Search your business name and there it is: your reviews, your photos, your opening hours, on a site you have never heard of, under a profile nobody at the business created. Some of these pages even take enquiries, routing your customers' messages to a directory's sales funnel, or worse, to a competitor who claimed the profile.
Owners usually arrive with one question, how do I delete it, and the honest answer is that deletion is three different processes wearing one coat. Identifying which profile you are looking at is most of the work.
Look for control signals. Does the page offer claim this business, which means the directory generated it and holds the keys, or is it already claimed, with responses to reviews written in a voice that is not yours? Review responses from a stranger are the loudest alarm: someone is operating your identity in public, and every platform treats that more seriously than an unclaimed data page.
Check the data itself. A wrong phone number that rings a competitor, a website link that redirects through an affiliate path, or hours edited to mark you closed on your busiest day are not scraping errors. Scrapers make stale mistakes, uniformly out of date. Sabotage makes convenient mistakes, all pointing the same direction. Screenshot everything with dates before you touch a thing, because claiming and correcting will overwrite the evidence.
For an unclaimed auto generated profile, claim it where the platform is a meaningful source of customers, correct the data, and set the record straight; where the site is a content farm with no real audience, use its removal or data dispute route instead, and request deindexing from search engines once the page is gone or corrected. Claiming everything is how owners end up maintaining forty profiles forever. Claim the ones with traffic, remove the ones with none.
For an impostor controlled profile, file impersonation and trademark reports with the platform, with your evidence pack: your real listings, your business registration or trademark where you have it, and the screenshots showing responses and diverted contact details. Escalate to the search engine's legal removal tools if the platform stalls, and to the host if the profile is part of a phishing or lead theft operation. These reports move slowly and then all at once; a complete evidence pack is what separates the files that move from the files that circle.
Most fake and duplicate profiles are born from inconsistent business data scattered across directories, old addresses, a former phone number, a name variation from a rebrand. Clean the major data sources your industry actually feeds from, keep name, address, and phone identical everywhere you control them, and the aggregators have less raw material to fragment.
Then monitor cheaply: a monthly search of your business name plus the word reviews, and an alert on your name in quotes. A new profile found in its first month is a form and a screenshot. The same profile found after a year of accumulated reviews and a competitor's responses is a project. The difference is only how early you looked.
Generally yes for factual listings built from public data, which is why correction and claiming routes exist. What they cannot do is impersonate you, divert your customers deceptively, or keep publishing information they know is false once properly notified.
No. Claim and maintain profiles on platforms that actually send you customers or rank prominently for your name. For low value content farm pages, use removal or data dispute routes instead of adopting another profile to maintain.
Screenshots of the profile and its activity with dates, proof the business is yours such as registration documents or established official listings, and specific examples of the impersonation, like review responses or a diverted phone number.
Once the page itself is removed or corrected, use Google's outdated content and legal removal tools as appropriate for the case. Deindexing follows the source page's status, so source removal comes first.