The phone goes. A recorded voice, or a very friendly person, says they’re calling about your Google listing. It needs verifying. Or there are errors on it. Or you’ve been selected for a first-page position. Either way it’s urgent and they need a few details to sort it out.
Every business owner in Lancashire gets these. Some get them weekly. So let me save you the uncertainty.
Google does not cold-call small businesses to warn them about their listing or to sell them rankings. If someone rings you unprompted with an urgent problem about your Google presence, it is not Google.
The one exception, so you’re not caught out
I want to be precise, because a blanket “Google never calls” will eventually make you ignore a call you wanted.
Google does make automated calls as part of verifying a Business Profile, but only when you asked for it. You go through the verification process, you choose the phone option, and a call or a text arrives with a code. That’s a call you were expecting, because you started it minutes earlier.
The difference is who began the conversation. If you started it, fine. If they started it, be suspicious.
What they’re actually after
These calls come in three broad flavours, and it’s worth knowing which you’re on.
The access grab.
The goal is to get you to hand over control of your Google Business Profile, or to click a link and sign in on a page that isn’t Google. Once someone else manages your profile, they can change your phone number, your website address and your opening hours. I have seen a profile’s website link quietly swapped to a competitor’s site. That one took months to notice.
The hard sell.
No fraud, just an aggressive lead generation operation selling SEO or “listing management” at a few hundred pounds a month. The urgency is manufactured to stop you shopping around. What you get is usually directory submissions and an automated report.
The invoice.
You agree to something vague on the phone and a real invoice arrives for a service that doesn’t exist, or exists in a form nothing like what you understood. This shades into the fake invoice letters that arrive in the post, which are a related problem and worth their own article.
How to tell within fifteen seconds
Four tells, and you only need one.
Urgency.
Your listing will be suspended, your position will be given to someone else, the offer ends today. Real agencies and real platforms do not need a decision in the next ten minutes. Urgency exists to stop you checking.
They can’t name your business properly.
Ask them to confirm which business they’re calling about and what the listing currently says. A genuine call knows. A call working from a purchased list often doesn’t, or reads your trading name slightly wrong.
They claim to be Google, or “a Google partner”, or “Google certified”.
There is no such thing as a certified Google SEO. Google does certify people in Google Ads, which is a different product, and no certification of any kind authorises anyone to ring you about organic rankings.
They want you to do something on your computer.
Sign in here, read me this code, click this link, approve this request. That’s the moment to put the phone down.
What to do when one comes in
Practical, in order.
- Don’t confirm anything about your business. Not your address, not your email, not whether you manage the listing yourself. Every confirmation makes the next call more convincing.
- Never read out a code. A verification code sent to you is the key to your profile. Anyone asking you to read one out over the phone is taking it from you.
- Never approve an access request you didn’t expect. If a notification arrives asking you to grant someone management access, decline it.
- Hang up. You owe them nothing. No explanation, no “send me an email”. Just go.
- Then check your profile yourself. Sign in to Google Business Profile directly, through your own browser, not through any link they gave you. If there were genuinely a problem, it would be flagged there.
That last step matters, because occasionally there is something wrong with a profile, and the scam works by borrowing the credibility of a real problem. Checking it yourself costs you two minutes and settles it.
If someone already has access
It happens, and it’s recoverable, so don’t panic.
Sign in to your Business Profile. If you can’t, or if you can see that someone else is listed as the owner, Google has a process for requesting access back. You submit a request, Google emails the current owner, and they get seven days to respond. If they ignore it, you can verify and take it over. If they refuse, there’s an appeal route where you prove you own the business.
It’s slow and annoying, but it works. Don’t create a second listing as a shortcut, because duplicates split your reviews and make things worse.
While you’re in there, remove any user you don’t recognise, and check that your phone number, website address and opening hours are the ones you’d expect.
The thing I’d actually like you to take from this
These calls work because most business owners genuinely don’t know how any of this operates. Not knowing isn’t stupidity, it’s a reasonable consequence of running a business that isn’t a marketing agency. But it’s the gap these operations live in.
So the defence isn’t a list of phone numbers to block. It’s knowing two things: that your Google Business Profile is free, yours, and managed by you signing into it directly, and that nobody legitimate needs you to decide anything this minute.
If you know those two things, the calls stop working on you.
Report them if you can be bothered
You can report the number to Action Fraud, and you can report a suspicious profile access attempt to Google through the Business Profile help channels. Honestly, most people don’t, and I understand why. If you only do one thing, make it checking your own profile rather than chasing theirs.
If you’ve had one of these calls and you’re not sure whether you agreed to anything, or you’ve looked at your listing and something seems off, send me the details and I’ll tell you what I can see from the outside. Free, no pitch, and if everything’s fine I’ll say so and you can forget about it.
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