Short answer: Google has rewritten the advertising and solicitation section of its Maps content policy so it now lists separate rules for merchants. In the listing, it prohibits promotional or commercial content that contains “time-bound promotions, pricing, or direct calls-to-action.” In posts, it says offers and updates are otherwise permitted, with a limit on unrelated contact details and links. Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on October 6, 2026.
If you run an HVAC company, a lawn care crew, a dental practice, a restaurant or a shop in Northeast Indiana, there is a decent chance your Google description does some selling. A dated discount, a price, a “call now” line. Those used to be a harmless habit. Google's page now gives that habit a name, and tells merchants where it should live instead.
This is a policy text change, not a study, so there are no new statistics to report. We stick to what Google's page says, what Search Engine Roundtable reported, and what a few other analysts made of it. Where we are giving our own judgment, we say so. And there is one place where this post disagrees with advice we published earlier, which we flag in the section on prices.
Key Takeaways
- Google's policy page now has a “For merchants” list. In the listing, it names time-bound promotions, pricing and direct calls-to-action as prohibited promotional or commercial content.
- In posts, the named restriction is email addresses, phone numbers, social media links and links to other websites that are not related to your business. Offers and updates are otherwise permitted in posts.
- Google's page does not say which profile fields count as “the listing,” and no enforcement date or sweep has been announced.
- The practical move is to keep your description about what you are, where you work and what you do, and move dated deals and calls to action into posts and buttons.
- Pricing in the services section is a gray area. Keep it factual and not time-limited, and keep it out of your description.
What Did Google Change in Its Advertising Policy?
Search Engine Roundtable reported on October 6, 2026 that Google had updated the advertising and solicitation section of its Google Maps and Business Profiles “Prohibited & restricted content” policy. The change was spotted by Hiroko Imai, who posted before and after screenshots on LinkedIn. We read the live text of the policy ourselves on October 27, 2026.
The section opens with a statement of purpose. Contributions to Google Maps “should reflect genuine experiences or define a business's permanent identity,” Google writes, which “helps users discover listings and ensures the platform remains reliable rather than a marketplace.” From that, it concludes: don't post content for advertising or solicitation purposes.
What changed is the list that follows. The page now splits prohibited content into two groups.
What the Policy Page Now Lists
- For users: promotional or commercial content, and email addresses, phone numbers, social media links or links to other websites in your reviews.
- For merchants, in the listing: “Promotional or commercial content that contains any of the following: Time-bound promotions, pricing, or direct calls-to-action.”
- For merchants, in posts: “Email addresses, phone numbers, social media links, or links to other websites in your posts that are not related to your business. Offers and updates that may be seen as promotional or commercial content are otherwise permitted in posts.”
The user list is the older half. The merchant list is the new half, and it is the part that matters if you manage a profile. One analysis of the change, from Intelligent Solutions, notes that the help page shows no update date and that Google has not published a blog post or announcement about it. It also offers a view we cannot verify: that this is mostly Google writing down what it has enforced for a while. We would treat that as one analyst's opinion.
What Counts as the Listing, and What Counts as a Post?
Think of your profile as two layers. The listing is the permanent layer: the business name, categories, address, hours and the description. Posts are the timely layer: updates, events and offers that come and go. Google's new wording assigns each kind of content a home.
The permanent layer is meant to say who you are. The timely layer is where Google openly says offers are fine. Look at the contrast in the policy text itself. The listing rule uses the word “prohibited” for time-bound promotions, pricing and direct calls-to-action. The posts rule restricts only contact details and links that are not related to your business, and states that offers and updates are otherwise permitted.
The catch is that Google's page does not say which fields make up “the listing.” Relevant Audience, which also covered the change, makes the same observation: the source does not spell out whether name, description, attributes, services or products count. So the layers above are our working model, not a Google definition.
The model is useful because it matches a pattern we have seen reflected elsewhere in Google's Business Profile rules this autumn. We wrote about the post-text version of this idea in Google May Remove Posts With Unverified Phone Numbers (2026), where Google pointed owners to a Call now button instead of a number in the text. This new policy line applies the same instinct to the permanent part of the profile: put the action in a button, not in the sentence.
Which Parts of Your Profile Are Probably Affected?
Because Google does not map the rule to fields, here is how we would triage them. This is our judgment, in order of how clearly each field fits the description of “listing.”
Our Triage of Profile Fields
- The business description. The clearest case. It is permanent text about the business, and it is where most owners paste a deal. Intelligent Solutions calls a description that reads like an ad the main thing to fix this week, and Atlas Unchained, a marketing firm, puts it first in its audit list.
- Service and product descriptions. Plausibly in scope. Atlas Unchained advises removing promotional prices such as a “special” from these, while keeping a plain factual description.
- Business name. Not part of this change, but worth a look at the same time. Atlas Unchained notes that keywords or extras added to the name were already a suspension trigger before this policy. We did not independently verify that claim.
