Google Confirms Local Service Ads Bug Affecting Profiles

If you run Local Service Ads — the ads with the green "Google Guaranteed" tick that show above normal search results for trades and service businesses — it is worth logging in this week and checking that your ads are still connected to your Google Business Profile.

Search Engine Roundtable reports that some Local Service Ads accounts have been unlinked from the Business Profiles they were attached to, and that advertisers are also seeing errors and slowness when trying to open the Local Service Ads platform.

What Google has actually said

According to Search Engine Roundtable, Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, responded to complaints on LinkedIn with: "We identified a bug and are actively working to resolve it." She added that it is "unrelated to the migration" of Local Service Ads to Google Ads.

That is the whole of the official comment. Google has confirmed that a bug exists and is being worked on. It has not published a list of what the bug does, who is affected, or when it will be fixed.

Search Engine Roundtable's own write-up is careful about this. Its editor says he suspects the bug being fixed is the one unlinking Local Service Ads accounts from Business Profiles, and that he is "trying to get confirmation" of that. So the connection between the unlinking reports and the bug Google acknowledged is the publication's informed guess, not something Google has stated.

The unlinking reports themselves come from an advertiser named Jack Hepp, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable. He wrote that his longest-running Local Service Ads account "was unlinked from the associated GBP for some reason" and that he had to contact support to get it relinked. He also said he could not see the ads in any of his associated Google Ads accounts, and that he kept getting errors trying to access the platform. That is one advertiser's experience, reported by a trade publication — not a measured outage.

What to do

If you do not run Local Service Ads, nothing. This does not touch your ordinary Business Profile listing, your reviews, your photos, or how you appear in Maps. Free Business Profile listings are not part of this.

If you do run Local Service Ads:

• Sign in and check that your ads are still showing and still tied to the correct Business Profile. If you cannot get in at all, try again later — the reported instability appears to come and go.
• If the link to your Business Profile has dropped, contact Google support and ask for it to be relinked. That is what the advertiser quoted by Search Engine Roundtable did, and it worked for him.
• Keep an eye on your leads for the next week or so. If enquiries through Local Service Ads stop suddenly, an unlink is one possible explanation worth ruling out before you assume demand has fallen.
• Do not start deleting and rebuilding anything. Google has said it is fixing this. Tearing down a working account to solve a problem on Google's side usually costs more than it saves.

Why this is a small item

A bug of this kind is annoying but temporary, and it affects the advertising side of Google rather than the free listing most small businesses rely on. There is no setting you can change to prevent it and no long-term change to plan around. Check, relink if needed, and get back to work.