Google charges Local Services advertisers for missed calls in listed hours

What Google bills for since October 1

Some of the calls on your October bill from Google may never have reached a person. If you run an HVAC company, a plumbing shop, a dental practice or a law office, and you pay for Google's Local Services Ads, a new rule applies to you. These are Google's pay-per-lead ads that show at the top of search results. Since October 1, 2026, Google can bill you for a call nobody picked up.

Which calls count depends on the hours printed on your Google listing. For anyone running these ads, the job this week is short: Read those hours, then call your own number near the start and the end of them. Owners who skip these ads pay nothing under this rule, and the hours are still worth a look, since customers read that box before they call.

Google's help page on how leads work has the rule. Google now lists this as a call it can bill you for: "You missed a phone call during your business hours and the customer stays on the line for more than 20 seconds." That covers calls no person picks up. Google emailed advertisers about it in late August (Search Engine Roundtable has the email), and this month it rewrote the help page with more detail (Search Engine Roundtable covered that too).

One sentence on that page decides how much of this touches you: "'Business hours' are the hours you set in your Google Business Profile, which you can update at any time." Your Google Business Profile is your Google listing, the box with your hours and reviews that shows up when someone searches your name. The hours in that box now decide which missed calls Google can put on your bill.

My guess is that this catches owners who typed wide hours into that box years ago to look open. Say 7 to 7 on weekdays, plus Saturday mornings. I can't tell you how many did that, because nobody has published it. But if the front desk works 8 to 5, a customer who calls at 7:20 hears ringing, hangs on past 20 seconds and can now turn into a charge.

If the hours you told the ads to run differ from the hours on your listing, Google only bills missed calls that fall inside both.

Voicemail counts as a connected call, and a menu resets the timer

Voicemail has its own rule. If a call reaches your voicemail or a recorded greeting during business hours, Google's page says "it's treated as a connected call and is charged if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds". That holds whether or not the caller leaves a message, odd as that sounds. So if someone listens to your greeting for more than 20 seconds and hangs up, Google can bill you for that call, even with no message to call back.

Phone menus, the "press 1 for service" kind, get their own line in Google's rules. Once a caller presses a key, the help page says, "the 20-second timer resets." From there: "You're charged if the call continues for more than 20 seconds after that first key press." A caller who hangs up at the menu before pressing anything costs you nothing, and Google's August email to advertisers said the same.

Call your own number at the edges of your hours

It's about five minutes of work: two short calls on one day, plus one more if you find a gap elsewhere in the week.

1. Read the hours on your Google listing. Search your business name on Google and read every day's hours out loud. Write them down.
2. Write down when someone really answers. Use the times your front desk or answering service covers. Those can differ from the hours on the door.
3. Find the gaps. Any stretch on the listing with nobody answering is a stretch where a missed call can be billed. Early mornings, the last hour of the day and Saturdays are the usual places to look.
4. Call your business number twice. Use a cell phone your system doesn't know. Call about 15 minutes after the listed opening time and again about 15 minutes before the listed close. If a gap from step 3 falls somewhere else, like a Saturday, call once inside it too.
5. Time each call from the first ring. Write down whether a person, a menu or voicemail picked up, and how long it took. Let your greeting play all the way through, so you know how long it runs. If the call rang past 20 seconds with no person on the line, or sat in voicemail that long, that's the kind of call Google can bill.
6. Close each gap. Either put a person or an answering service on that time, or change the hours on the listing to match when someone answers.

Changing the hours is the quicker and cheaper fix, and Google's help page says you can update them at any time. The catch is that your listing will show you as closed during those times. For a furnace repair shop, a call at 7:15 on a cold morning may be worth paying someone to answer, so decide gap by gap. On the next few listings I look at, the hours are the first thing I'll read.

What to do about calls already on the bill

Your October statement may already show some of these charges. It's also where you'll see what one costs you, since what you pay per customer call varies by trade and by town. For one you think is wrong, such as a wrong number or a spam call, use the Feedback Survey that comes with that lead (Google's word for a call it bills you for). The help page says Google "may also occasionally credit leads you report as poor quality through this survey."

Google also does some of this on its own. Its page says it checks lead quality for 30 days, and "If a lead is determined to be of poor quality, duplicate, or invalid, a credit is automatically applied to your account balance." Google's page leaves three groups out of lead credits: health care businesses (Google calls them health care verticals), tax specialists, and advertisers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). If you run a dental practice or another health care business, check whether your category qualifies before you count on a credit. How often a missed call gets credited is something the page leaves open, so I'd flag any charge I doubted and note the date.

One more rule keeps the count down. Once Google bills you for a customer, any call or message with that customer in the next 15 days is covered by that first charge, whether you call them back or they call again, as long as it's the same phone number or email address.

The same hours customers and chat apps read

Those hours do other work. Chat apps such as ChatGPT and Gemini may repeat whatever hours they find for you. If the listing is wrong, a customer may be told you're open when nobody is there to pick up.

Fix it once on the listing, and the next person who reads it gets the right hours. Pick a day this week for the opening and closing calls, and close whatever gap you find.