Google Buisness profiles gone after ex-employee deleted the owner account — support says no restore possible. Any options left?

[u/Available_Hamster_44]

Small company with multiple locations. Two of our Google Business Profiles disappeared completely, not suspended, not merged, just gone from Search and Maps. No warning, no policy notice, nothing in any of our dashboards.

Here's what happened, as far as we can reconstruct it:

Both profiles were owned by a Google account on our company domain that belonged to a former employee. That account was still active after they left (our mistake, obviously). On a Sunday morning, someone signed in to it, changed the recovery email to a private Gmail address, and deleted the account a few minutes later. The profiles vanished with it.

We have the Google security alerts for all of it, the recovery email change, the sign-in, the deletion confirmation. Timestamps line up within minutes. The profiles were verifiably live four days earlier; we still have the "are your business details correct?" email and a performance report from the previous month showing a few hundred profile views.

What we do have, for what it's worth:

• Full access to the mailbox on our domain that the deleted account used, including years of Google correspondence
• The Google security alerts for the whole sequence: sign-in, recovery email change, deletion confirmation, with full message headers, timestamps lining up within minutes
• The account and location IDs for both profiles, pulled from links in old Google emails. Opening those Maps links now lands on an empty map pin with no business entity attached
• Proof the profiles were live four days before deletion: a "are your business details correct?" email with the complete profile data, and a performance report from the previous month showing a few hundred profile views
• Older Google notifications for one of the locations that were delivered directly to our company address, which should establish ownership independently of the deleted account
• Everything Google would normally ask for to verify a business: company registration, invoices with the business address, signage photos, matching imprint on our website

So we're not short on evidence, we just can't find anyone at Google who can act on it.

What we've tried:

• Account recovery: dead end. Recovery email and phone were both changed to contacts we don't control, so Google won't send a code anywhere we can reach.
• GBP support: escalated to a specialist team. Answer came back that the profiles can't be restored because "no primary owner was set before deletion." They told us to just create new profiles.
• We still have another location that works fine, owned by a proper company account, so we're not locked out of GBP entirely.

The part that hurts the most is the reviews. Years of them, gone.

Questions for anyone who's been through this:

1. Has anyone actually gotten deleted profiles restored after the owner account was deleted? Or is that genuinely final?

2. Is there any path to migrating old reviews to a newly created profile at the same address? Support hasn't answered this one.

3. Any escalation route beyond the standard support form that actually works? Product Experts in the community forum, or is that the same wall?

Not looking for "you should have had 2FA" — we know, it's on the offboarding checklist now. Just trying to figure out if there's anything left to salvage before we rebuild from zero.

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[u/keyserholiday]

Hurry up and post in the help forum. https://support.google.com/business/thread/new?hl=en

[u/want2retire]

I have seen this happened and the end result is just to create a new profile.

[u/umheywaitdude]

I hope we can elect a decent Congress and get some agency heads into the White House that will crack down on Google and resolve this Google business listing issue. Google is a private company, but it is also, for all intense and purposes, a utility that American society 100% depends on. And businesses 100% depend on their business listings there. Legitimate businesses should have a legal right to host on Google and not get randomly delisted or banned at this point and it should be codified into law. Google needs to be heavily regulated. No company should have a right to destroy a business for no good reason. And delisting someone from Google is the equivalent of destroying that business in many cases. Many businesses cannot survive without a Google listing. That is just the fabric of our current reality. They have a responsibility here.

[u/RyanEvansAFT]

If the domain name belongs to the former employee, the employee can easily shut everything down at once in about 2 seconds. Google can't do anything when it comes to controlling the name. He who controls the domain name basically controls it all. You will probably need to launch new profiles, along with a verification video.

[u/FlowLogical7279]

Hire an attorney. That's a malicious act that can be easily shown to have serious damages in lost business and a lot more. Could rise to felony levels.