Charleston SEO Recap: Your Listing, Their Number (Sep 8-14)

A stranger put their phone number on a roofing company's Google listing this week. Not in the phone field, Google guards that one. Inside a photo. Printed across an AI generated image that got uploaded to the profile and landed at the top of the listing, which is exactly where a customer looks first.

The same number turned up on more than 150 other business listings around the country.

That is the week, and it is not really a story about one scammer. Two things happened between Monday and Friday and they pull against each other. Google kept widening the set of people allowed to change your business information, and Google's own reporting went dark for the first ten days of September. The week your profile was easiest to edit from the outside was the week you were least able to see what had changed.

None of this is an algorithm update. I check Google's Search Status Dashboard before writing these, and the newest row under Ranking is still the August 2026 spam update from the 18th, the same place last week's recap left it. Five things, ordered by what they cost you if you answer a phone for a living.

First, somebody was selling your phone calls back to you

Search Engine Roundtable wrote this up Wednesday, after Naomi Stevens and Sam Sarsten surfaced it on LinkedIn. A Google Maps contributor using the name Jack Edward had been uploading AI generated photos to business profiles that were not theirs, with a phone number printed inside the image. Same number, more than 150 unrelated listings, spread across the country. Stevens found it on a roofing client's profile.

The customer sees a photo at the top of a listing with a number on it. They dial the number on the photo. They reach the scammer.

Here is the part I would underline. Stevens reported it to Google support and the first reply back was: "we're not sure of your exact issue, but here are solutions to the most common issues." None of them were relevant. The contributor account got removed inside about 24 hours, but that happened after the thing blew up publicly on LinkedIn, not because the support ticket worked.

So the actual escalation path for a business owner whose inbound calls are being stolen is currently: know someone with an audience. If you do not have that, you have a canned reply.

I do not think Charleston roofers should read this as a national curiosity. We are in the back half of hurricane season. A Mount Pleasant homeowner standing under a tarp at 7am is the highest intent, highest ticket call you will get all year, and she is also the least likely person on earth to cross check whether the number printed on the photo matches the number in the listing. Storm work is the easiest call to intercept because the caller is already rattled.

Do this on your phone, not your desktop, because the photo carousel is ordered differently on mobile and mobile is where the call comes from. Open your profile. Scroll every photo. Anything you did not upload, and especially anything with text or digits baked into the image, report it. Then call the number shown on your own listing from a phone Google does not associate with you, and confirm it rings on your desk.

(Two minutes. I have watched owners spend two hours arguing about a meta description and zero minutes on this.)

Second, Google is now emailing you a four day deadline

Barry Schwartz documented a new Google Business Profile email on Monday with the subject "Does this look right to you?" The body reads: "A Google Maps user noticed that some of the information on your Business Profile might be out of date and suggested an update." You get two buttons, yes it's correct and no it's incorrect, and a line asking you to share your feedback within four days.

I like the feature and I do not like the window. Four days is a reasonable ask for somebody sitting at a desk. It is not a reasonable ask for a plumber who is under a house in West Ashley until Thursday and does not open the business email until Sunday night. The default outcome for a lot of real Charleston operators is that the window closes while they are working.

This is the same machinery as Tell Maps, which went live two weeks ago and lets anyone edit your listing by talking to an AI. Tell Maps is the front door for the suggestion. This email is Google asking you to referee it. The suggestion volume is going up, so the referee emails are going up with it.

One rule, and it is not optional: never click the button inside the email. Fake Google Business Profile notices have been a standing phishing genre for years, and Google just normalized a legitimate email that asks you to click a decision button under time pressure. That is a gift to whoever clones it next. Go to the profile directly, find the pending update there, and answer it there. Thirty seconds, and it removes the entire attack class.

Third, People Also Ask is now almost entirely AI

Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked posted numbers Tuesday from roughly 19.2 million English language queries collected this year. In the first week of September, 97% of People Also Ask answers were AI Overviews, up from 86% in August. Saeed Khosravi of Allintitle said his Also Ask Miner sample showed 100% from August onward. Fourteen months ago the figure was 12%.

