One cunning loophole in Google enables your rivals to sabotage and make your ads invisible.
Google is looking into a grave problem concerning Local Service Ads (LSA) that could virtually remove competition from the market.
There’s a bug when multiple LSAs are linked to one Google Business Profile (GBP), which makes ads go away thereby erasing any potential leads. Competitors may exploit this defect as they connect unauthorized LSA to your GBP and so prevent customers from seeing advertisements about their products.
This is why it is important. If you have noticed an abrupt stoppage of leads from your GBP, then there might be an illegal linkage of LSA. It might need asking Google support to resolve this matter.
Initially, the issue came up after a company owner made an outcry on Google Business Profile forum about sudden loss of leads and spam, which hitherto had been constant. The business owner said:
“After engaging a representative, I learned that we had two LSAs’ associated with our profile hence rendering our ad invisible! On checking it out, only one account was linked on our GMB which I personally opened. As for me; I have already just created one LSA account and no other person holds its login credentials.”
“They told me that unlinking the unknown credential LSAs was impossible. Their suggested solution was abandoning our ten-year-old account having numerous reviews and starting anew something that sounded quite unreasonable. Who took over our google listing?”
“There should be some way whereby we can re-verify our account as well as get rid of unsanctioned LSAs. We hired another firm to manage our website still under the same owner as GMB but they didn’t handle any LSAs for us.”
Meanwhile, Ben Fisher, Co-Founder/Lead Consultant of Steady Demand, called on Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin to address this exploitative practice on X. He said:
“Whereby through automatic linking to GBP it can practically obliterate them so that a cruel strategy by competitors on LSA involves creating a new LSA for a rival.”
In response, Marvin (Google) acknowledged the issue and confirmed that Google is actively investigating the manipulation.