How Do I Add Someone to My Google Business Profile?

Short answer: open your Business Profile, go to the three-dot menu or Business Profile settings, click People and access, hit Add, type their email, pick Owner or Manager, and send the invite. Takes about two minutes. They get an email, they accept, and they are in. The email has to be the Google account they actually sign in with or the invite goes nowhere.

That is the whole process when it works. It does not always work, and the reasons it breaks are the same five or six things over and over. I set this up for clients most weeks, so here is the version with the potholes marked.

How do I actually get to People and access?

Google keeps moving this button, which is why half the people who ask me this have already looked for it.

Easiest way is to search your own business name while signed in to the Google account that owns it. Your profile management panel shows up right there in search results. Look for the three dots or Business Profile settings, then People and access. From there, Add is in the top left. Type the email, choose the role, send.

If you do not see that panel at all when you search your business, you are either signed in with the wrong Google account or you never actually verified the listing. Those are two very different problems and it is worth figuring out which one you have before you start clicking around.

Owner or manager, which one should I pick?

Manager, almost always.

A manager can do the daily work. Edit hours, post updates, reply to reviews, add photos, respond to messages. That covers everything an employee or an agency needs.

What a manager cannot do is add or remove other users, or delete the profile. Which is exactly why you want it. You keep the keys, they do the work. I have watched a business owner hand out owner access to a vendor, part ways a year later, and then spend six weeks trying to get their own listing back. Give owner access to yourself and maybe a business partner. Everybody else gets manager.

One more thing on owners. There is a primary owner, and that person is the only one who can pass the primary role to somebody else. If your primary owner is a former office manager whose Gmail nobody has the password to, fix that today, not the week you need it.

Why did my invite never show up?

Four things cause this, and it is usually the second one.

The email went to spam. Have them check.

The address is not a Google account. This is the big one. A person can have a perfectly working work email that has never been used to create a Google account, and Google cannot invite an address it does not recognize as an account. They need to sign up for a free Google account with that address first, or you just use their Gmail.

You typed it wrong. Go back to People and access and look at the pending list. If the address is off by a letter, cancel the invite and resend.

They accepted it while signed in to a different account. Happens constantly with people who have a personal Gmail and a work Google account open in the same browser. Have them sign out of everything, sign back in as the invited address, then click the link.

What if somebody else already owns my listing?

This one comes up more than you would think. An old marketing company claimed it. A previous owner still holds it. Somebody at Google auto-generated a profile years ago and a random person verified it.

Search your business, find the listing, and look for the Request access option. Google emails the current owner and gives them seven days. If they never respond, you can usually claim it yourself after that window. If they say no, there is an appeal process where you prove the business is yours.

It is slow and it is annoying, but it works far more often than people assume, mostly because the current owner is a dead email address nobody checks. Start the clock now instead of waiting until you need to change your hours for a holiday. If your profile is a mess in other ways too, I wrote up what a Google Business Profile should actually look like for a local business.

Should I give my marketing agency access?

Yes, as a manager. Never as an owner.

Any agency worth hiring will ask for manager access and will not push back when you say that is all they are getting. If somebody insists on owner access or, worse, asks for your Google password, that is your answer about who you are dealing with.

Same rule applies to your Facebook page, by the way. I went through how Facebook page admin roles work separately because the setup is close but the wording Meta uses is different enough to trip people up.

And when the relationship ends, remove them the same day. Not next month. People and access, click their name, remove. Their old posts and review replies stay on the profile, nothing disappears, they just lose the ability to touch it. If you would rather have somebody handle the whole thing, that is a chunk of what our local marketing services cover for businesses around Northwest Ohio.

Common questions

Can I add someone to my Google Business Profile without giving up ownership?
Yes. Add them as a manager instead of an owner. Managers can edit the profile, post updates, reply to reviews, and upload photos, but they cannot add or remove users or delete the listing. That is the safe default for an employee or an agency.

How long does a Google Business Profile invite take to show up?
Usually a few minutes. If it has been a day and nothing arrived, check the spam folder first, then confirm the email address you typed is the exact Google account they sign in with. A work email that is not tied to a Google account will not work.

Can I have more than one owner on a Google Business Profile?
You can. There is one primary owner and you can add additional owners on top of that. The primary owner is the only one who can transfer that primary role, so make sure it stays with someone who will still be around next year.

What happens if I remove someone from my Google Business Profile?
They lose access right away and any reviews or posts they made stay on the profile. Removing a user does not delete anything they published. If they were the primary owner you have to transfer that role first, since the primary owner cannot simply be removed.

Someone else claimed my business on Google. How do I get it back?
Use the Request access flow on the listing. Google emails the current owner and gives them seven days to respond. If they ignore it you can usually claim the profile yourself, and if they deny it you can appeal. It is slow but it works more often than people expect.

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