How to Get Your Cinema Showtimes on Google

To get your cinema showtimes on Google, you have to get them into the third-party showtime databases Google licenses, not just onto your website. In practice that means three things: a verified Google Business Profile in the movie theater category, a ticketing or scheduling system that sends your full programme to a showtime data provider such as The Boxoffice Company, and crawlable film pages of your own that rank in the ordinary results underneath. There is no form where a cinema can type its times into Google directly, and no public Google showtimes API.

Search your cinema's name and a panel of Google showtimes appears above everything else, often before your own website. For most exhibitors it is the single highest-traffic surface they do not control, and when it is wrong, the complaint lands at your box office rather than at Google's.

The most common assumption is that Google reads those times off the cinema's website, and that better markup will fix them. It will not, because that is not where the data comes from. This guide explains where cinema listings on Google come from, who supplies them in each market, what schema markup does and does not do, and how to fix the usual faults.

Why cinema listings on Google matter

Showtimes are the most common thing people do on a phone before choosing a film. In an IAB and InMobi survey of 373 US mobile users (August to September 2012), 59% of regular moviegoers had checked showtimes and theaters for a specific film on their phone in the previous six months, the joint-highest activity measured. Only 24% had bought a ticket on the phone. The survey is old and small, so read it as direction rather than size, but the pattern has not reversed: people look up times far more often than they buy, and the place they look is search.

Show the data as a table

Activity in previous six months	Share of regular moviegoers
Checked showtimes for a specific film	59%
Checked what is playing nearby	59%
Read reviews	45%
Watched trailers	41%
Checked social media about a film	35%
Bought a ticket on the phone	24%

That gap is the opportunity. Every showtime lookup that ends on a third-party marketplace is a sale you pay a booking fee on, or lose to the cinema down the road. Every lookup that ends on your own booking page is a direct sale.

Where Google's showtimes actually come from

Google showtimes are licensed data. Google stopped running its own movie listings site, Google Showtimes, on 1 November 2016 and folded the feature into the main results page. The times in that panel come from commercial showtime databases that collect schedules from cinemas and their ticketing systems.

The clearest public statement comes from the providers themselves. The Boxoffice Company, part of the Webedia group and formerly known as CinemaSource and West World Media, says it puts cinemas' showtimes and ticketing links on Google, Bing, IMDb, TikTok and Apple Maps. Its Source database covers movies, theatres and showtimes in more than 70 countries and 25 languages, and collects a ticketing URL for every showtime. IMDb's help centre says its own showtimes come from Webedia and are supplied by the cinemas. In the US, Gracenote (Nielsen) also publishes theatre showtimes for the US and Canada through its OnConnect API, and renewed a multi-year metadata partnership with Google in February 2026, though that announcement does not mention showtimes specifically.

Operators have known this for years. A US exhibitor on the Film-Tech forum in 2011 described emailing a weekly comma-separated file of times to CinemaSource, which then fed Google. The format has moved on to automated links from point-of-sale systems, but the route is the same.

So there are two separate systems in play:

• The showtimes panel and the Google Maps "Showtimes" tab: fed by commercial schedule aggregators and data partners who collect listings from ticketing systems and distributors.
• Ordinary organic search results: your own pages, crawled and indexed like any other website, where your markup and site structure decide what appears.

Adding Movie or ScreeningEvent markup to your site will not insert times into the first system. It does help the second, which is a different and still valuable prize.

Where the "Tickets" button goes

The buttons next to each time are also supplied data. When Google added showtime filters in April 2018, tapping a time sent buyers to Fandango, MovieTickets.com, Atom Tickets or the theater's own site, with AMC, Regal and Cinemark among the chains supported directly. The Boxoffice Company says it collects ticketing links per showtime for both exhibitor websites and third-party vendors. Which link wins depends on what the data provider holds for your venue. If it only holds a marketplace link, that is where your customers go.

Showtime data providers by country

The table lists only what each company documents publicly. A blank in the last column means we found no public statement, not that no relationship exists. Ask your ticketing provider which of these it already feeds.

Market	Showtime data providers documented	Public link to Google showtimes
United States	The Boxoffice Company (Source); Gracenote OnConnect (US and Canada theatre showtimes); International Showtimes	Boxoffice Company states it lists showtimes on Google. Ticket links to Fandango, MovieTickets.com and Atom documented in 2018.
Canada	The Boxoffice Company; Gracenote OnConnect	Boxoffice Company (global statement)
France	The Boxoffice Company / Webedia, which also runs AlloCiné	Boxoffice Company (global statement)
Germany and Austria	The Boxoffice Company / Webedia (Filmstarts); International Showtimes (Berlin, customers include Kinoheld)	Boxoffice Company (global statement)
Spain and Latin America	The Boxoffice Company / Webedia (SensaCine)	Boxoffice Company (global statement)
Brazil	The Boxoffice Company / Webedia (AdoroCinema)	Boxoffice Company (global statement)
Turkey	The Boxoffice Company / Webedia (Beyazperde)	Boxoffice Company (global statement)
UK, Ireland and other markets	The Boxoffice Company (70+ countries); International Showtimes (120+ countries)	Boxoffice Company (global statement)

Webedia's consumer sites are those linked from the Boxoffice Company website. Checked November 2026.