- Photos with overlaid text. Atlas Unchained suggests removing images with a phone number, URL or sale banner added on top. That is the firm's precaution, and nothing in the policy text we read mentions photos.
The first item is where we would spend the first ten minutes. It is the field most likely to be in scope, the field most likely to contain a deal, and the one that is easiest to rewrite. The other three are judgment calls, and you can leave them for a second pass.
What About Prices in the Services Section?
This is the part that needs honesty, because it touches advice we have published. In The 300-Character GBP Field AI Overviews Read First (2026), we passed along reporting that price and cost queries trigger AI Overviews often, and that a realistic range on a service entry gives an AI answer something to cite. That post suggested adding pricing where it will not disqualify you.
Google's new listing rule lists “pricing” next to time-bound promotions and direct calls-to-action, as examples of promotional or commercial content. Read quickly, that sits awkwardly beside the earlier advice. Read carefully, the two are not necessarily in conflict, but nothing in Google's page settles it.
How We Are Reading the Tension
- What the policy says. The prohibited content is “promotional or commercial content” that contains pricing. It does not say that any mention of a price anywhere in a profile is banned.
- What it does not say. It does not say whether a price field on a service entry counts as the listing, or whether a plain price range is promotional.
- Our working position. A time-limited price is the clearest risk, because it is both pricing and time-bound. A plain, factual range with no expiry is a weaker case for the rule, but we would no longer call it risk-free.
- What we would do for now. Keep prices out of the description. If you keep a range on a service entry, keep it factual and not time-limited, and check back as Google clarifies.
That is a lean toward caution on a point where Google has not drawn the line. If Google later confirms that service-entry prices are fine, nothing is lost by having kept your range on your own website pages in the meantime, where no listing rule applies and where the same AI-citation logic still holds.
How Do You Rewrite a Listing So It Describes Instead of Sells?
The rewrite follows one rule: describe what the business is and does, and leave anything that expires, costs a number or tells a customer to act to a post or a button. Atlas Unchained gives the shape of it in its own roofing example, which keeps every fact checkable, lets nothing expire, and asks for no click. Here are four hypothetical before and after pairs for the kinds of businesses we write for. They are invented for illustration and describe no real client.
Hypothetical Description Rewrites
- Heating and cooling. Before: “Fall furnace tune-up $89 through November. Call now to book!” After: “Furnace and air conditioner repair, maintenance and replacement for homes across DeKalb County, Indiana.” The tune-up deal becomes a dated post.
- Dental practice. Before: “New patient special, $99 exam and X-rays this month. Call today.” After: “General, family and cosmetic dentistry for adults and children in Fort Wayne.” The special becomes an offer post with dates.
- Lawn care. Before: “Free aeration with any fall cleanup booked by November 15.” After: “Mowing, fall cleanup, aeration and landscape maintenance for homes and businesses in Allen County.” The aeration promotion becomes an offer post that ends on its own.
- Restaurant. Before: “Taco Tuesday, $2 tacos! Order online now.” After: “Counter-service tacos, burritos and breakfast, open daily in Auburn.” The Tuesday deal becomes a recurring update post with a link button to the ordering page.
Notice what the “after” versions keep: service types, place names, who the customer is. Those are the same details that give search a clear picture of the business. We covered that angle at length in the 300-character description post, where the point was that the description is the field AI Overviews read first. A description that is full of an expiring discount is spending its characters on text that will be wrong in three weeks.
The deal itself does not disappear. In our post on contact information in posts, we summarized Google's posts page: an offer post requires a title with dates and times, and it automatically includes a “View Offer” button. That is the right home for a time-bound promotion, and the dates mean the post stops being true on schedule instead of sitting in your profile after the deal is over.
How Can a Northeast Indiana Business Audit Its Listing?
This is our version of the audit, built on the policy text and informed by Atlas Unchained's 30-minute checklist. It is a judgment-based precaution, not a Google instruction. Most small profiles can be done in half an hour, and the order below catches the most risk per minute.
A Seven-Step Listing Cleanup
- Record your baseline first. Before you edit, note your Business Profile performance numbers for calls, direction requests and website clicks. Atlas Unchained recommends this too, so you can tell later whether the cleanup changed anything.
- Screenshot the old text. Save a before copy of the description and services. A dated record of what you changed and why is also useful if you ever need to explain your profile to Google.
- Rewrite the description. Remove any price, discount, coupon, financing offer, dated line or “call now” style phrase. Keep services, service area, years in business and one specific difference.
- Check each service entry. Remove sale pricing and anything that expires. Keep a short, plain, factual description. Decide separately what to do about plain price ranges, using the cautious position above.
- Move each removed deal into a post. Give it a title and dates, so it ends by itself. Do not paste a phone number or email into the post text; use the button.
