GBP Agency/Organization account deprecated?

[JeffClevelandTN]

Thanks Colan!

@JeffClevelandTN if you want to create a new post at the GBP forum and DM me the link I will look into this. I never heard back on my original escalation.

Thanks! I'll work on that tomorrow and let you know.

 

[BenFisher]

Hi All,
As far as I know, there is no issue with creating an agency account; I also have it from credible sources that it is not going anywhere.

 

[NevenaIvanova]

Hi Ben,

I am afraid that I faced the same issue when creating an agency account.

Has somebody found a workaround?

 

[rmcelwain]

We're starting to have a lot of issues with GBP now as well. We're around 1200 profiles and we're now seeing that 'Own this Business' doesn't work for us any longer, we get a 403 error, and there are profiles that we cannot request access to through the standard tool in the GBP organizer. All Google support has told us is that there's "something wrong with your org"

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

I know this thread is a few months old now, but for our agency at least, we did find a workaround. Hopefully the original poster @allanzen or other members, like @NevenaIvanova or @Lluc will find it helpful.

While @Colan Nielsen had replied back to my comment/reply earlier in the thread with a generous offer to help after I opened a Google Support ticket, work and life kept me from continuing to pursue this until it became an urgency just recently . As mentioned earlier in the thread, I had encountered a suggested workaround but didn't get a chance to try it.

In short, according to Google, the Google Account used for the Google Business Profile Agency Registration page, must not be associated with any GBPs. In our case, we use Office 365 for our domain email solution, not Google Workspace. So, I created a brand new email address similar to "agency.gbp@ourdomain.com" and set this up as a Google Account. However, after going thru the same steps as everyone else that is having issues, I got the same error "Sign up temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a moment." I did wait a day and same error. I then made sure that the security for that Google account had 2FA setup as that sometimes will prevent delegation with other Google properties (e.g. Google Ads, Search Console, Analytics, etc). Still no success. So going back to the earlier workaround discovered on the Google Support forum, it suggested to use a domain that had no email addresses setup as a Google Account which were tied to any GBPs. In other words, if you have a domain with several email addresses, and even if only one of them has a Google Account associated with a single GBP, you may encounter this error during registration of a new agency account.

As, we own a lot of domain variations of our primary domain that are not actively used, I thought what is the harm in trying this. Took the time today to setup one of our unused domains for testing, which means there would be no existing email addresses and therefore no pre-existing Google Accounts associated with any email addresses on this domain, and therefore no email addresses/Google Accounts associated with a previous GBP. I created a new email address, set it up as a Google Account, and had ZERO issues in creating a GBP Agency Account. I then created a couple of new Groups, added some client GBPs to those Groups, and then added members to our GBP Organization using Google Accounts associated with our our primary domain without any issues. While this workaround may not be practical for everyone, it certainly did work for us.

I "think" this may just be impacting new registrations, using a domain that isn't using Google Workspace, but also having at least one email address setup as Google Account that is also associated with a GBP already.