Why the times go wrong

Exhibitors report the same handful of Google showtimes faults over and over: schedules a week out of date, times shifted by an hour around a daylight-saving change, a neighbouring venue's listings attached to their profile, and showtimes appearing on the wrong business entity entirely.

All of these are symptoms of the same thing. The data has passed through at least one intermediary between your scheduling system and the panel, and there is no direct feedback loop telling anyone it arrived wrong.

The daylight-saving failure

A schedule exported without an explicit time zone is interpreted by whatever the receiving system assumes. Twice a year that assumption is wrong for a fortnight, because the US and Europe change clocks on different weekends. If your programme feed emits local wall-clock times with no zone attached, fix that at source before chasing anything else. A time written as 2026-11-14T19:30:00+00:00 cannot be misread. A time written as "7.30pm" can.

The wrong-venue failure

Cinemas inside a shopping centre, a cultural centre or a hotel frequently find their showtimes attached to the restaurant next door, because the two businesses share an address and Google has picked the wrong entity. This is a Google Business Profile problem, not a scheduling one. Google's guidelines for representing your business say a business inside another should not borrow the host's categories, and that departments should each have their own profile. An arts centre with a cinema is a textbook case.

The stale-week failure

Most of the industry still works on a weekly cycle. Gracenote's showtimes API documentation notes that theatres generally release showtimes by week, Friday to Thursday, with advance-ticket times for major releases available up to 90 days ahead. If your programme for Friday is confirmed on Wednesday night but only exported on Thursday afternoon, the panel will show last week's films for part of the busiest booking window of the week.

Why doesn't Google show movie showtimes anymore, or for my cinema?

Two different questions hide behind this search. The first is about Google itself. The standalone site at google.com/movies was discontinued on 1 November 2016, so bookmarks to it stopped working. Showtimes did not go away: they moved into the main results page, and searching a film title, a cinema name, "showtimes" or "movies" still brings up the panel where Google has data.

The second question is the one operators ask: why is the panel missing for my cinema when the multiplex down the road has one? Google shows a showtimes panel only for venues its data partners hold, and only when the partner's record can be matched to your Business Profile. Use the table to diagnose it.

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
No showtimes panel at all	No data provider holds your schedule, or its record does not match your Business Profile (name, address or category differ)	Ask your ticketing provider which aggregator it feeds. If none, use the provider's listing form, for example the Boxoffice Company "Get Listed" form. Align name and address exactly.
Wrong times	Stale export, missing time zone, or a cancellation never sent	Re-export with ISO timestamps and offsets. Ask the provider to re-pull. Then flag the listing with Google's feedback link.
Times off by exactly one hour	Local times sent without a zone around a clock change	Send offsets (for example +01:00) in every timestamp
A film is missing	Title in your system does not match the provider's film record (abbreviation, format suffix, festival title)	Use the canonical release title. Put "IMAX", "OV" or "Parent and baby" in attributes, not the title.
Duplicate cinema listing	Two Business Profiles for one venue, often an old name after a rebrand or a host building's profile	Claim both, request the duplicate be marked as such or removed, keep one canonical name
Showtimes on the wrong business	Shared address with a restaurant, hotel or arts centre	Separate profiles, distinct suite or entrance in the address, correct categories on each
"Tickets" goes to a competitor or marketplace	The provider only holds a third-party booking link for your sessions	Give the provider a per-session deep link to your own booking page
Panel shows last week's programme	Weekly export runs after the new week is announced	Push the schedule as soon as it is confirmed, and push every change, not once a week
Cinema shown as closed	Hours or "permanently closed" status edited by the public or an old profile	Fix in Business Profile. Check Google's hours guidance for cinemas (below).

The four things you can actually control

1. Your Google Business Profile

Claim and verify the profile for every location. Get the category right: a cinema should use the movie theater category as its primary category, not an events venue or a cultural centre. Google's guidelines ask for categories that are "as specific as possible, but representative of your main business". The category is part of how a data provider's venue record is matched to your profile.

Keep the name and address exact and consistent with your website and with what your ticketing provider sends. On hours, note that Google's guidelines list movie theaters among businesses that should not provide opening hours, because their schedules vary by showtime. If you do show box office hours, make sure they never contradict your first and last screening.

