dates you choose and leave the weekly pattern alone.⁵ If you edit the regular hours to show Christmas week instead, somebody has to remember to change them back, and until they do the profile is wrong on every ordinary Monday. Bing, which imports hours from a linked Business Profile, copies the wrong pattern too.⁶

For a longer closure, Google draws the line at about a week. Its special hours page says they cover a closure of up to six days in a row,⁵ and its page on closing a business says seven or fewer.⁷ Beyond that, Google wants the business marked temporarily closed, and says temporarily closed businesses can rank after open ones for broad searches.⁷ A business closing 24 to 28 December is comfortably inside the limit.

On the dates in Google's list, a profile without special hours may carry that warning about hours that might differ.³ Google recommends confirming hours for official holidays even when they match your regular hours, so customers can see they are accurate.⁵ A customer who sees the warning has to ring to check, or picks a competitor whose hours are confirmed.

Yelp puts a note about special hours at the top of the business page and in the hours section once they are set.⁸ Apple lets a customer who finds a place closed when its card said open report it from the place card, and Apple reviews the report, edits the card and emails the business.⁹ In the US, Google Maps now lets people suggest new hours by chatting in Ask Maps or by uploading a photo of a sign, with Maps reviewing suggested edits for accuracy.¹⁰ Leave the holiday hours blank and a customer, or Apple, may correct them for you, in Apple's case after somebody has already found the door locked.

Google suggests confirming every official holiday, even one where you keep your regular hours.⁵ Two details still catch people out. Special hours only show if the profile's hours are set to Open with main hours. And special hours that run past midnight have to be split, so a pub open until 1am on New Year's Eve needs 31 December until midnight, then 1 January from midnight to 1am plus any other hours it keeps that day, because special hours replace that day's regular hours.⁵

Bing is the slow one. A change goes through a publishing cycle of 7 to 12 days in North America and up to two weeks elsewhere, and editing a listing while a change is pending pushes the date back.¹ A listing linked to Google syncs weekly, every two weeks or monthly, and Bing says the timing of synced updates can vary and some fields may not sync exactly.⁶ On a monthly sync, hours set on Google in mid-December may not reach Bing before Christmas, so set Google now and check the live Bing listing in December.

For a chain on Google, upload just the store code and special hours columns, because a column left blank under its heading erases what is there.⁵ Apple reads temporary hours as free text, and a location it cannot read with enough confidence has to be fixed by hand.¹² Then check a handful of branches on the live listings. A bulk upload that reports success only tells you the file was accepted, and multi-location reporting has the same blind spot.

Being open at the time of the search became a stronger local ranking signal at the end of 2023. On 15 December that year, Google's Search Liaison confirmed the change for non-navigational searches, the ones that are not looking for a particular business by name.¹⁴

For holidays, my reading is that a bakery closed on Christmas Day will drop for "bakery near me" that day and lose nothing, because it has nothing to sell. The damage comes from the two kinds of wrong listing. Shown as closed when you are open, you lose searches you could have served. Shown as open when you are shut, you win the search and lose the customer. Google's guidelines ask for your regular customer-facing hours,¹⁵ so list the real ones and do not pad them to rank.

None of the providers below documents how its assistant answers a question about a particular date. What they do document is where business details come from, and for most of them that is the listings above.

Gemini uses public Google Maps information to give a place's opening hours,¹⁶ and Gemini in Maps navigation takes questions such as when a named place closes.¹⁷ Ask Maps, the conversational search in Google Maps that brings in Gemini, has been rolling out since August to more than 150 countries and territories in English.¹⁰ Apple shows your normal hours on the place card, and the place card appears in Maps, Siri, Calendar, Messages and elsewhere.¹¹ Bing treats Bing Places as one of its main sources, but lets other sources take priority when they are fresher or when they conflict with it.¹

ChatGPT says less. OpenAI says it may share your approximate location with trusted third-party providers for things like nearby business listings, without naming them, and the search providers whose privacy policies it links are Microsoft and Shopify. It also warns that search results can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect.¹⁸

A correct answer about Boxing Day needs a source that states Boxing Day hours: special hours in a listing, or a page that says them. Without either, the most an assistant can work from is your weekly pattern, which says a business that opens on Saturdays is open on Saturday 26 December. That is why consistent details across every listing matter. If an assistant does get you wrong, there are ways to correct it, but this one is cheaper to prevent.

I would state the holiday hours on the website too, in plain text on the contact page and on each location page, using exactly the times the listings show. Apple asks that place card hours match the hours on your official website wherever possible.¹¹ Bing only applies hours that agree with trusted external data.¹

For markup, Google's LocalBusiness documentation uses openingHoursSpecification with validFrom and validThrough for hours that apply to a date range, and opens and closes both set to 00:00 for a day closed all day.¹⁹ Schema.org defines validThrough as the date after which the hours stop applying, and its own example gives a one-day entry the same date for both.²⁰ Schema.org also has a specialOpeningHoursSpecification property for overriding regular hours,²⁰ which Google's documentation does not mention, so I would follow Google's pattern. Here it is for a made-up bakery in Leeds that opens Monday to Saturday.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Bakery",
  "name": "Example Bakery",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Example Street",
    "addressLocality": "Leeds",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"],
      "opens": "08:00",
      "closes": "17:00"
    },
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "opens": "08:00",
      "closes": "14:00",
      "validFrom": "2026-12-24",
      "validThrough": "2026-12-24"
    },
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "opens": "00:00",
      "closes": "00:00",
      "validFrom": "2026-12-25",
      "validThrough": "2026-12-28"
    },
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "opens": "00:00",
      "closes": "00:00",
      "validFrom": "2027-01-01",
      "validThrough": "2027-01-01"
    }
  ]
}
</script>

The markup backs up the visible text on the page. I would not expect it to change what your Business Profile shows, which is set in the profile. Take the holiday entries out in January, and see the structured data guide for markup more generally.