Google Business Profile Link Rules: Fix Yours Before They Disappear

In September 2025 Google rewrote its Business Profile link rules and, more importantly, started enforcing them with a crawler that runs daily and ignores your robots.txt file. Links that sat on profiles untouched for years are now being pulled with no warning and no appeal.

Here is what actually changed, straight from Google’s own policy, and how to check your own profile before a link vanishes.

What changed in September 2025

On 3 September 2025 Google roughly doubled the length of its business links policies and guidelines and added a formal link-verification system (PPC Land coverage of the update). Three things are new and worth understanding.

1. Links are verified daily by an automated crawler. Google’s own wording: “Our automated crawlers will visit these links daily at most to confirm that they lead to a valid and relevant web page. If a link cannot be accessed by our crawlers, we cannot verify it, which may lead to the removal of the link.” The crawler uses the GoogleOther user agent.

2. The verification crawler does not obey robots.txt. This is the part that catches people out. Google states it plainly: “To enforce this policy, these business link verification crawlers don’t follow robots.txt rules.” Blocking bots, rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, login walls, IP blocking, geo-blocking, or serving different content to bots than to humans all cause the link to fail and get removed.

3. Every link must lead to a dedicated page for that specific location. Google now requires that action links “lead to a dedicated landing page for your business,” and for multi-location businesses, “action links must lead to a website for a specific location.” A shared homepage or another location’s page is no longer acceptable. Google also caps you at 20 links per action type and one link per domain per action type.

What Google’s crawler actually tests

Response codes. The page must return a clean 200 OK. Google lists 404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden, 500 Internal Server Error and 503 Service Unavailable as failures.

Full page load. GoogleOther must be able to load all resources on the page, including images, CSS and JavaScript. Sites that serve stripped-down content to bots fail.

Unrestricted access. No CAPTCHAs, login walls, rate limiting, IP blocking, geo-blocking, or content cloaking.

Redirect behaviour. A single clean redirect usually passes. Multiple hops, cross-domain redirects and link shorteners get flagged.

The three link types and how to fix each

Website link: your own business site only

The website field must point to your own domain, not a social page or a shortener.

Compliant:

• https://yourbusiness.com.au/
• https://lawfirm.com.au/locations/sydney/

Non-compliant (get removed):

• facebook.com/yourbusiness
• bit.ly/your-website
• instagram.com/yourbusiness

Action links: complete the action on the page

Google’s rule: “an ‘order’ link must allow the customer to complete an order.” A “Book” link must reach a page where the booking can actually be finished.

Banned destinations: WhatsApp, Messenger or any messaging app, social platforms, app store links, link shorteners, and generic pages that do not complete the action.

What works: Calendly or a real booking system, an online ordering flow, a quote request form, a direct reservation platform.

Social media: use the dedicated field

Google added specific social profile fields in 2023. Add Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn under Edit profile → Contact → Social profiles, never in the website or action-link fields.

Test your links right now

You can see exactly what GoogleOther sees. Ask a developer to run this against your website and each action link:

curl -A "GoogleOther" -I https://yourdomain.com.au/

You want HTTP/1.1 200 OK. Anything else (403, 404, 500, a redirect chain, a CAPTCHA challenge) means the link is at risk. Test booking and ordering links the same way.

Real examples: what works vs what fails

Link Type	Fails verification	Passes verification
Website	facebook.com/cafe	mycafe.com.au
Booking	wa.me/61400123456	calendly.com/mycafe/booking
Ordering	bit.ly/order-now	mycafe.com.au/order

Security settings that quietly kill verification

The most common culprit we see is over-aggressive bot protection. Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode, WordPress security plugins such as Wordfence or Sucuri, and host-level rate limiting all block GoogleOther by default in some configurations. Because the verification crawler ignores robots.txt, the only reliable fix is to make sure nothing at the server, CDN or plugin level is challenging or throttling that user agent. In almost every case the right answer is to leave GoogleOther fully allowed.

The dedicated-landing-page rule matters more than it looks

The requirement that each location link to its own dedicated page is the change most businesses miss, and it overlaps with good local SEO anyway. In a recent Sydney reinstatement we handled for a mortgage broker, part of the fix was building proper location landing pages that mapped his service area rather than pointing everything at a single homepage. That satisfied Google’s link rule and, as a side effect, gave him location pages that actually help him rank. If you run more than one location or service area, a homepage-only link is now both a compliance risk and a wasted ranking opportunity.

If your links are already gone

Do not re-add them immediately. Fix the underlying cause first.

1. Identify the failure with the curl test above.
2. Fix the security block, error, redirect chain or wrong destination.
3. Give Google a day or two to re-crawl.
4. Re-add the corrected link.
5. Check it again over the following week.

Links removed and re-added without fixing the root cause just get removed again. If a link problem has already tipped over into a full suspension, our Google Business Profile suspension guide covers the reinstatement path.

When to get help

Most link fixes take a developer 30 to 60 minutes once the cause is clear. The hard part is knowing exactly what GoogleOther sees and which fix will actually stick.

If links keep disappearing after you fix them, or a link issue has already caused a suspension, book a technical audit and we will show you what Google’s crawler is hitting and give you a priority fix list.