Where a venue is inside a larger building, make the address distinct enough that Google can separate the two businesses. Business Profile booking links are not a route into showtimes: Google's local business links cover appointments, reservations and food or shopping orders, not per-screening cinema tickets.

2. Your schedule data, at source

Whatever aggregators receive, they receive from your ticketing or scheduling system. That means:

• Publish the full programme far enough ahead that partners have collected it before customers search.
• Emit explicit time zones and ISO timestamps rather than local strings.
• Keep film titles matched to the canonical release title, not an internal abbreviation or a marketing variant. Title mismatches are why a screening sometimes attaches to the wrong film entirely.
• Send format, language, subtitle and accessibility attributes as attributes. Providers such as Source and International Showtimes carry fields for 3D, IMAX, Dolby Atmos, dubbing and subtitles.
• Push changes and cancellations as promptly as you push additions. A stale panel is usually a cancellation that never propagated.
• Include a deep link to the booking step for each session, so the provider has your link and not only a marketplace's.

Ask your ticketing provider directly which aggregators they supply and how often. Most exhibitors have never asked, and the answer is often "on request" rather than "automatically". The BigScreen Cinema Guide notes that an automated link can be created from many point-of-sale systems to the Boxoffice Company, and that it refreshes its own listings six times each weekday.

If your theater still uses spreadsheets for scheduling, you can still get listed: providers accept schedules from venues without an integrated system. But every manual export is a chance for a stale or mistyped week. A theatre management system that publishes changes automatically removes that step, and our showtime planner is a free way to move the planning off the spreadsheet first.

3. Indexable showtime pages on your own site

This is the part you own outright, and it is where the organic result, the one that goes to your checkout rather than to a third party, is won.

Each film in your programme should have its own crawlable URL with the title, synopsis, runtime, certificate, formats and every showtime for that film, each linking directly to the booking step. Times rendered only by JavaScript after a user interaction are effectively invisible; render them server-side.

See movie schema markup for cinema listings for the structured data that goes alongside, and winning "near me" searches for the local layer.

4. A booking path that survives the handoff

When someone does arrive from the showtimes panel or an organic result, they arrive with a film and a time already chosen. Landing them on a generic homepage throws that away. Deep links should open the specific screening with the seat map ready.

A worked example shows what is at stake. The Boxoffice Company claims that cinemas see a 10% to 15% increase in direct ticket sales once their own links are listed across search platforms. That is a vendor's figure, not an independent measurement. Applied to a cinema selling 1,000 tickets a week online at a $12 average ticket, 10% is 100 extra direct tickets, or $1,200 a week, before concessions. Even if your real uplift is a third of that, the fix costs an email to your ticketing provider.

What schema markup does and does not do

Schema markup is worth doing, but it is easy to oversell. Here is what Google actually documents.

• Movie markup powers the movie carousel, a list of films with title and poster. Google says the carousel is only available on mobile devices. It requires name and image for each film and does not include showtimes.
• Event markup powers the event experience in Search, available in a list of countries that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain and India. Google's documentation does not mention ScreeningEvent, cinemas or showtimes, and says the experience only supports pages that focus on a single event. A programme page listing 60 screenings is not that.
• ScreeningEvent and MovieTheater are valid schema.org types. They describe your screenings and venue accurately to every crawler and AI assistant that reads structured data, but Google does not document a rich result for them, and they do not feed the showtimes panel.

Very few cinemas use any of it. In our crawl of 1,189 cinema websites in 35 countries (September 2026), 39% had any schema.org structured data, 7% declared MovieTheater and 4% marked up screenings. Those are floors, since markup can sit on pages we did not visit, but the gap is wide.

Show the data as a table

Feature	Share of 1,189 cinema websites
Any schema.org structured data	39%
MovieTheater markup	7%
Screening or event markup for showtimes	4%

A correct screening, with the venue and film nested inside it, looks like this. Put one block per screening on the film's page, generated from the same data your ticketing system uses, so it can never disagree with the booking page.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ScreeningEvent",
  "name": "Dune: Part Two (IMAX)",
  "startDate": "2026-11-14T19:30:00+00:00",
  "endDate": "2026-11-14T22:26:00+00:00",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
  "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
  "videoFormat": "IMAX",
  "inLanguage": "en",
  "subtitleLanguage": "en",
  "workPresented": {
    "@type": "Movie",
    "name": "Dune: Part Two",
    "image": "https://www.example-cinema.co.uk/img/dune-part-two-poster.jpg",
    "duration": "PT2H46M",
    "contentRating": "12A",
    "sameAs": "https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15239678/"
  },
  "location": {
    "@type": "MovieTheater",
    "name": "Example Picturehouse",
    "screenCount": 4,
    "url": "https://www.example-cinema.co.uk/",
    "telephone": "+44 20 7946 0000",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "1 High Street",
      "addressLocality": "Exampletown",
      "postalCode": "EX1 1AA",
      "addressCountry": "GB"
    }
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://www.example-cinema.co.uk/book/screening/48213",
    "price": "14.50",
    "priceCurrency": "GBP",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "validFrom": "2026-11-01T09:00:00+00:00"
  }
}
</script>

Points that matter: startDate carries a UTC offset; offers.url is a deep link to that session, not your homepage; videoFormat and subtitleLanguage describe the version rather than being stuffed into the title; and sameAs ties the film to a public identifier. Our free movie schema generator writes this for you.