- Scan your recent posts. Look for email addresses, phone numbers, social media links or links to other websites that are not related to your business, which is the named post restriction. Edit rather than bulk delete.
- Check back in 30 days. Compare your numbers with the baseline. If calls dropped, you may have removed something that worked, and you can test it back in as a post instead.
If an agency, a scheduling tool or a staff member edits your profile, ask who owns the description and whether they know about this change. Profile text can also change through suggested edits, so it is worth knowing how that works. We explained the four-day window in Google Gives You 4 Days to Reject Profile Edits (2026). If a profile ever does get suspended or a complaint stalls, our post on delayed review appeals covers what to do while you wait, and it cites the same Google policy page.
What Do We Still Not Know?
A lot. It is better to say so than to guess and have an owner act on the guess.
Open Questions
- Which fields count as “the listing.” Google's page does not map the rule to the name, description, attributes, services or products.
- Whether a plain price range is “promotional.” The policy says “promotional or commercial content that contains” pricing. It does not say what makes content commercial.
- When and how it will be enforced. As Relevant Audience notes, Google gave no enforcement date and no count of affected listings.
- Whether existing text will be removed automatically. We found nothing from Google on this, and we found no report of a sweep.
- What the penalty is. The page says what is prohibited, not what happens to a profile that does it. We would not assume a suspension, and we would not assume nothing.
- How a call to action is defined. “Direct calls-to-action” is not defined in what we read, so a line like “serving Allen County, call for details” sits in a gray zone.
The honest summary is that the change is real and documented, the enforcement picture is almost empty, and the cleanup is cheap. A half hour of rewriting is a fair price for removing the uncertainty, and it leaves you with a description that does a better job of saying what you do.
Want Someone to Check Your Business Profile Listing?
Button Block reviews Northeast Indiana businesses' Google Business Profiles, rewrites descriptions and service entries so they describe instead of sell, and sets up the posts and buttons that carry your offers. No promises about rankings, just a profile that follows Google's current written rules.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I still put a special offer on my Google Business Profile?
- Yes, in a post. Google's policy says that in the listing, promotional or commercial content with time-bound promotions, pricing or direct calls-to-action is prohibited, but that in posts, offers and updates that may be seen as promotional are otherwise permitted. The dated deal belongs in a post, not in your description.
- What does Google mean by "the listing"?
- Google's page does not say. It separates "the listing" from "posts" and stops there. Our reading is that the permanent profile fields, such as the business description, are the clearest case, but we have not found a Google list of which fields count, and one analysis of the change makes the same point.
- Do I have to remove prices from the services section of my profile?
- We cannot say Google requires it. The policy lists "pricing" as part of promotional or commercial content in the listing, but it does not say whether a price on a service entry counts. A plain factual price range is a different thing from a sale price, and a time-limited price is the riskier kind. Until Google clarifies, keep any services pricing factual and not time-limited, and keep it out of your description.
- When did the policy change, and will Google remove my old listing text?
- Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on October 6, 2026. Google has not published an enforcement date, a count of affected listings, or a statement on whether existing listing text will be removed automatically, as one analysis of the change notes. Cleaning up your own text now is a precaution on our part, not a Google instruction.
- Can I put my phone number in a Google Business Profile post?
- This policy addresses contact details in posts that are not related to your business, which means email addresses, phone numbers, social media links and links to other websites. A separate Google posts policy covers unverified contact information and recommends a Call now button. We covered that one in a separate post, linked above.
- Is this a rule for reviews too?
- The same section has a separate list for users writing reviews. It prohibits promotional or commercial content in reviews, plus email addresses, phone numbers, social media links and links to other websites. That list is not new. What is new is the "For merchants" list covering the listing and posts.
Sources & Further Reading
- Google, “Prohibited & restricted content,” Maps User Generated Content Policy Help: support.google.com (read October 27, 2026): the “Advertising & solicitation” section, including the “For users” and “For merchants” lists quoted above.
- Search Engine Roundtable, “Updated Google Maps Policy: What Merchants Can't Post In Listings Or Posts”: seroundtable.com (Oct. 6, 2026): the report of the change, the credit to Hiroko Imai, and the listing and posts rules.
- Relevant Audience, “Google Business Profile Policy: No Promos in Listings”: relevantaudience.com (Oct. 2026): the observation that Google gave no enforcement date or count of affected listings, and did not define which fields count as the listing.
- Intelligent Solutions, “Google Business Profile Policy Update: What to Fix Now”: intelligentsolutionstech.com (Oct. 7, 2026): the note that the help page shows no update date and no announcement, and the view that descriptions written like ads should be fixed first. An agency opinion we could not verify independently.
- Atlas Unchained, “Google Just Limited Promo Text in Your Listing. Audit It.”: atlasunchained.com (Oct. 7, 2026): the 30-minute audit order, the advice to record a baseline and a change log, and the roofing description example. A marketing firm's recommendations, not Google guidance.