A two-star review landed on Friday. You open the profile on Monday to answer it, and the Reply button is grayed out. You are seeing the listing the way a customer sees it, not the way an owner does.
The person who set the profile up in 2019 was your office manager. She left in March. Nobody asked for the login before she went, and the profile lives in a Google account that was never yours.
Here is the mechanism. Access to a Google Business Profile is tied to Google accounts, not to the business. Google does not care whose name is on the lease. It cares which accounts are listed under People and access, and whichever one holds the Primary owner role holds the profile. Move that role deliberately and the handover is ten minutes of clicking. Leave it in a departing employee’s Gmail and you are locked out of your own reviews.
This post covers the cooperative cases: handovers, managers, and requesting access from an owner who is unreachable rather than unwilling. If the person holding the profile will not cooperate — an ex-spouse, ex-agency or ex-employee — that is a different play: getting ownership back from someone who will not hand it over.
Roles, and which one you actually need
Google My Business, as most owners still call it, has three roles.
| Role | Can do | Cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Primary owner | Everything an Owner can, plus transfer primary ownership | Leave the profile until someone else holds primary ownership |
| Owner | Edit everything, reply to reviews, add and remove people, remove the profile | Take primary ownership away from the primary owner |
| Manager | Edit most of the profile, reply to reviews, publish posts | Add or remove people, change roles, or remove the profile |
Which one you need:
- The business holds Primary owner, through an account it controls rather than someone’s personal Gmail.
- A second trusted person — a partner, a general manager — holds Owner, so one lost password never locks everyone out.
- Everyone else, including every agency you ever hire, gets Manager.
How to transfer primary ownership
This assumes the current primary owner is available and willing. The clicking takes about ten minutes. The calendar time is closer to a week, because of step 2, so start before the leaver’s last day rather than on it.
1. Add the new person as an owner
Sign in with the Google account that currently holds primary ownership. Search the business name on Google, or open business.google.com. Click the three-dot menu, then Business Profile settings, then People and access. Click Add, enter the email of the new person’s Google account, and choose Owner, so they can manage people while you wait. Google emails them an invitation; nothing has moved until they accept it from that same account.
2. Wait roughly a week
Google will not let a newly added person become primary owner straight away. In our experience they need to have been on the profile for around a week first; the Primary owner option does not appear until then, and the exact number is Google’s to change. Use the wait to confirm the new person can sign in and see the profile.
3. Change their role to Primary owner
Back in People and access, still signed in as the current primary owner, open the new person and change their role to Primary owner. Confirm. Your own account drops to Owner.
4. Remove or downgrade the outgoing account
Only now, with the new primary owner on the list, remove the departing account, or change it to Manager if the person is staying in a smaller role. Do it in the opposite order and you get a profile with nobody holding the keys.
5. Confirm from the new account
Sign out. Sign in as the new primary owner and open People and access. Check three things: the new account shows Primary owner, the departed account is gone or downgraded, and there is nobody else on the list you cannot name.
How to add or remove a manager
Adding a manager is step 1 with a different role. Sign in as an Owner or the Primary owner, open the three-dot menu, Business Profile settings, People and access, click Add, enter their Google account email, and choose Manager. They can edit once they accept the invitation.
Removing someone is the reverse: open People and access, click the person, and remove them. Only an Owner or the Primary owner can do this.
When someone leaves:
- Remove their account the day they go, and any other account on the list you do not recognize.
- If they ever used your login rather than their own, change that password and turn on 2-step verification. A removed manager who still knows the primary owner’s password has not been removed.
- Check who holds Primary owner. If it is the person leaving, you are not offboarding, you are transferring; go back to the procedure above.
How to request access when someone else owns the profile
This is the route when you are not on the list at all: the founder retired, the seller moved away, or nobody can name who claimed it years ago. It is a Google Business Profile access request, and it works whether the owner is cooperative or unreachable.
- Sign in to Google with the account you want to hold the profile. Search the business on Google or on Google Maps.
- On the listing, click Own this business? or Claim this business. Google shows a partial email of the current owner and a Request access button.
- Fill in the form: the role you want, your relationship to the business, your contact details. If you are the operator, ask for ownership, not manager access.
- Wait. Google emails the current owner, who typically has 3 days to respond. If they approve, you are in. If nobody responds, Google usually offers to let you verify the business yourself, which follows the same path as verifying a profile from scratch. Google does not guarantee that option appears.
If the current owner denies the request, the cooperative route is over. What remains is Google support at support.google.com/business/gethelp with proof of ownership: business registration, a utility bill in the business name, photos of your signage. That case, and the actively hostile owner, are covered in full in the access recovery walkthrough. This post stops where cooperation does.
Selling or buying a business
The profile is part of what is being sold, whether or not anyone wrote it down. The reviews, photos and ranking history live on that one listing and do not move to a new one.
If you are the seller: add the buyer as Owner a week or more before closing, transfer primary ownership on the day, and let the buyer remove you afterwards. Do not delete the profile. Do not mark it closed. Do not leave primary ownership in your personal account as a favor you will get to later.
If you are the buyer and the seller has gone quiet: use the request-access flow above, ask for ownership, and have the purchase agreement ready as proof.
Working with an agency without handing them the keys
An agency should never hold primary ownership of your profile. Not a good agency, not ours, not anyone. The agency’s job is editing and reporting, and Manager covers all of it. We ask for Manager access on every engagement and check that the primary owner is an account the business controls before we touch anything. If an agency insists on primary ownership, ask why; there is no technical reason for it.
For multi-location work there is a cleaner option than adding individuals: the agency uses its own organization account in Business Profile Manager and is granted access to your locations from there. You keep primary ownership, and when the contract ends you remove one organization instead of hunting for six email addresses. For more than a handful of locations, set it up this way from the start — see how we handle multiple locations.
What not to do
- Do not create a new profile because you cannot get into the old one. Two listings, split reviews, and a fair chance Google merges or suspends one. The duplicate profile problem is harder to unwind than an access request.
- Do not share one login between several people. Shared logins cannot be offboarded, and a security flag on that one account takes everyone down with it.
- Do not make the agency primary owner. If it has already happened, ask them to transfer it to you today; a cooperative agency does this in one sitting plus the waiting period.
- Do not remove the old owner before the new one is in place. The order above is the order for a reason.
When you cannot get it back
Sometimes the cooperative route has nobody on the other end. The founder died. The former owner lost the Google account and cannot recover it. The account was a personal Gmail deleted years ago.
Start with the request-access flow above; a request with no reply usually opens the self-verification option. Our rough read, not a Google figure: when the previous owner is unreachable rather than hostile, the large majority get in within a few weeks. The ones that do not usually have a second problem underneath, most often a profile that is also suspended — its own recovery process.
Documentation decides these: business registration in the current operator’s name, a utility bill or lease at the address, photos of signage with the business name visible, and for a death or a sale, the paperwork connecting you to the person who held the account. Gather it before you file, not after Google asks.
Filed the request, waited out the window, tried support with documents, still outside after a couple of months? Stop. Either the case belongs in the hostile-owner playbook linked above, or something structural about the profile needs fixing first.
This post is one piece of a bigger playbook. The full guide covers all 16 common Google Business Profile crises in one place: The GBP cheat sheet.
Handing a profile over and want it done cleanly? Our Google listing service covers the transfer and the cleanup of the access list, or send us the profile link and we’ll map out the fastest route.
