Another Business's Reviews on Your Google Profile: 2026

You open your profile and the reviews are about somebody else's business. A restaurant's complaints under your dental practice; a 1-star about a haircut on a listing that sells tyres. Finding another business's reviews on your Google profile costs you twice, because the rating that decides whether anyone calls is now an average of two companies, and the flag button you reach for first cannot help in two of the three possible causes. We read Google's duplicate-profile documentation, its bulk-upload status table, its review policy and its Business Information API reference line by line, and scored the six pages ranking for this query. Not one mentions the review-side route, and not one quotes what Google says a merge costs you.

The three ways another business's reviews land on your profile

The symptom is identical in all three cases and the fixes have nothing in common, which is why owners lose fortnights flagging reviews that were never going to be removed. Sort the cause first.

In the first case Google attached the reviews. Two profiles were treated as one place and the review sets were combined. Those reviews are genuine, they describe a real experience at a real business, and they breach no policy — so every flag comes back clean, correctly.

In the second, nothing was merged: two eligible businesses share an address, Google has decided one is the duplicate, and the surviving profile now carries the traffic and the feedback for both.

In the third, a human made the mistake. A customer searched a name close to yours, landed on your profile and reviewed the other company on it. That review does breach a policy line, and it is the only one of the three a flag will remove.

The last row is a different article, because those reviews are about your business under someone else's management, not another business — we cover it in buying a business with bad Google reviews. It is here because it is the row owners most often mistake for the first.

Tell the three cases apart before you file anything

Ten minutes separates them, and the evidence you gather doing it is the evidence each route needs anyway.

Screenshot every answer with a visible date before you touch anything. Both routes run on evidence you cannot reconstruct later, and our guide to documenting evidence for a Google review dispute covers what holds up.

What Google actually says about duplicates and shared addresses

Most pages on this topic open with a flat claim: one listing per location. That is not Google's rule. Its wording is about businesses, not addresses: "You can have only one Business Profile for each business. Multiple profiles for the same business may mislead your customers and are against our policies. If a profile is considered a duplicate, it won't show on Google Search or Maps."

That last clause explains the symptom. A duplicate is not deleted, it is made invisible. The business behind it is still real, its customers still search for it, and they arrive at whichever profile Google kept — yours. Google names three reasons for the mark: an existing verified profile for the same business, the same address as another, or different services split across profiles. Only the first is genuine duplication. The second is a guess about geography, and the one that catches two unrelated companies in one building.

Using Google's words is practical, not pedantic: a ticket asking to "appeal the duplicate status for two distinct and eligible businesses" lands in a queue with a procedure for it. One saying "Google merged my reviews" does not.

On shared addresses Google is more generous than the folklore. Several businesses at one address can each hold a profile if they are "distinct businesses with different names and clearly visible differences in signage" and each is eligible — covering "multiple brands, rebranded businesses, departments within other businesses, or individual practitioners at a shared location". A salon inside a gym is not automatically a duplicate. What tips it over is sameness: same name, phone, category, no signage difference. All four are in your control, and fixing them is cheaper than appealing, as is ordinary Business Profile hygiene.

When Google merged two distinct businesses

This is the case with a named remedy, short enough to quote whole: "If Business Profiles for 2 distinct and eligible businesses were incorrectly merged, contact support to appeal the duplicate status."

Two words carry the weight. Distinct means different businesses, not different departments or service lines of one business — Google rejects separate profiles for "different services" outright. Eligible means each would qualify for a profile alone. Fail either and the appeal fails, whatever the review mess looks like.

Do not answer a wrong merge by creating a fresh profile. It is marked a duplicate under the first of Google's three reasons, it will not show on Search or Maps, and you have added a second case to the queue. The same holds for a move: "do not create a new Business Profile for the new location. Instead, update the existing profile with the new address."

Expect slowness and chasing. Our walkthrough of contacting Google support covers the channels that still reach a person, and if the merge arrived alongside a suspension, read profile suspension after a review dispute first: a suspended profile must be reinstated before a duplicate appeal can be acted on.

A merge combines the reviews, and the replies may not survive

Five of the six pages ranking for this problem are titled around merging "without losing reviews". None quotes the sentence that says what you lose: "When 2 profiles are merged, their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost. For the merge to be successful, the profiles must represent the same business and should have the same info."

Reviews are the asset everyone watches, so Google protects them. Replies are the asset you built by hand, and they are the ones marked expendable. Two years of answering criticism in public can disappear while the criticism stands.

Export your replies before you request a merge and before you accept one. A screenshot of each, or a copy in a spreadsheet, is twenty minutes of work and the only backup that exists.

