Automated Google Business Rejections are a Failure on Google's Part

There’s a very strange issue going on with Google My Business that’s only gotten worse over time. I first started noticing it early in 2024 and it now seems to be happening with worrying frequency of every Google Places listing that I manage (and with 175 customers that’s a very long list).

Google My Business is, for the uninitiated, Google’s local business directory listing service. They have their own search results and they function as display listings where business owners can customize their services and photos, and display relevant information like phone numbers and hours. They can link directly to the business website or even online sales or ordering platforms. You can even post status updates to alert customers to events, discounts or special notices like weather closures. Whatever else you’d like to say about Google this is a service that they’ve gotten right, and it’s extremely beneficial in a very tangible way for small businesses.

In an era where organic search results are quickly becoming a pay-to-play environment and ads are becoming harder to distinguish from organic results, Google My Business has emerged as a critical lifeline for local businesses and organizations to stand out in crowded search results. Especially when considering that local businesses often don’t have the budget or means to promote themselves to the same extent that bigger companies do.

One of the keys to how convenient and effective Google My Business has been is the ability for location administrators to edit their information, add new photos and change services and information accordingly. So for example, if I ran King Michael’s Kickass Pizzeria (dibs on this idea, don’t trademark that) and I decided I wanted to close my store at 10:00 PM rather than 11:00 PM, I would log into the Google My Business dashboard as an administrator and update the hours for the King Michael’s Kickass Pizzeria Google My Business page. I would then submit the changes and that would be that.

Except that’s not what’s been happening lately. Instead, there’s been a sudden surge in changes being reviewed and subsequently “rejected” by Google My Business automated systems within a few minutes of submitting them. Going by complaints I’ve seen on Google forums it’s happening more and more, and it speaks to how Google’s hands-off policy is harming the very small businesses it claims to advocate for.

Just recently I started working with a pizzeria. After claiming the business listing we proceeded to upload a big batch of photos and within ten minutes every single one of them was rejected. These all met the requirements of images: PNGs, under 5 MBs each, far surpassing the minimum resolution of 250×250 and high quality photos that accurately represented the business and did not depict irrelevant or illegal activity. It was just a batch of pizza and calzone photos.

Google never provides any actual specific reason for the rejection, even when your changes (such as updating the hours) are completely benign and don’t violate any kind of policy, or even cause any kind of conflicting information that might confuse the end user. This has been a company-wide problem in Google’s blanket “guilty until proven innocent” environment that puts an undue burden on business owners or creators, but this is a new level of failure when it comes to the robots running Google’s show.

Google claims that its review algorithm is carefully tailored to monitor each submission and to approve “authorized” ones while automatically rejecting ones that violate their terms of service. If that’s true, I have no clue how or why this keeps happening. When a business owner can’t make updates as simple as updating their hours or adding new photos, something is very wrong from Google’s side.

So what’s the recourse in a situation like this? Google, which can be difficult to reach depending on the service, actually does provide the ability to quickly contact the Google My Business team. In the case of the pizzeria I reached out to them regarding our inability to upload photos. The good news is that generally they respond within 24 hours by E-mail. On the other hand if you want to speak to them by phone you’re out of luck. Rather than any schedule a time to call they’ll simply call you at any random point throughout the day and if you miss the call, you’re out of luck. Shame on you for being in the shower the very minute Google called, I suppose.

That leaves E-mail back-and-forth. Again, to Google’s credit, if you identify the issues you’re having Google will fix them…eventually. I initially made contact with a Google rep on October 29, who said they were looking into the situation. Then nearly a week later I received this back (edited for brevity):

Hi Michael,

Greetings for the day!

I am Swetha from the Google Business Profile Support team. Thank you for contacting us about your business profile.

I understand that the photos are getting rejected.

Upon checking I see that your photos are now going live.

If you’d like more help on this issue, reply to this email. We’ll be happy to help! For help with other issues, you can always reach us via our Help Center.

That was it. After a week of being unable to do something as simple as upload photos, it was finally fixed with no explanation, no recommendation on how to avoid this, and no details on how they’ll prevent this from happening in the future.

It’s far from an isolated example. Another client’s updates to their hours were rejected repeatedly, forcing us to open another ticket with Google. For over a week the wrong hours were listed and the business had zero recourse until the issue was finally fixed.

To be clear I take no issue with individual support reps and I always emphasize that as much as I can. Getting angry at these people accomplishes nothing – they’re often working within the confines of a system they can only do so much within, which brings us to Google itself.

Google has remained radio silent on this matter, not issuing any kind of rubric or guidelines for what’s been causing this, what the solution is, or how business owners and their associates can minimize the risk of it happening. This leaves me to conclude that it’s a problem with Google’s robots that they haven’t disclosed.

I understand that Google’s system is vast and that it’s inevitable that not everything will work properly, but think about what’s happening here. Businesses that have no choice but to rely on Google because of the platform’s near-monopoly on web searches are not being allowed to update the profiles that Google sets up for them. Google has aggressively marketed small businesses on Google My Business and yet it can’t seem to take basic steps to make sure the platform actually works consistently. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it and the only recourse is to wait a week or longer while potentially misleading information could confuse customers – or worse, cause them to go somewhere else.

That’s the problem. Google can’t build a “hands-off” platform and then take a frustratingly long time to contact and an even more frustratingly longer stretch of time to fix a problem on its own platform when it will often make or break the success of a small business. Google Business is a lifeline for small businesses, and the least Google could do is provide a road map for how it plans to address this issue – or at least some transparency when it comes what’s going on behind the scenes. The last thing Google needs to do right now is make its small business platform less appealing when smaller companies are being priced out of search engine campaigns.

If this is happening to you, your recourse is simply to fill the form out. It generally takes a day or two to hear back from Google but when you do, don’t let up. Stay on top of them until the problem is “fixed” internally.

In the meantime, the best we can do is hope for Google to address this problem internally. It’s one more thing business owners (and their partners) don’t need, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I won’t see that dreaded rejection message further as Google hopefully addresses this.

Michael Carusi

I run a tech company where I build websites for free and host them. 175 plus amazing clients as of your reading this - and still growing. My blog consists of stuff I'm thinking about. E-mail me with cool opportunities.

Automated Google Business Rejections are a Failure on Google’s Part