Removing "Online Order" Functionality From GMB Listing

[Cordell Crowley]

Our company manages a large amount of GMB listings focusing primarily on flower shops. As of earlier this week, we've noticed that a large amount of these listings suddenly have "order online" links for Doordash, Grubhub, etc. on their knowledge panels. No way to remove it from within GMB, and nothing in the dashboard really even provides any info outside of a message in the "Bookings" section that says "customers will now see a booking button on your listing on Google Search". To pre-face, none of the affected listings have any food related categories of any kind. "Florist" is the primary category on each of the affected listings, and additional categories include "flower delivery", "flower designer", "gift shop", and "gift basket store".

I am aware of the Online Food opt-out form but wasn't sure on what an expected turnaround time on this usually is or if it even works consistently. I've spoken with Doordash support and will try to work with them to get this cleaned up for the listings we have that are linking to them, but I'm also not 100% confident that the issue is coming from their end of things i.e. it could be on Google's end.

Here is an example of one of our clients' listings that is being affected. It also has an ad for Grubhub in addition to the "order" links.

Any advice or insight into what else I can try, how/why this is occurring, additional steps to take, etc. would be appreciated. I've filled out the Food Opt-out Form for a number of clients as a test, so hopefully that alone will resolve the issue.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Right now it is taking most people a few days to hear back from GMB support. If you don't hear anything in a week after submitting that form, I'd suggest going to the GMB forum.

 

[Cordell Crowley]

Right now it is taking most people a few days to hear back from GMB support. If you don't hear anything in a week after submitting that form, I'd suggest going to the GMB forum.

Good to know; I'll give it a few more days as I just filled the form out on Monday.

 

[Cordell Crowley]

Right now it is taking most people a few days to hear back from GMB support. If you don't hear anything in a week after submitting that form, I'd suggest going to the GMB forum.

So just to update, GMB Support got back to me and this is what they said:

"I would like to inform you that the link to certain booking and ordering services can appear automatically with your business listings in Google Search and Google Maps. These links are updated automatically via third-party providers. There's no way to add, edit, or remove these links in Google My Business. Therefore, I regret to inform you that we would not be able to remove these links from our end.

Google works with selected third-party providers that provide booking and ordering services for local businesses. Links for third-party providers display as a result of a relationship your business previously established with them. These links lead to the website of the third-party provider. From the third-party website, a user can take an action such as "place an order" or "make an appointment or reservation".

If you want to remove or fix a link in your own listing, please contact the third-party provider’s support team or a technical contact to request removal of your data from the information they are sending to Google.

Please do not worry as we are here to help you, however, you are requested to first get your information removed from the "DoorDash" (by contacting them) and then fill the form to opt out from the online orders. In case you still encounter the same issue, please do not hesitate to revert to my email and I will personally look into this for you."

So I have to talk to Doordash support (again) and then fill the opt-out form after they've done stuff on their end. Seems like a lot of steps to force someone to take to remove something from a listing that they didn't add on themselves.

If I fill out the food ordering opt-out form on a listing that doesn't have any 3rd-party "order online" links when we first set the listing up, will that prevent these from being attached in the future? Wasn't sure if it worked that way or not.

 

[andrewthorn]

The part at the top is a Google Ads Local Campaign. They are using a thing called affiliated locations to be able to advertise on the GMB panel of your customers. This is currently running rampant with lots of companies doing it like doordash, menulog, viator, getyourguide etc. I doubt many of these businesses have any associations with the businesses they are advertising on. I think they have been provided with an open ticket to advertise on any GMB they have the placeID for. As I am seeing advertisements on landmarks etc. What we are suggesting our clients to do is run local campaign ads on their own listings to block the ad from appearing. It works well and doesn't cost that much. Once these aggregators see you running your own ads, they stop running them on your listings.

Its becoming a bigger problem now more people are catching on about affiliated location extensions.

More info on them can be found here About affiliate location extensions - Google Ads Help

 

[Allie Margeson]

Great tip, Andrew! Does anyone know if there's anything else you can do other than paying for your own ads? I have a listing that is showing an ad for a lead gen company and their fake website uses our client's logo so it could deceive customers. There should be an option other than to pay your way out with ads, right? :/ We've contacted support and reported the ad. This seems like an invitation for spammers to hijack listings.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I have a listing that is showing an ad for a lead gen company and their fake website uses our client's logo so it could deceive customers.

I was chatting with Allie yesterday but will post this here as well. I told her to report this on the Google Ads help forum. I cannot imagine Google is okay with this so hopefully, they act on it.