Daily Marketing News, September 26, 2026: Google removes Business Profile posts with unverified contacts
Google now removes Business Profile posts with phone numbers, emails and social handles it can't tie to the business. Google Ads doesn't let you touch target ROAS while promotion mode is on. Bing is trying on Google's feature names and letting people remix images straight from search results.
Topic of the day: Google started removing Business Profile posts with unverified contacts
On September 25, 2026 it became known that Google tightened its rules for phone numbers, emails and handles in business profile posts. Google Posts are the updates a business owner publishes right in their Google Business Profile, and they show up in Search and on Maps. For a local business this is one of the few free ways to talk to people who are already looking at the profile.
Until now the help page said it briefly: a phone number in the text of a post is always prohibited. Now the wording is different. Google writes that it may remove posts with unverified contact information and lists phone numbers, email addresses and social media handles under that label. A second help document adds a detail: a post with a phone number may be rejected if Google can't confirm that the number is connected to this specific business.
So the rule got wider and softer at the same time. Wider, because emails and handles are now in the list next to phone numbers. Softer, because in theory a number Google can verify might survive. In practice I wouldn't bet a post on Google's ability to verify anything.
The change was spotted by local SEO specialist Hiroko Imai. Her advice is simple: don't put contacts in the post text at all. Send people to the site and social accounts through the "Learn more" or "Book" buttons.
What to do right now: go through your recent posts and remove phone numbers, emails and social handles from the text. Check that every post that needs a call to action has a button with a working link. It's a small job, and it's much less annoying than finding out your posts quietly disappeared.
More news for September 26, 2026
Local Services Ads is Google's ad format for local services, such as plumbers and lawyers, where the customer often calls right away. Before, the number from Google Ads was set in the profile's advanced settings, and that was the number shown in the ads, with a call counter attached. Ads specialist Anthony Higman writes that since September 1 all local formats have shown the main number from the profile. Google replied on X: if a campaign has both locations and call numbers connected, ads with locations may send calls to the numbers of those locations. That leaves a choice: keep only the numbers and keep call tracking, or add locations and lose it. Later Higman reported that everything works correctly again in his accounts, but it's better to check the number in your own ad with your own eyes.
Target ROAS is automated bidding: the advertiser sets how much revenue they want for every dollar spent, and the system picks bids to hit that goal. Promotion mode is a mode you switch on for the duration of a sale. While it's active, Google Ads shows a notice that target ROAS can't be changed and offers to adjust ROAS tolerance, the allowed deviation from the target. The restriction was found by specialist Arpan Banerjee, and freelancer Adriaan Dekker also wrote about it on LinkedIn. The takeaway is simple: set your ROAS target before the promotion starts, because during the sale you won't be able to fix it.
Bing is Microsoft's search engine. Its search mode with AI answers was called Copilot Search and opened in a separate tab. In the test this tab is called AI Mode, the same as Google's AI search mode. Bing has already tried the name AI Overviews for AI answers above the results, which is also the name of a Google feature. The test was first noticed by Sachin Patel, who posted screenshots on X and on Search Engine Watch. For anyone promoting a site, this is one more sign that AI answers in search are becoming a common standard. Content should be prepared for them across all search engines, not just Google.
Before, an image found in Bing simply opened for viewing or for a click through to the site. Now some images carry a label, and it comes in 2 versions: an "Editable" tag right on the picture, found by Sachin Patel, or a "Customize" button, found by Khushal Bherwani. Barry Schwartz, editor of Search Engine Roundtable, sees only a pencil icon. A click opens Bing Image Creator, Microsoft's image generator, where the picture can be reworked. Owners of sites with photos, illustrations and infographics should keep in mind that some people will stay in Bing's editor and never reach the page.
Search Engine Roundtable summarized an investigation by 404 Media. Raters are people who manually evaluate a system's answers. Google has long used them to check the quality of its results. OpenAI's contractors read real ChatGPT user queries and grade the answers, and according to an internal document more than 10,000 people may take part in these projects. Several contractors hired through the staffing company Mercor were fired after a check concluded their ratings had been written by AI. Mercor confirmed that using language models is forbidden, and OpenAI declined to comment. For marketers it's a reminder: ChatGPT answers that may mention your brand are trained partly on ratings from real people.
What advertisers and site owners should do with this
- If you run a Google Business Profile: remove phone numbers, emails and social handles from post text, and send people through the "Learn more" and "Book" buttons.
- If you run Local Services Ads: open your ad and check which number it actually shows and whether calls are being counted.
- If you're preparing a sale in Google Ads: set target ROAS before switching on promotion mode, because after that only the tolerance can be moved.
- If your site relies on images: watch image search traffic from Bing, since part of it may now end up in Bing Image Creator.
- If you optimize for AI answers: prepare content for Bing as well as Google, since both are moving to the same format.
Writes about: SMM, paid boosts, ads, traffic, suppliers, the market from the inside, daily news
