Google Business Profile Suspensions Rise, But Appeals Are Delayed

Google Business Profile (GBP) suspensions have steadily risen since January, and as they increase, appeal resolution times have grown significantly – from about five days to nearly five weeks.

As a Platinum Product Expert in the Google Business Profile Support Forums, I help small businesses navigate Google’s GBP platform.

For many of these SMBs, Google is a primary lead driver, and when their listing goes south due to a suspension, life can get very hard.

Image from author, March 2025

What We Know

We noticed in February that forum complaints about suspensions reached their highest level since last August.

Users typically try support first but when frustrated, a subset of them find their way to the forums to see what their next steps are.

The forums provide a canary-in-the-coal-mine function allowing outside observers to understand problems that Google Business Profiles are currently experiencing.

Based on the current daily average posting rate, we estimate that March’s suspension-related posts will surpass February’s total. (Image from author, March 2025)

The weekly influx of these posts has not slowed. In fact, it’s accelerating.

Posts peak on either Mondays or Tuesdays, when business owners return to the office to deal with their suspensions and appeals.

You can see in the following chart that these daily high points and weekly totals continue to increase.

Image from author, March 2025

Why It’s Happening

Many others, who are managing local profiles, report an uptick in suspensions. The exact reason for this increase remains unclear.

As usual, Google has provided no explanation, despite overwhelming demand on both support channels and the forum.

When Google updates the algo, perhaps to increase trust in its listings, suspensions seem to be triggered – even when the user makes even minor changes to the profile.

Unfortunately, we do not yet know which attributes Google is finding unacceptable.

Google staffs their support for the “typical” level of suspensions. Appeals of those suspensions are handled by humans, and a suspension increase can cause the staff to get further and further behind.

These delays contribute to some of the “noise” we are seeing in the forum. At this point, the appeal process is taking somewhere on the order of 4 weeks or more, not the ~5 days noted by Google.

Image from author, March 2025

Bulk & API Accounts Also Impacted

GBP Bulk and API accounts – where a single corporate account can add new locations in bulk, with minimal additional verification or change information – have been impacted as well.

Several bulk and API account managers report that individual listings within bulk and API accounts now require manual re-verification even after minor edits, creating massive headaches for the corporate marketing teams trying to re-verify a listing in Peoria.

Late yesterday, Google confirmed the re-verification issues in a statement on the forum.

Our research indicates that the problem started much earlier than last week, and we are not convinced that the problem is yet solved.

Image from author, March 2025

However, Yext was reporting continuing issues on their system update page.

Image from author, March 2025

Don’t Make Changes

We strongly advise not making any changes to your listing at this time.

It appears Google does not yet have a handle on whatever is causing the increase in suspensions and re-verifications.

It obviously doesn’t have a handle on dealing with the large number of appeals. Thus, if your listing gets suspended, you will experience significant delays in getting reinstated.

We recommend you pause making any changes to your individual, API-managed, and bulk listings, at least until Google clarifies the issues or, more importantly, until support addresses the appeals backlog.

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Featured Image: voronaman/Shutterstock