Check your Google Verified status and your budget pacing before anything else. A profile suspension and a paced-out budget both produce a total stop, and everything else produces a decline rather than a stop.

On this page

• What should I check first, and in what order?
• What measurement artifact fakes a drop in leads?
• Could someone else have changed the account?
• What should I do if my Google Verified badge lapsed?

What should I check first, and in what order?

Stop at the first gate that fails.

1. Is your Google Verified badge still active? Google Verified replaced the Google Guaranteed and Google Screened badges in October 2025. Licence or insurance expiry is the most common cause of a sudden total stop, and the notification is easy to miss. Check the expiry dates on every document on file. If your account has already moved into Google Ads, Google says insurance and licence reverification are no longer required, and any new business check shows up as a notification inside Google Ads.

2. Are you paced out? Look at spend against your weekly budget. If you have consumed it, you stop appearing, and it looks identical to a suspension from the outside.

3. Did your business hours change? Including a holiday schedule somebody set months ago.

4. Did your responsiveness collapse? A run of missed calls — a sick week, a phone system change, a number that stopped forwarding — reduces what you are sent. Check the answer rate, and check that the phone number on the profile still reaches a human.

5. Did review volume or score move? Slower and less likely to cause a sudden stop, but worth ruling out.

6. Only then, the market. A competitor entering, seasonal demand, a Google product change.

What measurement artifact fakes a drop in leads?

Before diagnosing anything, confirm the window you are reading is complete.

Reporting settles. Measured on an apparel account against a saved snapshot, a window ending 1 day ago backfilled +83.7% on re-read, while every window 4 or more days old backfilled 0.0%.

A "leads stopped" panic read on the last two days is often a reporting artifact. Read a settled window before you act.

Could someone else have changed the account?

Somebody else changed something. On a 12-account book over 29 days, 1,141 of 1,148 change events were mine — the other 7 were scheduled scripts running on client-organisation seats, firing at fixed times, including a budget cut that silently reversed one of my own changes.

If more than one party has access, confirm who changed what before you theorise.

What should I do if my Google Verified badge lapsed?

Fix the underlying document and re-submit. Do not create a new profile — you lose your review history and your ranking inputs, which is the most expensive possible response to a recoverable problem.

Related questions

Why am I first on one Local Services Ads search and nowhere on the next?

LSA ranking is recomputed per search and is heavily driven by proximity to the searcher, your responsiveness, review profile, and whether your budget can still serve. Two searches minutes apart from different postcodes are genuinely different auctions. Read the full answer.

Do more Google reviews actually get you more Local Services Ads leads, or is that a myth?

Not a myth — review score and review count are both stated ranking inputs. But they are slower and weaker levers than proximity and responsiveness, and the marginal review matters far less at 200 reviews than at 5. Read the full answer.

My new Local Services Ads account has had almost no leads in its first month — is something broken or is that normal?

A quiet first month is normal, but there are four specific things that produce near-zero rather than merely slow, and all four are worth ruling out before you accept it. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Last reviewed 2026-09-14.