When your business appears twice on Google

Where the second one came from

Most duplicates aren't created by the owner. The usual sources:

• Google generated it from public data — a directory, a permit record, an old listing.
• A previous employee or an agency claimed one and nobody handed it back.
• The business moved, and the old address stayed behind as a separate listing.
• Someone created it by mistake while trying to claim the real one.

That last one is common with trades, where the same business exists under a slightly different name in different places.

Decide which one to keep first

This is the step people skip, and undoing it afterwards is painful.

Keep the listing with the reviews. Reviews are the thing you cannot move or recreate. Everything else — hours, photos, description, categories — can be copied across in an afternoon. A profile with thirty reviews and a wrong phone number beats an immaculate profile with none.

Check both before deciding: which is verified, which has the reviews, which appears when you search the business name from a phone that isn't yours.

Removing the duplicate

If you control both, the route is to report one as a duplicate from within the profile you're keeping. Google can merge them, and in some cases reviews come across.

If you don't control the duplicate, you have to claim it first, which means going through verification on a listing you didn't create. Tedious, but it's the only way to act on it.

If the duplicate is an address you've left, don't delete it: mark the business as moved, so Google links the old listing to the new one instead of stranding whatever reputation it had.

Don't just delete it

Deleting throws away the reviews, and reviews don't come back. Merging or marking as moved keeps what those listings accumulated. The instinct to make the wrong one disappear quickly is the expensive one.