Service Area Map Generator
Type the town you work from and how far you travel, add up to 20 places you serve, and get three things: a PNG map of your service area for your website and your team, a copy-ready list of area names for forms, and areaServed JSON-LD for your site. Nothing is looked up until you click Draw map, and nothing you enter is sent to our servers.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License.
| # | Area | Matched to | From centre | Circle |
|---|
Merge the areaServed part into the LocalBusiness block your site already has rather than adding a second block. The LocalBusiness schema generator builds the rest.
What the map is for, and what Google reads
Our take: the map is for your website and your staff, not for Google. The picture helps a customer see in two seconds whether you come to them, and it settles arguments inside your own team about which side of the line a job falls on. The service area on your Business Profile is typed in as named places (Google's help page below describes no other way), and we found no Google page that says it reads a map image from your website. That is our reading, not a statement from Google.
Google's help page, Manage your service areas for service-area & hybrid businesses, sets the limits. We opened it for this page; the quotes are Google's words, and Google can change them.
| Limit | What Google's help page says |
|---|---|
| How many | "You can set up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postal codes, or other areas you serve." |
| Radius | "You can't set your service area as a radius distance around your business." Google adds that if you previously set it up that way, you can't edit it. |
| How far | "The boundaries of your overall area shouldn't be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based." |
| Detail | "When you set your service area, be as specific and accurate as possible." |
| Delay | "If approved, service area edits may take up to 48 hours to show on your Business Profile." |
On hiding the address, Google's guidelines for representing your business say: "If you're a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers."
Three outputs, three readers
| Output | Where it goes | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
| PNG map | Your service-area page, quotes, dispatch wall, staff handbook | Customers and your team. Not an input to your Business Profile. |
| Area names | The service area field in your Business Profile (up to 20), and the same wording on your website | Google and customers |
| areaServed JSON-LD | Your website's LocalBusiness markup | Any reader of schema.org markup. Google's local business structured data page, which we opened, does not list areaServed or GeoCircle, so we could not confirm a Google feature that uses it. |
The markup is still worth having, because it keeps the website saying the same thing as the profile. In a small sample of 64 business homepages from our own customers, 34 carried a LocalBusiness-type block and 19 of those declared areaServed. We did not check whether the values matched their profiles, so treat the 19 as a count of who tried, not who got it right.
Choose the 20 names, not the circle
The radius is a planning aid. What you hand to Google is a list, and a list has a ceiling of 20, so the decision that matters is which 20. Our rule of thumb:
- Rank places by work you have done, not by population. A big town you have never driven to earns its slot less than a small one that sends you three jobs a month.
- Cut anywhere you would refuse a normal job. If a call-out there needs a surcharge or a phone call first, it is outside your real area whatever the circle says. The table under the map flags names that fall outside your circle.
- Check the drive for the furthest name. Google's guide is about two hours of driving, and the tool can only measure a straight line. Open a route planner and time it.
- Keep the wording identical everywhere. The list you copy here should be the one on your profile, your website and every directory that asks for areas.
If your goal is to be found in towns far from your base, a longer list will not do it. Our guides on ranking in other cities and location pages cover what does.
No premises: why the map should show a town, not your door
For a service-area business, centring a map on a street address is the wrong default. If your address is hidden on your profile, a PNG centred on it publishes the address anyway, in a picture nobody thought to check. Centre on the town or the nearest landmark.
There is a second reason this matters to us. In our own build work we have had OpenStreetMap, the very map this tool draws on, refuse a service-area client with no storefront, and we listed that business on Brownbook instead. OpenStreetMap's good-practice page says data should be verifiable, meaning "another mapper should be able to come to the same place and collect the same data", which a business with no premises cannot offer. That is one case from our builds, not a rule we have measured across businesses. The details are in service area business citations, and the other side of the coin, what OpenStreetMap wants from a business that does have premises, is in how to add your business to OpenStreetMap.
One related number from our free tool: in 99 anonymous NAP checker scans since 2026-09-04, 60% of the businesses were missing from OpenStreetMap. We do not split that by business type, so it does not say how many of them had no premises. For a business that does, adding a point is the fix. For one that does not, the fix is a different set of listings, which is what the local citation finder narrows down by country and industry.
How to use the results
- Draw the map and read the table first. Fix any name that was matched to the wrong place by adding a state or country.
- Download the PNG and put it on your service-area page with a sentence naming the towns, and a link to OpenStreetMap's copyright page near it. Keep the credit drawn on the image.
- Copy the names into your Business Profile's service area, one at a time, within the limits above.
- Paste the JSON-LD into your site's existing LocalBusiness markup, then check it at validator.schema.org.
- Check the rest of your record. The same names, plus your phone and hidden-address rules, should match on every listing. The free NAP checker shows where they do not, and our citation building service keeps them consistent across directories.
Frequently asked questions
What is a service area map generator?
A tool that turns a base town and a distance into a picture of where you work: a circle drawn on a real map, with pins for the towns you name. This one also gives you the list of area names to paste into forms, and the same areas as areaServed JSON-LD for your website. Nothing is saved on our side; the map is drawn in your browser.
How many service areas can I add to a Google Business Profile?
Up to 20, according to Google's help page "Manage your service areas for service-area & hybrid businesses", which says "You can set up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postal codes, or other areas you serve." The tool warns you when your list is longer than 20.
Can I set a radius on my Business Profile?
No. The same Google help page says "You can't set your service area as a radius distance around your business." and that a profile set up that way in the past can't be edited. You enter named areas, one at a time. That is why this tool gives you the circle for planning and a name list for Google.
How far can a service area reach?
Google's help page says "The boundaries of your overall area shouldn't be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based." That is driving time, not distance, so a straight-line circle can mislead: a 40-mile circle over a river or a mountain range may be far more than two hours. Check the drive for your furthest area before you list it.
Does Google read the map image or the areaServed markup?
We could not find any Google page that says it does either. Google's help page describes the service area as areas you enter on your Business Profile, and says nothing about reading a picture on your website. For areaServed, we opened Google's local business structured data page and it does not list areaServed or GeoCircle among its properties (it lists geo for the business location). The markup is valid schema.org (areaServed accepts a Place, a Text or a GeoShape such as GeoCircle, per schema.org), so other readers can use it, but we would not expect a Google feature from it.
Is the service area map generator free? What does it send?
It is free with no signup, and our servers never receive what you type. When you click Draw map, your browser asks the OpenStreetMap geocoder (Nominatim) to find your town and each named area, one lookup at a time with a gap of just over a second, then loads map tiles from tile.openstreetmap.org. Those services see the place names you typed and your IP address, and your browser also tells them which site the request came from. Nothing is looked up until you click.
Why did a town land in the wrong place?
The geocoder returns its best match for the words you gave it, and many names repeat (Springfield, Richmond, Newport). Add the state, county or country to the name, for example "Springfield, Illinois", and draw again. The table under the map shows what each name was matched to and how far it is from your centre, so a wrong match is easy to spot.
Can I put the PNG on my website?
Yes, with the credit. The credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors" and the address openstreetmap.org/copyright are drawn onto the image, so keep them and do not crop them out. OpenStreetMap's copyright page asks anyone using the map to credit OpenStreetMap and make clear the data is available under the Open Database License, and it says you may link to that page. OpenStreetMap Foundation's attribution guidelines say the credit should typically sit in a corner of the map and that images where a link is not possible should print the copyright URL. We did not find a rule on OpenStreetMap's tile policy page about exporting a map as an image, so if you plan to publish the PNG widely, read that policy yourself.