The Google Guarantee is gone. Your marketing probably still promises it.

If you run Local Services Ads, the badge on your profile has changed. Different name, different colour, no email that made it obvious what it meant.

The name is the small part. The money-back guarantee that sat behind the old badge is not there any more, and a lot of home service businesses are still advertising it on their websites, their trucks, and their quotes.

What Google announced

In a post published on 20 August 2025, Google said it was moving to a single Google Verified badge from October. That one badge replaces four separate things: Google Guaranteed, Google Screened, License Verified by Google, and the Money Back Guarantee.

The replacement is a verification signal. It says the business has completed Google's screening and verification, and the badge appears alongside details of which checks were passed. If your documents were current, the change happened to your profile without you doing anything.

Which is why most people missed it.

A verification is not a guarantee

The old badge did two jobs at once, and only one of them survived. It told a homeowner that Google had checked you out, and it told them that if the job went wrong, there was a reimbursement programme standing behind it. The second job is the one customers actually repeated back to you, because "backed by Google" is a much easier thing to understand than a screening process.

That backstop is gone. What remains is a statement about your legitimacy, which is worth having, and which is not the same thing at all.

The practical consequence lands on your marketing rather than your operations. Any sentence you have published promising that Google will make it right is now describing a programme that does not exist, and you are the one who said it.

Go and find every place you still say it

This is a genuinely worthwhile hour, and nobody is going to do it for you.

Search your own website for "Google Guaranteed" and check the homepage, the service pages, and the footer badge somebody added in 2022. Then work outward through the things that never get audited: the quote and invoice templates, the email signature, the truck wrap and yard signs, the printed leave-behinds, the Facebook page description, the profile blurbs on directories you forgot you joined. Anywhere you wrote "Google Guaranteed", the claim needs to become "Google Verified", and anywhere you wrote that Google backs the work or covers the customer, the sentence needs to go entirely rather than be reworded.

Vehicle wraps and printed material can wait for their next replacement cycle; that is a cost decision and a reasonable one. Everything you can edit today should be edited today, because a stale claim on a website is a promise a customer can hold you to.

While you are in there: LSA is not Google Ads

Worth clearing up, because businesses conflate the two constantly. With Local Services Ads you pay for leads related to your business and the services you offer, not for clicks. Somebody calling you is the billable event, and choosing between the two products turns on that difference.

That changes what you should be watching. A click-based campaign is judged on cost per click and what happens on your website afterwards; a lead-based one is judged on whether the calls are real work you actually want, and on whether anybody picks up. Verification requirements sit alongside that, and they are ordinary: licence or registration documents, customer reviews depending on your category, billing set up. Professional categories go further and ask for headshots and background checks. Ads can run before the badge is granted, though verified profiles get preferential placement, so the onboarding is worth finishing rather than leaving half done.

The trust job came back to you

With no reimbursement programme in the picture, the reassurance a homeowner needs has to come from somewhere else, and there is only one place left: what other customers say, and how fast you pick up.

That is not a consolation prize. Reviews and responsiveness were doing most of the work already, and the guarantee was a supporting actor that people quoted more often than they used. If your review flow is occasional, the steady version is the fix, and if calls from these ads ring out during a job, catching the missed ones is worth more than any badge, since you are paying per lead for the privilege of not answering.

If you want a second pair of eyes on where your marketing still promises something Google retired, book a strategy call. Fixing the language is quick; the reputation work underneath it is the part that decides whether the badge ever mattered.