Google requiring storefront photos

[Kasey R.]

I have a client with many locations with similar names because they are a large health system with around twenty hospitals and hundreds of clinic locations. Therefore, the individual clinics are branded with their health system name. Lately, Google has been marking locations as duplicates when they are not. The name will appear very similar or will be the same, I.e Brand Name OBGYN Clinic (because they have multiple OBGYN clinics) but the addresses, phone and website url will clearly be different.

Google is marking these as duplicates and the only way to get the one marked as a duplicate live again is to provide storefront photos of both businesses. They are clearly differentiated and Google has not flagged them previously. Is this common for anyone else?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

I've heard of GMB support suggesting this a lot lately. It might be beneficial to post the issue over at the GMB Forum.

 

[Kasey R.]

I've heard of GMB support suggesting this a lot lately. It might be beneficial to post the issue over at the GMB Forum.

Thank you, Colan. I will try this!

 

[Jeannie]

Varying exterior images are one clear signal of separate business locations. They should not be "Photoshopped", which suggests manipulation. They may be far from this obvious interior office one attached (a bit of humor), but Google AI Vision and TensorFlow Enterprise images are surprisingly smart.

 

[Mikek86]

I just had this happen to me... I also sent in a copy of my lease, bank statement with new location address and utility bill. They forwarded it to a different department, the first one was in Ireland. 24 hours later we were live.