Managing Multiple Locations on Google: Groups, Bulk Verification and the Ten-Profile Threshold

One location is straightforward. The second one turns profile management into a different job: access has to be governed, data kept consistent, and changes pushed through in several places at once. Google provides two tools for this, and both sit behind thresholds that most operators discover only after running into them.

From two locations: the business group

Once you manage "2 or more profiles," you can create a business group. Google describes it plainly: "Business groups provide a more secure way to manage and share access to your Business Profiles with co-workers", and, more memorably, "It's like a shared folder for your profiles" (Google, Create & manage business groups, accessed 20 September 2026).

The real benefit is succession rather than convenience. If profiles are managed through an employee's personal Google account, you lose them when that person leaves, or you spend weeks recovering them. In a group, access belongs to the group rather than to an individual.

Within a group, "Both managers and owners can create, edit, and delete profiles within a business group." That is convenient, and it is also the reason to grant access sparingly.

Three restrictions that hurt in practice

One group per business or brand. Google advises: "Limit business groups to one account per business or brand." Google names one exception itself: "If your organization operates multiple brands or divisions that require different sets of users who have access, you can create multiple business groups." The price is the two restrictions below. Create several groups without that reason and you pay it for nothing.

Spreadsheets do not work across groups. "It's not possible to import a single spreadsheet across multiple business groups", and "Each business group requires its own spreadsheet to import businesses." The same limitation applies in reverse: you cannot download data from several groups into one combined spreadsheet. Split your locations across three groups, and you will maintain three spreadsheets from then on.

Groups cannot be nested. "A business group can't act as a manager of other business groups." A regional structure, in which a parent group administers the regional ones, is simply not available.

All of these points come from the same source (Google, Create & manage business groups, accessed 20 September 2026). Their effect is organisational: the structure you choose at the start determines for years how much manual work maintenance will cost.

From ten locations: bulk verification

The second threshold sits at ten. From there, bulk verification becomes available, which lets you verify profiles together instead of one at a time. The condition is unambiguous: "Your spreadsheet has 10 or more profiles from the same business" (Google, Verify Business Profiles in bulk, accessed 20 September 2026).

Two phrases in that sentence decide whether your application succeeds.

"10 or more" means ten valid profiles. Google states that "Duplicate, suspended, or disabled profiles don't count towards the 10 Business Profile minimum." Submit eleven entries of which two are duplicates, and you are at nine, and you receive a rejection that looks inexplicable at first glance. Clean up before you apply, not afterwards.

"from the same business" means one business, not one account. Agencies managing several clients in a single account are excluded. So are businesses that do not serve customers at their own address: one of the listed conditions is "Your business isn't a service-area business." A trade business that travels to customers and has no premises open to the public falls outside the scheme, however many locations it operates.

Verified does not mean verified forever

The sentence worth remembering appears at the end of the same help page: "To keep Google Maps data sources correct, we may de-verify accounts that don't actively manage their profiles." And more bluntly: "If an account abuses bulk verification and doesn't comply with our guidelines, we revoke their bulk verification."

A set of profiles left untouched after verification therefore costs you visibility, and it puts at risk the status you have just worked to obtain.

What this means in practice

Decide the structure before you add locations. One group per business, from the beginning, and several only for separate brands with separate sets of users. Merging later is considerably more expensive than choosing correctly at the start, precisely because of the spreadsheet limitation.

Remove duplicates before you apply. They cost you visibility, and they do not count toward the ten-profile threshold either.

Plan for maintenance, not just for setup. Ten locations mean ten sets of holiday opening hours, ten review streams, ten sets of customer questions. The workload grows linearly; attention does not.

Check regularly that every location is still accurate. The most common discrepancy is also the most mundane: a branch has moved and the profile has not.

This is exactly where Regiofy fits. The key figures for every location sit on one page: review count, average rating, response rate and score side by side, instead of clicking through ten separate views. For each location you see how many reviews are still unanswered, and when the response rate falls below half, that location appears in the dashboard warnings.

If you are setting up your second location right now, none of this is urgent yet. From the fifth onward, it is the difference between an overview and a search.