A stranger can ask to advertise your business, and you approve it in a tab you have never opened

There is a screen in Business Profile Manager called Requests, and most owners have never opened it. It is where a person who wants to run ads featuring your business asks your permission to do so.

Google documents the flow on its page about managing advertising account links, read 3 September 2026. Someone who wants to advertise your business or product on Google can request to link your Business Profile to their advertising accounts — a Google Ads account, to advertise your business with location assets and local ads, or a Merchant Center account, to show local products.

Why this exists at all

The legitimate version is ordinary. A franchisor advertising its locations. A manufacturer running local ads for the shops that stock its product. A marketing agency you hired, doing the thing you hired it for.

The request flow exists so that none of those can happen silently. Which means the reverse is also true: if a link is live, someone approved it.

What approval hands over

Google’s own wording is that Google Ads may use data from your Business Profile, including but not limited to the street address, phone number, hours, and merchant photos and videos.

The “not limited to” is doing real work in that sentence, and it is Google’s phrasing, not a paraphrase.

There is a second-order effect written into the same page: if you link to a Google Ads account, any Merchant Center accounts linked to that Google Ads account can view your locations. One approval, an unknown number of viewers downstream. That is the part worth pausing on before you click Approve for a company whose relationship to you is a cold email.

An ad link is not a manager role

This is the reassuring half, and it matters because the request screen looks alarming the first time you see it.

Linked advertising accounts can’t edit your business information. Google states it flatly. An ad link is not a manager role, cannot rename you, cannot move your pin, cannot change your hours.

Editing rights live in a completely separate system — owners, managers, suggested edits, and Google’s own data sources — and that system is where profile changes you did not make actually come from. If a field changed on you, an ad link is not the culprit.

Reviewing a request, in Google’s steps

1. Go to Business Profile Manager
2. Select Requests
3. Scroll to the request you want to review
4. Select Approve or Decline

The requester’s email address appears on the request, and Google notes it is there so you can contact them directly. Use it. “Who are you and which campaign is this for” is a reasonable question, and a legitimate requester answers it in one line.

One detail with real consequences: an account can be linked to all locations or to a single business group. If you run several locations and the advertiser only needs one, the narrow option is available and nobody will pick it for you.

Unlinking, and the one thing to do first

Google’s steps: Business Profile Manager, Linked accounts, scroll to the account, select Unlink.

Google’s advice before you do it is to consult the person who updates the account. That is not a formality. Unlinking stops your business from being advertised through that account — which is the point when the relationship is over, and an expensive surprise when it isn’t and someone is mid-campaign.

Add it to the audit you already do

Nobody checks Requests, because nothing prompts you to. Put Linked accounts on the same quarterly pass where you check who has owner and manager access, verify the phone number, and confirm nothing has quietly been rewritten.

While you are in there: the Social profiles field is a similarly unvisited corner of the same interface, and it has its own rejection rules that nothing tells you about either.

Open Requests once. Approve what you recognize, decline what you don’t, and note who is on Linked accounts. Profile management, including the fields nobody remembers to check, is on every plan we run.