There is no documented un-merge that splits reviews back out

This is the finding that changes what you spend your week on, and nobody writes it down. Google documents how to request a merge, how to remove a duplicate you created, how to appeal a duplicate status and how reviews move when you relocate. It documents no procedure that takes a merged review set and returns each review to the business it was written about.

The appeal is not that procedure. It addresses the status: it argues two businesses are distinct and eligible, so both should be allowed to show. Winning it can make the suppressed profile visible again. Nothing in Google's wording promises the reviews written about that business will travel back to it.

One adjacent route exists and is narrower than it sounds: "If you unintentionally created and verified a new profile due to a change in physical location or ownership change, contact us to transfer your reviews from the old profile to the new one." That covers your own duplicate of your own business. It does not describe pulling another company's reviews off your listing.

So treat a wrong merge as two jobs with different odds: separating the profiles, which has a documented path, and cleaning the rating, which does not. Plan for the rating to be fixed by new reviews rather than by subtraction.

When the reviewer picked the wrong profile

This is the commonest version of another business's reviews on your Google profile, the one with the best odds, and the one every competing guide leaves out. Nothing is merged: a person searched a name close to yours, or tapped the wrong pin in a plaza, and wrote about a business that is not you.

That review breaches policy on its face. Google's off-topic rule reads: "Only post content that is based on your experience or questions about experiences at a specific location." Location is the operative term: an experience somewhere else is off-topic here, however genuine it was there. The fake-engagement rule adds the second ground — content "that is not based on a real experience or does not accurately represent the location or product in question".

Pick one ground and make it obvious. The strongest evidence is a service you do not sell, a staff name you never employed, or a date you were closed. Say what the review describes, say why it cannot be your business, and stop. Google is clear that "only those that violate Google policies are eligible for removal", and that it "doesn't get involved in conflict between businesses and customers" — so an argument about fairness reads as the second thing.

Report it, then watch the status rather than refiling. "Review evaluation typically takes several days", with a status in the Reviews Management Tool: "Decision pending" while it waits, or "Report reviewed - no policy violation" if refused — at which point an appeal, not a second report, is the next step. The mechanics are in our guides to reporting a policy violation and a denied removal request, and the boundary cases in off-topic Google reviews.

Google's own data model knows, and will not let you write to it

There is a way to see the merge from the inside, and it settles an argument that otherwise runs on guesswork. The Business Information API describes each location's metadata, and one field in it is duplicateLocation, documented as: "Output only. The location resource that this location duplicates."

Read that twice, because it is the whole situation in one line. Google records the duplicate relationship explicitly, as a pointer from your location to the other one, and marks that pointer output only. The link is machine-readable and not writable. No API call, no dashboard toggle and no form field lets an owner change which location their listing is held to duplicate. That is why this never resolves itself through the interface, and why every real fix runs through a human at support.

The same metadata block carries hasPendingEdits — "Indicates whether any of this Location's properties are in the edit pending state" — the field that tells you something is being changed about your listing before the change lands. If you or your agency already use the API, both are worth reading on a schedule.

Stop the next wrong merge before it publishes

Most wrong merges start as an edit suggestion, and edits are the part of the pipeline Google has just changed. In its 2025 figures, published 16 April 2026, Google says it "blocked 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits to help keep Business Profiles factual". Edits are a quieter attack surface than reviews, and the one that can erase you from the map rather than merely rate you badly.

In the same announcement Google added the control that matters here: "Starting this month, we're rolling out proactive email alerts so verified and active owners have a way to easily review important edits to their Business Profiles before they go live." Two conditions do the work in that sentence. Verified and active. A profile nobody has signed into for a year may not count as active, which turns dormancy into a security setting.

Three things follow. Stay signed in often enough to count as active, with a notification address a human reads. Treat an edit alert as urgent: pre-publication is the only moment a wrong merge is cheap to stop. And check your name, category and address on a fixed cadence — a monitoring routine catches the step change a merge produces.

The ninety-minute triage when another business's reviews appear

1. Screenshot the profile as it stands — review count, star average, the foreign reviews, today's date visible.
2. Answer the four questions above and write down which case you are in. Everything after depends on it.
3. Export your replies. This is the asset Google says "may be lost", and the only backup is yours.
4. Search the other business by exact name and record whether it still has its own place on Maps.
5. If merged: photograph permanent exterior signage for both businesses, then ask support to appeal the duplicate status.
6. If a shared address: fix sameness first — distinct name, category, phone, and a unique suite number or store code — then appeal if the status persists.
7. If a reviewer mistake: report each review on one named ground, track it in the Reviews Management Tool, and appeal a refusal rather than refiling.
8. Never create a second profile, whatever the delay. It is marked duplicate, it does not show, and it muddies the original case.

Frequently asked questions