How to Claim a Google Business Profile Someone Else Owns

If your Google Business Profile is already claimed by someone else, you can request access at business.google.com/add: Google notifies the current owner by email and gives them three days to respond. If they do not respond, you may be able to claim the profile yourself, though that option is not offered in every case.

The process, step by step

1. Go to business.google.com/add
2. Enter the business name and address
3. Select the existing listing from the suggested results
4. Choose Request access
5. Complete the form and submit it

Google forwards the request to the current owner, who has three days. If they accept, you get access. If they decline, the process stops and you have to go through Google support. If they do not respond, open the confirmation email, choose View request then Verify, and follow the verification steps on screen.

Process documented by Google Business Profile, consulted 2 September 2026.

Why you do not control your Google Business Profile

Four situations come up constantly, on your own profile.

1. A former manager created it with a personal account and left two years ago. The account still exists, nobody knows the password, and the access request email goes to an address no one reads anymore.
2. An agency claimed it on your behalf, under a mandate that has since ended.
3. A profile already existed for your location, created automatically by Google. Someone else claimed it before you did.
4. Someone you do not know suggested an edit and Google published it without consulting you. The profile is still yours, but somebody else has changed what it shows.

The result: you can see your profile without being able to change it. Wrong hours, a changed address, you have to report it to Google and wait for Google to act.

What changes across a network of locations

For a single store, this is one request to make. For a network of forty locations, it is potentially forty requests, and at the outset nobody knows which ones are affected.

So start with the inventory rather than the access requests. For each location, you need to know which profile exists, who holds it, from which account, and whether a second one exists. Without that inventory, you recover your profiles one at a time as incidents come up, which takes years and leaves locations invisible in the meantime.