Is there a Google showtimes API?

No. Google does not offer a public API for submitting showtimes, and none for reading the showtimes panel. Cinemas reach Google through licensed data providers, and developers who need showtime data license it from the same providers, for example Gracenote's OnConnect showtimes endpoints (US and Canada), Boxoffice Company Source or International Showtimes.

The "Google showtimes results API" products that appear in search, such as SerpApi's, are third-party services that scrape Google's results page and return the panel as JSON. They do not give a cinema a way in. They copy what is already there, inherit every error in it, and are subject to Google's terms of service. We do not recommend building on them. If you need your own schedule as data, your ticketing system already has it.

Step-by-step checklist to get your showtimes on Google

1. Search your cinema's name and "showtimes" on a phone, logged out. Screenshot what appears.
2. Claim and verify the Google Business Profile for every location. Remove or merge duplicates.
3. Set the primary category to movie theater. Remove categories that belong to a host building.
4. Match name, address and phone exactly across the profile, your website and your ticketing system.
5. Ask your ticketing provider, in writing: which showtime data providers do you send our schedule to, how often, and with which booking link?
6. If the answer is "none", submit the venue directly to a provider, such as the Boxoffice Company listing form.
7. Confirm the export uses ISO timestamps with offsets, canonical film titles and per-session booking URLs.
8. Give every film its own server-rendered page with all times and direct booking links.
9. Add ScreeningEvent markup generated from live data, and validate it.
10. Set a calendar reminder for the weeks either side of each clock change to check the panel again.

How to verify your showtimes in Search

• The panel. Search "[cinema name] showtimes" and "[film] showtimes [town]" on mobile, in a private window. Check three sessions against your box office, including one after a format change.
• Maps. Open your listing in Google Maps and check the showtimes tab matches. A mismatch with Search points to two different venue records.
• Your markup. Run a film page through Google's Rich Results Test to see what Google can parse, and through the Schema Markup Validator for ScreeningEvent, which Google's test does not treat as a rich result type.
• Search Console. Use URL Inspection on a film page to confirm Google sees the rendered times, and the Performance report filtered to queries containing "showtimes" to see whether your own pages earn clicks.

How to report wrong showtimes

There is no support queue for this, which is why the forum threads exist. The practical route is:

1. Use the feedback link on the showtimes panel itself to flag the specific incorrect listing.
2. Correct anything wrong in Google Business Profile, especially category, address and duplicate profiles.
3. Go back to your ticketing provider and ask them to re-send the schedule to their data partners. This is the step that actually fixes it, because the panel will simply re-import the bad data otherwise.
4. If your venue is listed by the Boxoffice Company, report it through its Get Listed form, which covers incorrect showtimes, names and addresses on Google and Bing.

Expect the correction to take days rather than minutes, because it has to travel the same path the wrong data did.

What to do first

If you do nothing else: verify every location's Business Profile and check the category, then ask your ticketing provider which showtime aggregators they feed and how often. Those two steps resolve the majority of the complaints exhibitors post about this.

Then make your own film pages indexable, because that is the traffic you can convert on your own checkout rather than losing to whoever else is listed in the panel. Filmgrail's cinema websites are server-rendered and emit Movie and Event structured data for every film and showtime; sending your schedule to showtime data providers is available on demand.

Sources and method

Every claim about Google's products is taken from Google's own documentation or contemporaneous reporting, checked in November 2026. Claims about data providers are taken from the providers' own pages and are their statements, not independent audits. Where a provider claims a sales uplift, we say so.

• Google Search Central: Movie carousel structured data; Event structured data.
• Google Business Profile Help: Guidelines for representing your business on Google; Manage your local business links.
• The Boxoffice Company: Source, Referral, Get Listed, About.
• Gracenote: OnConnect Movies API and Movie showtimes endpoint; Advanced Television, 11 February 2026.
• International Showtimes, Showtimes API; IMDb Help; BigScreen Cinema Guide.
• TechCrunch, 7 November 2016; TechCrunch, 3 April 2018; Film-Tech forum, 2011; SerpApi.
• IAB and InMobi, Mobile and the Movies, October 2012 (n=373 US mobile users).
• Filmgrail, cinema website technology study (1,189 sites, September 2026).