When you see businesses outranking you in Google’s local search results, you may think that they have a bigger marketing budget or are working with a great SEO agency. But the truth is that some of those businesses may not exist at all.

These phantom businesses have no staff, no office or storefront, and just plain no business at the address listed on their profile. They are literally nothing but a Google Business Profile somebody built to co-opt phone calls that should have gone to an operating company.

This is a costly and seldom talked-about issue in local search on Google, and it affects more local businesses than people realize. Here’s what these fake listings are, why they hurt your local community just as much as they hurt your bottom line, and the laborious effort it can take to deal with them.

What Exactly is a Fake Listing?

A Google Business Profile that doesn’t represent a real business operating at its claimed address is fake. They’re relatively common, and there are a few different types:

• Ghost listings: The address might belong to a house, a UPS Store mailbox, an empty lot, or a co-working desk rented so that it can have a physical address for verification purposes. 
• Lead-generation fronts: These listings exist to get phone calls meant for a legitimate business, which the call recipient then resells, often to contractors who are not from your area and have never worked in your market.
• Keyword-stuffed names: These aren’t actual business names. They are a collection of viable keywords laced together to get higher placement in searches. “Denver 24/7 Emergency Cheap Plumber Near Me” isn’t a real business name.
• Address multiplication: This is when a real business with a single location creates multiple fake branch locations to blanket an entire metro area and show up in other neighborhood search results.
• Hijacked profiles: This is when a once legitimate Google profile is claimed and repurposed by a fake business. The legitimate business may have closed, or just hasn’t paid attention so isn’t aware they’ve been hijacked.

These fake listings often show up when there are high stakes and decisions need to get made fast. These include situations where there are issues requiring locksmiths, garage door repair, towing, plumbing, HVAC, roofing, pest control, or addiction treatment. Any situation where a customer is stressed, needs help right now, and is going to call whoever shows up first in local search results.

Fake Listings Aren’t Just a Marketing Problem

The people who are most negatively affected by fake listings aren’t necessarily business owners. They’re the people in your community, and as stated above, they find these listings at the worst possible time, like when a basement is flooding in the middle of the night, a car is locked with a child or pet inside, or a roof starts leaking during a rainstorm.

What happens next is unfortunately clockwork. The price quoted over the phone is much lower than what gets charged. The work might be done by someone with no license and no insurance. This means if something goes wrong there’s no recourse, because there’s no actual shop to walk into, no license board to complain to, and sometimes not even a company that legally exists. The phone number just isn’t working or isn’t interested in hearing your complaint.

The people who get hurt the most by this are often the most vulnerable in our communities: elderly homeowners, renters, and other people in genuine emergencies who just trust that the top results on Google mean something, because they’re supposed to.

This damage has a compounding effect. Every negative experience makes more people skeptical of local search results, including legitimate ones. Money that should be staying in your community and paying local wages and local taxes gets funneled out to a call center somewhere and sold to the highest bidder. The money people pay for a service in your neighborhood doesn’t come back to the neighborhood, it goes to a scammer somewhere else.

This Is Not a Fair Fight

The prominent section at the top of Google search results is called the Google map pack. It shows an interactive map and the top three local business results. Every slot held by a fake listing is a slot that a real, licensed, insured, local business does not get the benefit of having. This is regardless of how strong their SEO is, how many great reviews they’ve collected, or how many years they’ve been serving their community.

The math does not work in your favor. A crook creating fake business listings can make up a dozen of them in an afternoon for the price of a few mailbox rentals. You just have your real address and location, and your one actual business. You’re playing by a different set of rules, and they take advantage of that.

It continues going downhill from there. These fake listings are designed to attract the highest-value calls, urgent contacts from people who need to hire someone immediately. These calls would normally generate revenue for a real business like yours, in addition to reviews and engagement that improve local rankings over time. Instead, these valuable SEO markers go to a lead broker, your business gets a little less of them, and that leads to an eventual slowing or even loss of SEO strength.

Finally, there’s a reputation problem. When a dishonest locksmith charges $900 for a lock change that wasn’t necessary, the customer doesn’t walk away with the thought that this specific company was scamming them. They walk away thinking that locksmiths are scammers in general. This is the same problem from which many auto mechanics suffer, and it has become a widely held misconception. Every fair and honest operator in a trade like this carries that unfair opinion on their shoulders and it makes it much harder to build trust.

How Wild Iris Marketing Gets Them Removed

We do this work carefully, and we don’t stop until it’s done.

It starts with building a clear idea of what’s what. Figuring out which listings are real and which are not is harder than it sounds. A real business with outdated information and poor SEO can look a lot like a fake business at first glance, and there are more of them like this out there than there should be. We take the time to be sure because, as a small business ourselves, we don’t want to accidentally file against a real business struggling through a rough patch.

Once we’ve confirmed that we’re dealing with a fake listing, we build the case. A removal like this depends on immaculate documentation, carefully cross-referencing the fake listing’s information against public records, business registries, licensing databases, and the physical reality of the address. This step is painstaking and slow. It’s not something a tool can do for you, and there is no shortcut.

Then we file a report. Google does have processes for this, but they aren’t easy to find and they’re not consistent across the board. And worst of all, they don’t come with confirmation or status updates, so it’s not always easy to figure out what’s going on with a case. The reporting forms themselves are limited. They have strict character counts, little to no room for context, and in some cases no way to attach documentation we’ve spent days or even weeks gathering. There are many constraints in the system, and we navigate them with our experience and knowledge.

When the standard reporting forms go nowhere, as they often do, we work through established industry forums and Google’s own specialist communities, where the people who handle this kind of work regularly share what’s getting them results. These aren’t “secret” channels. They’re just specialized channels that most business owners and laypersons would never encounter or have a reason to search out. This kind of knowledge comes from doing these processes repeatedly over time. It’s not something you can pick up quickly, and it’s constantly evolving.

Often, we must repeat this process multiple times. Removals get denied, and fake businesses who did get removed come back under new profiles with slightly different information. This can turn into ongoing work, it’s not always a one-time fix.

This kind of work takes being patient and methodical, going through channels most agencies don’t bother with or in many cases even know about. That’s why we’re able to get results where others fail.