Google deleted 12 million fake businesses. What if one of them is yours?

September 29, 2026 · Lucas Vogel

There is an entire economy of businesses that do not exist.

Fake locksmiths with a phone number that routes to a call centre three states away. Plumbers whose address is a mailbox. Restaurants taking orders for food nobody is cooking. Google removed or blocked more than 12 million fake Business Profiles in 2024 alone, along with 240 million policy-violating reviews and 70 million edits to listings on Maps.

Twelve million. That is not a spam problem, that's a population.

So the cleanup is good news, and I want to say that clearly before the rest of this. If you run a real shop, every fake competitor Google deletes is one fewer pretend business sitting above you in the results.

Using models to tag businesses

Google's system now uses a Gemini-trained model to spot suspicious patterns, such as a listing that quietly changes category from "cafe" to "plumber". It works on patterns rather than complaints, which is the only way you review twelve million anything. But does that fix the problem? Not entirely: the trouble with patterns is that a real business can look like a fraudulent profile too.

Appeal times have gone from about five days to nearly five weeks, according to Mike Blumenthal, a Platinum Product Expert in Google's own Business Profile forums. Five weeks is a long time to be invisible when Maps is how most of your customers find you. It is an especially long time if you just moved, or rebranded, or added a service — all the ordinary things that make a listing change shape, and all of which look, to a pattern-matcher, a little like what a fake business does.

Google's announcement of the cleanup runs to several hundred words. None of them are about what happens if it gets you by mistake.

Fake phone orders

Here's the bit I keep turning over, and I'll say up front it's not a popular position.

Go back to that fake restaurant taking orders for food nobody is cooking. Ask how it actually works. Someone sets up a listing, puts their own phone number on it, and waits. A hungry customer finds it, calls, reads out a card number, and never gets dinner.

The scam doesn't need anything clever. It just needs phone orders to be normal — which they are, because they've worked fine for fifty years. Nearly every shop takes them.

But a customer on the phone has no way to tell whose phone it is. That's not a failure on their part or yours. It's just what a phone is. And it means the thing that makes phone ordering convenient for your customers is the same thing that makes it available to someone impersonating you.

I'm genuinely not going to tell you to stop answering the phone. What I'd say is that it's worth knowing which of your orders you could actually prove, and which you couldn't.

Where our platforms work

Our own platform makes customers sign up and sign in before they can place an order or book an appointment. The reasoning for this is twofold - you get to know your customer better, and the customer can keep track of their order history with you.

An authenticated order or appointment guarantees that it came from a specific person with a specific account. You can see their history. You can recognise a repeat customer. And nobody with a spoofed listing and a burner phone can place one on your behalf, because they'd need to be you to receive it.

It's a trade. Some friction in exchange for knowing that the order in your queue is real. For the food side especially, we think that's the right side of it — but you run your shop, and you may weigh it differently.

The practical bits

Keep your own paperwork. Utility bill, signage photo, lease. An appeal to Google goes faster when you can show you exist without waiting for someone to come and look.

Change one thing at a time. A listing that changes name, category and address in the same week reads as suspicious to a platform inundated with a lot of genuinely suspicious listings.

Don't let Maps be your only front door. If your entire discoverability lives inside someone else's index, a bad week in their spam filter is a bad month in your books.

That last one isn't really about Google. It's the same reason a shop that only takes bookings through a marketplace has a business that partly belongs to the marketplace. Owning the page your customers land on isn't paranoia - it's just the cheapest insurance there is.

We build booking and ordering sites for shops like yours — your own page, your own customers, and a record of who ordered what. If you'd like to see it working, we're here.