Epic Insights

Edition 37  ·  Sep 15, 2026

The Big Story

Your Google Business Profile is the only asset in your marketing that other people can add to. Photos from any contributor. Suggested changes to your hours and address. Answers to questions about your business from people who've never walked in. None of it waits for your sign-off. It publishes, and then it gets reviewed, if it gets reviewed.

Here's what that buys somebody who's looking for a way in. This month Naomi Stevens found an AI-generated photo sitting on a client's profile: the company's name printed across it, and a phone number that belonged to somebody else. She checked the account that uploaded it and found the same number on photos across more than 150 unrelated businesses. Anyone who read that number off the picture and dialed it reached a stranger.

She reported the image. Support sent back a list of fixes for common problems, none of them hers. She uploaded a logo and a cover image to try to push it down the gallery, and it stayed put. It came off after Barry Schwartz wrote about it at Search Engine Roundtable on September 10.

Google is screening this at a scale nobody else could manage. By its own count it blocked 79 million bad edits and pulled 13 million fake profiles last year, and in April it announced Gemini models screening edits before they publish plus email alerts so verified owners can review them. Those alerts cover edits. A photo somebody uploads is a different surface, and it showed.

Scale catches patterns. It doesn't catch yours, today. Whatever is sitting on your listing right now has been there since the last time a human being looked, and that's the whole exposure. Fifteen minutes closes it.

Quick Hits

Ask Epic

You can report it, and Google does pull a lot of them. Their own 2025 numbers say 292 million policy-violating reviews blocked or removed. So it's worth doing.

Just know what the bar is. Google removes reviews that break a policy, not reviews that are unfair. If there's no name, no visit and no detail, you've got a case worth making. If it's just somebody being harsh, it's probably staying, and it can take a while either way.

So the better protection is the one you control. One bad review out of thirty reads as a bad day. One out of six reads as a pattern. Keep the count climbing and a single spiteful star stops mattering.

Reply to it in public, short and calm, no arguing the facts. Then keep asking customers for reviews the clean way: ask everybody, don't tell them what to say, don't screen for the happy ones, don't offer anything for it. Google's enforcing all three of those now, and a stripped profile hurts worse than the review did.

What Epic's doing for you this week

We're scrolling the photo galleries on every Business Profile we manage, looking for anything uploaded by somebody who isn't the business. It's not a thrilling job and it's apparently the only version of quality control there is. We're also running link checks across ad destinations and profile links so nothing's pointing at a page that no longer exists, and confirming the owner email on each profile is an address somebody still reads, because that's where Google sends its alerts. Whatever turns up lands in your Client Center.