Google Business Profile Scams Are Still Happening. Here’s What to Know.
If you run a small business — a restaurant, a nonprofit, a plumbing company, a boutique, a law office — you’ve almost certainly gotten one of these calls. An automated voice, or sometimes a surprisingly convincing human, claiming to represent Google. They’ve noticed some issues with your business listing. Your profile isn’t verified. Your search rankings are suffering. For a fee, they can fix all of it.
They cannot. And they’re not from Google.
These calls are a persistent, well-organized scam targeting small business owners across Alexandria, Northern Virginia, and the DMV — and they work often enough to keep the phone banks running. This post explains exactly what’s happening, how to recognize the variations of the scam, and what legitimate local SEO actually looks like so you can tell the difference.
Google Will Never Call You
This is the single most important thing to understand, and it bears saying plainly: Google does not call businesses to offer verification assistance, alert them to ranking problems, or sell them SEO services. Not ever. Google is a $2 trillion company with self-service tools for all of this. There is no outbound sales team cold-calling restaurants in Alexandria about their Google Business Profile.
If someone on the phone tells you they’re from Google, or that they’re a Google partner calling on Google’s behalf, that is not true. Hang up.
How the Scam Works
The calls follow a few recognizable patterns, and being able to identify them is half the battle.
The verification pitch. The caller says your Google Business Profile has errors, is unverified, or is at risk of being removed. They offer to verify or “fix” it for a one-time fee, often $200–$500. In reality, Google Business Profile verification is free and done entirely through Google’s own tools — no third party is involved, and no one can charge you for it.
The ranking alarm. The caller tells you your business isn’t showing up in local search results and that they’ve been alerted by Google to help you. They may have some genuine details about your business — your address, your category, even your current review count — which lends false credibility. This information is publicly available on your own listing; having it doesn’t mean they work for Google or that anything they’re saying is accurate.
The voice search platform. This one is worth calling out specifically because it sounds technical enough to be convincing: callers claim they can boost your ranking on “Google’s Voice Search Platform” and that your business isn’t appearing in voice search results. There is no Google Voice Search Platform. Voice search runs through the same index as regular Google search — there’s no separate platform, no separate listing, and no special optimization product you can pay a third party to manage. Anyone selling placement on a voice search platform is selling something that doesn’t exist.
The screen share. A more aggressive variant: the caller eventually asks to connect you with a technical team member who can “show you the problem” via screen share. This is a social engineering play designed to gain access to your computer, your Google account, or both. Do not accept screen share requests from cold callers, ever.
Who Gets Targeted
These scams hit every kind of small business, but certain industries get dialed particularly hard — usually because they’re visible in local search, have public contact information, and are often owner-operated without a dedicated digital team to run interference.
Restaurants, breweries, wineries, and food and beverage businesses are prime targets because their Google Business Profiles are actively used by customers and easy to find. Contractors and trades businesses — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping — get hit constantly because local search visibility is genuinely critical to their lead generation, which makes the “your rankings are suffering” pitch land harder. Retail and e-commerce businesses with physical locations are targeted for similar reasons. Nonprofits, which often have lean staff and limited technical resources, are targeted because they’re less likely to have someone on hand who can quickly identify the call as fraudulent. Professional services firms — law offices, accounting practices, medical offices — are targeted because the implied cost of not ranking well is high and the staff answering phones may not be equipped to evaluate the claim.
If your business is in any of these categories and you have a Google Business Profile, you will receive these calls. The question is whether you and your team are prepared to recognize them.
What to Do When the Call Comes
If you’re not sure whether a call is legitimate, a few quick questions will usually clarify things fast.
Ask for the full company name and any DBAs they operate under. Ask for a direct callback number for their main office — not the number they called from. Ask for their official website. Ask who handles your account after the sale and what the process looks like. If any of these questions produce evasion, irritation, or rehearsed deflection, you have your answer.
More broadly: you don’t owe cold callers anything. If something feels off, hang up. A legitimate agency offering real digital marketing services for businesses in Alexandria or anywhere in the DMV will have no problem sending you a proposal, pointing you to a portfolio, or having a conversation on your terms — not theirs.
What Legitimate Local SEO Actually Looks Like
Since these scams work partly by exploiting genuine uncertainty about how local search works, it’s worth being clear about what real alexandria search engine optimization strategies actually involve.
Improving your local search presence is not a phone call transaction. It requires auditing and optimizing your Google Business Profile — categories, service areas, photos, hours, Q&A, review responses. It requires ensuring your website is fast, mobile-responsive, and technically sound. It requires consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data across directories. It requires building locally relevant content that signals to Google what you do and where you do it. And it requires patience — meaningful movement in local rankings typically takes weeks to establish and months to compound.
Any agency or consultant worth working with will be able to explain what they’re doing and why, show you how they’ll measure progress, and give you realistic timelines. Anyone promising guaranteed rankings or dramatic results from a single phone call is either misinformed or lying.
Getting Scammed Costs More Than Money
The financial damage of these scams is real — fraudulent credit card charges, identity theft risk, payments made for work that never happens. But there’s a less obvious cost worth naming: some of these operations, once they have access to your Google Business Profile, will make unauthorized changes to your listing. Wrong hours. Wrong phone number. Fake reviews. Keyword-stuffed business descriptions that violate Google’s guidelines and can result in your listing being suspended. Cleaning that up takes time and in some cases requires going through Google’s support process, which is notoriously slow.
The reputation damage from a suspended or corrupted Google Business Profile can be significant, especially for businesses that depend on local search visibility — which in 2025 is most of them.
