Google keeps changing my hours, address, or category. Here's how to lock it down.
Google accepts edits from users, from third-party data, and from its own machine learning. If your hours, address, phone, or category keep reverting, something outside your dashboard is feeding Google a different answer — and until you fix that source, the edits will keep coming back.
- Where bad edits come from
- How to stop reverts
- NAP consistency
- Free profile audit
Your profile is a consensus, not a form you filled in.
Google cross-references what you enter against your website, directory listings, data aggregators, and user suggestions. When those disagree, Google picks whichever it trusts most — which is not automatically you.
So the fix is never just "change it back." It is to make every public source agree. Name, address, and phone identical everywhere, down to the suite number and the punctuation. Hours on your website matching hours on the profile. The old number from before you switched carriers scrubbed from every directory that still shows it.
Category changes are a different animal. Google will sometimes add or swap a category based on what it reads on your site and in your reviews. If your primary category keeps drifting, your website and services content are describing a different business than the one you're claiming to be.
And user-suggested edits go live before you approve them. Turning on profile notifications is the difference between catching a bad edit in a day and finding it three months later after your calls dropped.
Locking the profile down
- 011. Turn on edit notificationsEnable email notifications for profile updates so any user-suggested or Google-applied change hits your inbox the day it happens. This alone prevents most long-running damage.
- 022. Standardize your NAP everywherePick one exact format for name, address, and phone. Apply it on your website footer, contact page, schema markup, the profile, and every directory listing you can find. Inconsistency is what invites the overwrite.
- 033. Clean up stale citationsOld addresses and disconnected numbers living on directory sites keep feeding Google the wrong answer. Claim or correct the significant ones — the aggregators and the top local directories carry the most weight.
- 044. Match your website to your categoriesIf your primary category keeps changing, your homepage and service pages are probably ambiguous about what you do. Make the primary service unmistakable in the title, the H1, and the services list.
- 055. Set special hours ahead of timeHoliday hours left blank invite user edits and "hours may differ" warnings that kill click-through. Load them a month out, every time.
Other Google Business Profile problems we fix
Terms used on this page
Common questions
Why does Google keep changing my business hours?
Usually a user suggested the edit, or Google inferred different hours from your website or from customer behavior data. Correct it in the dashboard, make sure your site shows the same hours, and enable update notifications so the next attempt doesn't slip through.
Can competitors edit my Google Business Profile?
Anyone can suggest an edit, including a competitor, and some suggestions go live before you see them. That's exactly why notifications and a monthly profile check matter — malicious edits marking a business as permanently closed do happen.
Does my address have to match everywhere exactly?
Close enough usually works — Google is reasonably good at recognizing "Suite 4" and "Ste 4" as the same place — but exact consistency removes any doubt and is the cheapest signal you can buy. Pick one format and enforce it.
Is this something you monitor for clients?
Yes. Profile monitoring is part of the $99/mo: we watch for suggested edits, category drift, hours changes, and new duplicates, and correct them before they cost you calls.
See what your profile is missing — free.
We score your categories, services, photos, review velocity, and map pack position against the businesses currently beating you, and email you the report. No call required.
Last reviewed and updated by the RapidLocal team.