How to give an agency access to your Google Business Profile without sharing your password

Your agency, your web designer, or a freelancer has asked for access to your Google Business Profile. The safe way takes about a minute: you invite their Google account as a Manager from your profile’s settings. They get their own access, you keep ownership, and you can remove them whenever you like. You never send anyone your password. Here are the exact steps, which role to pick, the seven-day rule that catches people out, and how to take access back later.

The short answer

1. Sign in to the Google account that owns the profile, then open the profile. Searching your business name on Google while signed in, or going to business.google.com, both work.
2. Open the menu (the three dots, labelled More), choose Business Profile settings, then People and access.
3. Select Add and type the email address of the agency’s Google account.
4. Under Access, choose Manager.
5. Select Invite. The agency accepts from the email Google sends them, and you get an email when they do.

Until they accept, the invite sits under Pending on the same screen, where you can cancel it. That is the whole job. Everything below is about doing it in a way you will not regret in a year.

Owner or Manager: which one to pick

Google has two roles you can give someone. Owners have full control: they can add and remove people and delete the profile. Managers can do nearly everything else, including editing your hours and details, replying to reviews, posting updates, and adding photos. What a Manager cannot do is add or remove people, or remove the profile. Every profile also has exactly one primary owner, and that should be you, the business, not whoever set it up.

Manager is enough for every piece of routine work an agency does on a profile, and for the tools they use to do it. If an agency asks for Owner, ask what specifically they need it for. The honest answers are few: adding another person, or handling a profile you no longer want to run yourself. If it is a one-off, do that step yourself instead of upgrading them.

The seven-day rule that surprises people

For the first seven days after someone becomes an owner or manager, Google blocks them from three things: deleting or restoring the profile, removing other owners or managers, and taking primary ownership. Nobody can make them the primary owner during that week either; Google returns an error. It is a safeguard against a takeover, and it works in your favour: a new person on the profile cannot lock you out in their first week.

It also explains a common support ticket. You add a new agency on Monday and ask them to remove the old one; they cannot until the following Monday. Do that step yourself, since you are the owner. And if the person you invited deletes their Google account in those first seven days, they drop off the profile and need a fresh invite.

What to check before you select Invite

• Invite an account the agency controls as a company, not the personal Gmail of the account manager who might leave next spring. Google Groups cannot be added, so it needs to be a real Google account.
• Check the picture in the corner of the screen: you should be signed in as an owner. A Manager does not see the Add button.
• Find out who the primary owner is. If it is a former web designer or an old employee, fix that first, while they still answer email. Google’s help center has a separate guide to transferring primary ownership.
• Keep a note of who you added and when. When something on the profile changes unexpectedly, that list is the first thing you will want.

If you cannot find People and access

The usual reason is that you are signed in to the wrong Google account. Many owners have two: the one the profile was created on and the one they use every day. Try the other one. If neither shows the profile at all, someone else owns it, often whoever set it up years ago. Google has a request access process for this: you ask for access from the profile, the current owner gets an email, and they approve or deny it. Start that before you need the access, because it is slow when the owner is hard to reach.

If the profile is suspended, sort out the suspension first. Adding new people to a suspended profile changes nothing about the suspension, and an appeal is easier when the owner on file is the person filing it.

How to take access back

Open the same People and access screen, select the person, and choose Remove person. They get an email and lose access. Only owners can remove other owners and managers, which is one more reason the primary owner should be you. Removing someone does not undo their work: the review replies, posts, and photos they added stay on the profile. If you are leaving an agency on bad terms, remove them first, then change anything they set up that you do not want.

Any software the agency used on your profile loses access at the same moment, because those tools only see the profiles that the agency’s Google account can manage. You do not need to chase a list of apps.

What the agency does once it is in

With Manager access, the agency connects your profile to the tools it runs the work from. In GMB Helper.ai, the agency signs in with the Google account you invited, and your profile shows up in its workspace next to its other clients. From there it can reply to your reviews in your voice, post on a schedule, watch the profile for changes Google makes, and open a case if the profile is suspended or hit with fake reviews. Your ownership does not change, and nothing about your Google account is shared.

If you would rather run it yourself, the owner plans work the same way with your own Google account. Either way, the profile stays yours.