Be careful with those two numbers. Neither came from Google, both are English only, and the gap between 97 and 100 is sampling rather than a disagreement. The trend is the finding, not the decimal.

What died here is quieter than it sounds. People Also Ask used to be the cheapest real estate on the results page. You wrote a clean answer to a real question, the accordion expanded, and Google lifted your two sentences with a blue link attached to them. That accordion is now a generated answer. The question still gets asked. The click does not come back.

At this point a lot of owners are thinking: so writing FAQ content is pointless now. No, and I would push back hard on that. The answer is still being assembled out of somebody's pages. It is just being assembled instead of quoted. That changes the format, not the value. One question as a heading, the answer in the first two sentences underneath it, a real number in the answer, no preamble. That is a shape a machine can lift and attribute. A 400 word warm up before you say what a water heater costs is not.

This also lines up with Ben Fisher's 7,990 query study that I broke down Monday, where AI Mode sent 79.8% of its local citations back to Google Maps instead of business websites. Both datasets say the same uncomfortable thing from different angles. Your content is increasingly an ingredient rather than a destination, and your profile is increasingly the destination. Which is why the photo scam in section one is a bigger deal than it looks.

Fourth, four separate Google reports broke in the same week

Run these together, because individually they are noise and together they are a pattern worth acting on.

• Google Business Profile insights had no September data at all through Monday the 8th, eight days into the month, when the normal delay is a few days. Schwartz reported it populating again by Thursday.
• The Search Console links report has not refreshed since roughly August 8. A month of nothing.
• The Search Console page indexing report is missing a chunk of old June data, spotted Friday.
• A Search Console indexing bug on Monday showed indexed pages as not indexed. John Mueller confirmed Tuesday it was a short blip and had resolved.

Also on Thursday, Mueller said out loud that the old position 1 through 10 model is getting hard to map for site owners. He is describing the same thing you are feeling when a rank tracker says 4 and the phone says otherwise.

None of that is a conspiracy, they are bugs, and Google fixed most of them inside the week. The lesson is not that Google is hiding something. The lesson is that if your only record of how the phone is doing lives inside Google's dashboards, you do not actually have a record, and this was the week that got proven.

Keep your own. One line a day: calls answered, jobs booked, and what the customer said when you asked how they found you. The clients who kept that log through the spring could tell inside a week whether a rank drop was real. The ones who did not spent a month arguing with me about a chart.

Fifth, the small print

Real, but smaller:

• Google told the EU that its Digital Markets Act compliance changes produced "the largest reduction in quality" in the history of Google Search. Not a Charleston story. It is still worth knowing that Google will ship a worse result when regulators make it, and will say so publicly.
• Google Ads has been revoking promotional credits after advertisers already spent them, leaving real overages on the bill. If you are running on a credit, open the billing page.
• Merchant Center added AI Search intent, AI Search terms and AI Search attribution to its AI performance insights. First time any Google surface has handed anyone the actual terms behind AI traffic, even if it is only for merchants.
• Google published documentation on how Search experiences differ by country. Useful the next time somebody sends you a screenshot from overseas and asks why their results look nothing like yours.

What to prioritize this week

Ranked, and the first one takes two minutes:

1. Open your Google Business Profile photos on your phone and report anything you did not upload, especially anything with text or a number burned into the image.
2. Call the number displayed on your own listing from a phone that is not associated with your business, and confirm where it rings.
3. Stop clicking decision buttons inside Google emails. Confirm or reject suggested edits inside the profile itself, always.
4. Start the one line a day log. Calls answered, jobs booked, how they found you. Start it today, not after the next drop.
5. Rewrite your three best FAQ answers so the question is a heading and the answer is the first two sentences under it, with a real number in it.

The through line for the week is that your listing has more editors than it used to and fewer working alarms. Google keeps handing pieces of your business information to strangers and then asking you to check their work on a four day clock, in an email you should not be clicking.

That is most of what Charleston SEO work looks like now for the trades, and all of what Charleston roofing SEO looks like heading into storm season: the profile is the storefront, so somebody has to be watching the door. Ranking is the easy half. Owning the thing that ranks is the part almost nobody is doing.