Anyone with a Google account can change your Google Business Profile. Not with your password. Not with your permission. Google built it that way on purpose, and if you run a business that depends on people finding you in Maps, you should understand exactly how far that goes.
There is a video doing the rounds at the moment explaining this. It gets the mechanism right, and it asks the question most owners eventually ask: if you do not respond to an edit, does it just happen? The short answer it gives is right too. Not always, but if enough people suggest it, it can.
What the video does not cover is more interesting. There is a second process that matters far more than an edited phone number, and Google changed the rules of this whole game in April 2026 in a way most owners have not noticed.
Google does not treat your listing as yours
Start with the philosophy, because everything else follows from it. Google does not view your Business Profile as a private record that only you control. It treats your listing as shared public information, the same way it treats a map or a set of directions.
Google’s own help page says it plainly. If you find something wrong with a Business Profile that you do not own or manage, you can suggest an edit. That is any listing, and that is any Google account.
This is not a hole in Google’s system. It is the system. The goal is to keep listings accurate for the people searching, even when the business owner has gone quiet or moved without updating anything.
How much traffic this actually generates
The scale is not small. In Google’s own announcement of its 2025 Trust and Safety numbers, the company reports that its community suggested 80 million updates to business hours, contact information and similar details in 2025 alone.
Eighty million suggestions in one year. And in the same period, Google says it blocked 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits.
Those two numbers sitting side by side tell you the real story. Millions of edits arrive, and roughly half of them get stopped. The half that does not, lands on a listing that belongs to somebody.
What changed in April 2026
This is the part almost nobody has caught up with, and it is the reason a post like this reads differently now than it would have a year ago.
Google rolled out proactive email alerts. Verified and active owners now get an email when somebody suggests an important edit, so they can review it before it goes live rather than discovering it weeks later. On the example circulating most recently, the email arrives headed “Does this look right to you?”, shows the suggested change, and gives you a window to mark it correct or incorrect.
Google has also put Gemini on the job. Its models now review suggested edits and block the ones that break Google’s policies before they publish, rather than cleaning up afterwards. That is rolling out across Android, iOS and desktop.
So the honest position is this. Google has made real improvements, and they are worth knowing about. But improvements are not the same as immunity, and there is a catch in the wording that matters more than anything else on this page.
The catch: the alerts go to verified and active owners
Read that phrase again. Verified and active.
If your profile is not verified, or if it is sitting there untouched and dormant, the proactive alert is not something you should assume you will receive. The safety net is real, but it is conditional. It is also just an email, and an email only helps if somebody reads it.
Which brings the whole thing back to where the video started. The vulnerability was never really in Google’s system. It is in owners who are not verified, not watching, and not reading their own inbox. That is the gap, and it is a gap you close yourself.
The part that matters more than an edited phone number
Google has a second process, and it is a different animal entirely. It is called requesting ownership.
Here is how Google’s help documentation describes it. If a verified Business Profile for your business is owned by someone else, that person can request ownership from the current profile owner. Google notifies the current owner by email, and the current owner has three days to respond.
Read what comes next, because it is the sentence nobody quotes. If you do not get a response after three days, the requester may have the option to claim the profile, by verifying your business themselves.
That is not someone editing your opening hours. That is someone ending up in control of your listing. Your reviews, your photos, your phone number, your website link, all of it.
An edit changes what customers see. A successful ownership claim changes who has the keys.
Google is explicit that the option to claim is not always available, so this is not a guaranteed takeover. It does not need to be guaranteed to be worth defending against. And the trigger is not an attack that arrives with a warning siren. It is an email you did not read, in an inbox you do not check, offering you three days to say no.
Two ways your profile changes with nobody touching it
Not every unauthorised change comes from a person with an agenda. Two of the most common causes are automated.
The algorithm, matching your data. Google crawls the web constantly. If it finds a different phone number or a different set of hours on your website, your Facebook page, or an old directory listing, it may update your profile to match what it found. From Google’s point of view it is correcting you. From yours it is overwriting accurate information with stale information you forgot existed.
Google asking you directly. There is a lesser known process where Google sends automated messages by call, text, or WhatsApp to the verified phone number on your profile, to confirm your business details. Google’s documentation states that any information you provide in response may be used to update your profile.
That means the phone number on your listing is not just contact information. It is a channel that can rewrite the listing. If that number has been reassigned, or forwarded, or is being answered by someone who is no longer you, the details being confirmed are no longer necessarily accurate.
The good news is that Google gives you a way to see this. Under Edit profile there is a section called Collected info, which shows what Google has gathered, where it came from, and when. You can delete items from it. Most owners have never opened it.
Why a changed detail costs more than a wrong detail
It is tempting to treat this as a tidiness problem. It is not. A Google Business Profile is a lead channel, and every field on it routes a customer somewhere.
Change the hours and you send people away from a door that was open. Change the phone number and every call from Maps goes somewhere else, which is a direct transfer of your enquiries to whoever is now holding that line. Mark the business temporarily or permanently closed and you disappear from the results entirely, for however long it takes anyone to notice. Change the category and you drop out of the searches that used to bring you customers, without any visible warning on your own dashboard.
For a business running paid search as well, the damage compounds. Your ads are being paid for, your organic listing is being ranked, and the traffic from both is landing on a profile that has been quietly edited to point somewhere else.
I have written about a version of this before, with domain names. The pattern is identical. You assume you own the thing because you use it every day, and ownership turns out to be a set of settings you never looked at.
What you can actually do about it
Let me be straight with you, because the blogs selling monitoring software will not be. There is no switch in Google that blocks edits to your listing outright. Google does not give even a verified owner absolute and permanent control over every data point.
What you can do is make sure the things that do not need to happen, do not happen. That is six checks, and none of them take long.
Get verified, and stay active. This is the one that unlocks everything else. The proactive alerts only reach verified and active owners, so being unverified does not just look untidy, it removes you from the safety net.
Watch for the emails, including in spam. Search your inbox for the wording Google uses. If a suggestion is wrong, mark it incorrect rather than leaving it. An ignored email is how a small change becomes a permanent one.
Check Collected info. Go to Edit profile, then Collected info, and see what Google has gathered about you, where it came from, and when. Delete anything wrong. This is the one almost nobody does.
Match your details everywhere. If your website, your social profiles, and your directory listings all carry the same phone number and the same hours, the algorithm has nothing to correct. Inconsistent details are an invitation for Google to pick one for you.
Treat ownership requests as urgent. Three days is a short window and it does not pause because you were away. If a request is not legitimate, deny it. Do not ignore it, because ignoring it is how the claim option opens up.
Put more than one owner on the profile. If a single email address is the only route to your listing, that address is a single point of failure. Add a second trusted owner so one forgotten inbox cannot cost you the whole thing.
Then look at it on a schedule. Weekly is enough, and it is far better than the alternative, which is finding out from a customer who could not reach you.
Do this today
Open your Google Business Profile now, while you are thinking about it. Confirm you are verified. Then go to Edit profile, then Collected info, and read what Google has collected about your business and where each item came from. If something in that list is wrong, delete it.
Then search your inbox, including spam, for anything resembling a suggested edit or an ownership request. If something is sitting there, deal with it today.
Five minutes. It is the only way to know what state your listing is actually in, and it is much cheaper than finding out in three days.
Sources
- Google: New ways we’re protecting businesses on Maps (April 2026)
- Google Business Profile Help: Request ownership of a Business Profile
- Google Business Profile Help: Edit your Business Profile
- Search Engine Roundtable: Google Business Profiles “Does this look right to you” emails
