GEOGRAPHIC_LOCATION_CHANGE: moving premises without a suspension

If you are moving premises and the reviews are the part you cannot replace, Google’s documented route is to change the address on the profile you already have, and the reviews follow on their own. That does not hold everywhere: Google’s policy overview states that location edits are rejected outright for one named group of business types, and gives that group an instruction the rest of Google’s help pages tell you not to follow. Both sentences are published on google.com, and nothing we read reconciles them.

The value that names a move

GEOGRAPHIC_LOCATION_CHANGE is one of the standardised policy violations in the v4 Business Profile API. Its description is unusually literal:

Indicates the physical geographic location (address or latitude/longitude) of the business has changed significantly since the profile was created.

The enum it belongs to is introduced as “Represents standardized policy violations. New values may be added in the future. Clients should be prepared to handle unknown values.” You see the value on a rejected review reply, because the field carrying it is described as “Optional. Output only. The policy violation that resulted in rejection. Only populated if reviewReplyState is REJECTED.” So the first sign that Google has an opinion about your move can be a reply that will not publish. The rest of that list is in the published rejection reasons.

Note what it measures: the change is judged “since the profile was created”, not since the last edit, and nothing in the description turns on whether the move was legitimate.

What Google says happens to your reviews

There is a help page dedicated to exactly this question, and its answer for a straightforward relocation is a single sentence:

If you move to a new address and keep the same business name, Google will transfer your reviews automatically.

Two conditions are doing the work there: the address changes and the name does not. The page frames the whole subject as “When you make changes to your business, you can request to move your reviews from an old Business Profile to a new one, or we might move reviews automatically for you.”, and then limits it: “Not all business changes qualify to move or remove reviews.”

The limit is named:

For certain business categories, like hotels, golf courses, or scenic attractions, reviews might not be automatically moved.

The same page opens its section with an instruction, flagged as important: “Do not create a new Business Profile because of a change in a physical location or ownership.” If you have already done it, there is a route back, written for the case where it was a mistake: “If you unintentionally created and verified a new profile due to a change in physical location or ownership change, contact us to transfer your reviews from the old profile to the new one.” The word “unintentionally” is Google’s, and it matters below.

The rule that closes the edit route entirely

Google’s policy overview has a section headed Location change. Its first sentence is the most consequential thing we found on this subject:

Location edits will be rejected for businesses whose physical identity is directly tied to customer experience (e.g., dining, lodging, or entertainment venues).

That is a category test, not a quality bar you can clear with better evidence. For a restaurant, a hotel or a venue, the edit is documented as rejected. Read it next to the reviews page and the two category lists overlap without matching: lodging appears on both, dining appears only in the policy rule, and golf courses and scenic attractions appear only in the reviews carve-out. That comparison is ours; Google does not cross-reference the two pages.

Google publishes two opposite instructions

Page	What it tells a relocating business
Move your reviews across Business Profiles	“Do not create a new Business Profile because of a change in a physical location or ownership.”
Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues	“If your business relocates, do not create a new Business Profile for the new location.”
Overview of Google Business Profile policies	“If your business has relocated, you must mark the existing profile as permanently closed and create a new Business Profile at the new location.”

Two help pages say do not, and the page that says you must is the policy overview. We are not going to pick one for you and present it as Google’s position, because Google’s position is both of these at once.

What makes the third one legible is where the same remedy appears elsewhere. The guidelines page applies close-and-recreate to a name change that fails the rebranding test: “You must mark the existing Business Profile as closed and then create a new Business Profile with your new business name.” It gets there through a definition, “If your business changes its name but doesn’t meet the criteria above, then it’s considered a new business.” Closing and recreating is therefore what Google prescribes when a profile has stopped being the same business, and reading the location paragraph that way makes the category rule intelligible: if the premises are part of the identity, moving produces a new business rather than the same one at a new address. That is our reading of why the rule exists. Google does not state it.

The address guidelines say nothing about moving

The page that owns the address rules does not cover relocation at all. We searched it for every form of move and relocate and found none. Its instruction is accuracy, “Make sure your address and/or service area is accurate and precise.”, and its detailed rules govern which addresses are eligible at all, which is a separate subject from changing one.

What the edit itself costs

The mechanics are on the address page: open your Business Profile, then Edit profile and Location, then edit the field next to Business location and save. Re-verification is documented and not optional: “If you move your business to a new address after it’s verified, you must verify your business again.” Some profiles are gated earlier: “Some businesses might need to verify their Business Profile first before they can make any changes with their info.”

Timing is published as a range. Google’s tip reads “Changes to your profile usually take about 10 minutes to show up”, followed by “In some cases, it can take up to 30 days.” And if the address is simply wrong and you have not moved, the policy page routes that separately: “If your business has not moved and you need to fix an incorrect address, you must contact us.”

What we cannot tell you

We do not know what a restaurant, hotel or venue should actually do when it genuinely moves, and we are not going to invent an answer. The policy page tells it to close the profile and create a new one. The reviews page tells it not to create a new profile, and puts lodging among the categories whose reviews might not move automatically. No page we read says whether reviews follow a close-and-recreate, or whether the contact-us transfer, written for a profile created unintentionally, is open to one created on Google’s own written instruction. We have not moved a restaurant profile and we will not assert an outcome we have not seen. Nothing we read states how often a location edit is rejected, or publishes an appeal route specific to one.

A review that does not come across is not one you can rebuild, because you cannot recreate a review somebody else wrote. The move changes nothing about handling a bad one, and it is worth knowing what review tools actually publish before you trust one to carry your reply history through it.

The short version

Change the address on the existing profile and keep the name identical. Google documents the reviews transferring automatically when you do, with re-verification as the cost. Do not create a second profile, which two Google pages tell you not to do and which its own remedy page treats as a mistake to undo. And if you run a restaurant, a hotel or a venue, know before you start that Google documents your location edit as rejected, and that the instruction it gives you instead is the one its other pages forbid.