There are a lot of cases on the Google Support Community where a merchants Google Business Profile listing is disabled or suspended. They collect all the right documentation, request a reinstatement — Denied.
They Request that the profile be reviewed again — Denied.
They go to the community forum and request help from one of the Google Product Experts only to be told their listing cannot be reinstated.
They were relying heavily on their Google Business Profile for their business sales. That is how people find them online in their local market. Without their GBP they are losing business and their revenue is declining.
The big question is Why can’t the Google Business Profile be reinstated?
There may be a variety of reasons for this, it is dependent on WHY the profile was suspended in the first place.
Often it has to do with the user account that owns the profile. This is unrelated to the profile itself and cannot be fixed with tweaking the profile or providing all the correct documentation.
The user may be involved in suspicious activity with their profile.
This may be related to the quality of your email, it could be related to your Google Ads account, it could also be related to your activity on the local maps whether you are reporting people, writing reviews on business profiles that don’t pass Google’s quality review, posting on a profile… so many things and so many unknowns.
So, if you don’t know what you did to prevent your business listing from being reinstated, here are a few things you can check.
Check for user account restrictions
Google will sometimes flag a user account for “suspicious activity”. They don’t say what that suspicious activity is necessarily but whatever it was, it can impact A LOT of stuff. Especially your Google Business Profile.
First Simple step to check if a user account is restricted:
- Log into your Google user account — You may want to use an incognito window but it shouldn’t really matter for this test.
- While logged in to your user account, visit the following url: https://myaccount.google.com/restrictions
- Look for a warning message. If you have NO restrictions on your account you should get the image below

If you get a different warning that says features are restricted then you will need to fix those before your Google Business Profile can be reinstated.
Learn more about Google’s Feature Restrictions
Finding and Fixing Your User Account Restriction In The Google User Admin Dashboard
Google says they will let you know when there is a user account restriction. They also say they will tell you. These things are true.
We worked through this situation with a client where their Google Business Profile listing was suspended. They received an email from Google Workspace stating
“Google has recently detected activity from users in your organization that violates the Google Workspace Terms of Service or the Google Workspace for Education Terms of Service.
Google Workspace Email
As a result, users in your organization have had their access to certain services or features restricted. Users can find more details and submit an appeal by going to their account.
Please view the alert center for additional details, investigation options, and remediation recommendations.”

The day prior they received an email from “Google Business Profile” that stated “your profile has been put under restriction due to policy violation“

When you get someone frantically reaching out, panicked that their user account was restricted and ALL of the business profile listings their account was connected to were suspended as well, there are a few questions. Such as “what did you do?”.
The answer was of course, “I don’t know”.
This could have come from any user connected to their organization.
We went straight to the Google Admin panel with them. You can check yours by logging into https://admin.google.com/.
There is a section under “Security” on the left hand side of the dashboard called “Alert Center”. See the image below:

That is where you want to be. In the alert center you will see a bunch of different notices about what is happening on your account. In there you will see warnings and the severity of them as displayed in the image below:

In this case “Customer abuse detected” is where the issue was. We clicked through to that and found the culprit.

If you click on “View Additional details table” it will take you the rule and provide more details on the restriction. Notice how the scope is “Entire domain” in this case. This would impact and affect ALL users on the domain.

After this instance, we went back through the email history with them and found the restricted emails. We also went through the appeal process and the account was restored.
Once the account was restored, the Google Business Profiles were able to be reinstated since there was no longer an account restriction on them.
So What Have You Hopefully Learned From This Article
I hope this has been helpful. I see A LOT of cases in the GBP Support Community where listings CANNOT be reinstated. Yours may fall under this category.
The Google Product Experts in the GBP Community do not work for Google and cannot access your account for you. You will need to walk through the steps laid out in the article to see if you have a restriction on your account.
Go back through your emails to see whether you got a notification or a warning about an account restriction or suspicious activity from Google Work Space.
I recommend that you appeal those decisions, get your user account fixed and then report back into the community thread you had going. Contact the product expert that was handling your case and tell them what happened and request another review of your profile once the user account restriction has been lifted.
Have you run into this? I would love to hear about it and how you may have fixed it or what your struggles are still. Tell me about it!
You can contact on all the social media channels or connect with me here at Simple SEO.
All the best!
Kevin