How to Get Your Business Listed on Waze

Waze has over 140 million monthly active users navigating to their destinations. For businesses with physical locations — service businesses with showrooms, offices, or shop locations — a Waze listing puts your business directly in front of drivers who are already in navigation mode. When someone is driving near your location and looking for a service you offer, a Waze branded pin creates a moment of visibility that other digital platforms can't replicate. Here's how to get listed.

How Waze Business Listings Work

Waze has two types of business presence: organic listings (pulled from data sources like Google Maps) and branded pins (paid placements that create prominent branded icons on the Waze map). This guide covers both — getting the organic listing right is free and foundational; branded pins are a paid option worth understanding for high-traffic businesses.

Waze sources its organic business data primarily from Google Maps. If your Google Business Profile is complete, accurate, and well-optimized, Waze likely already has a basic listing for your business. To verify: open the Waze app, search your business name. If it appears, your organic presence is already there. If not, that signals your Google Maps data may be incomplete.

Setting Up Waze for Business (Branded Pins)

For a branded presence on Waze, go to waze.com/business and click "Get Started." Log in with a Google account (Waze is owned by Google). You'll enter your business information: business name, address, phone number, and business category. Upload your business logo — this becomes the branded pin that appears on the Waze map when drivers are nearby.

Waze for Business listings can target drivers within a customizable radius of your location. You can set a reach radius based on how far customers typically travel to reach you. For a local service business, 5–10 miles is typically the right radius.

Optimizing Your Waze Presence

Since Waze is powered by Google data, the most impactful optimization you can do for Waze visibility is optimizing your Google Business Profile. Ensure your address is precise (the pin location on Google Maps should be exactly at your building entrance or parking lot, not on the street or a nearby intersection). A misplaced Google Maps pin results in a misplaced Waze pin — fixing the pin location in Google Maps automatically improves the Waze experience.

For businesses with multiple locations, each location needs a separate Google Business Profile listing, which creates a separate Waze pin for each. Waze also allows you to report incorrect pin locations directly in the app — use the "Update place" option if you notice your own pin is misplaced.

Waze Ads: When They Make Sense

Waze's paid advertising product — Branded Pins and Takeovers — makes sense for businesses with high foot traffic or drive-through components: restaurants, auto shops, car washes, and retail. For service businesses without a customer-facing location (plumbers, electricians who go to customers), Waze ads are generally less relevant. The organic listing driven by your Google Business Profile is sufficient for most service businesses.

The simple action item here: verify your business appears correctly on Waze by searching it in the app, and ensure your Google Maps pin is placed precisely at your entrance. That's the foundation. PaperClick Marketing audits and optimizes presence across all location-based platforms as part of our local SEO programs. Let's make sure every map and navigation app is pointing customers to you.