On 1 October 2026, Search Engine Roundtable reported that some California Local Services Ads advertisers were serving in Illinois, New Jersey, Florida and Texas, cities and states their profiles had never listed as a service area. Google has not confirmed the bug. It is also the fifth distinct change to hit Local Services Ads since August, after a Performance Max migration, a Google Business Profile unlinking bug, a call-routing fault and a new missed-call charge. If you run Local Services Ads for a home services, legal, real estate or other local lead business, one check at a time has meant missing the pattern. Here is the single audit that covers all five.
Local Services Ads may be serving some advertisers' profiles outside their configured service area again, per an unconfirmed 1 October 2026 report. Pull your last two weeks of billed leads, match each one's location against your Service Area settings, and dispute anything outside it. Do this alongside four other 2026 LSA checks below before you decide whether to change your spend at all.
What happened on 1 October
Search Engine Roundtable reported that Local Services Ads profiles based in California were appearing, and apparently winning leads, in cities their owners had never selected as a service area, including locations in Illinois, New Jersey, Florida and Texas. LSA expert Anthony Higman reviewed the affected profiles and did not hedge: "These should NOT be serving in Fresno." Google had not confirmed the bug at the time of the report, and the outlet raised an alternative explanation worth taking seriously: this could be Google auto-expanding an advertiser's targeting without their consent, a policy behaviour, rather than a bug in the strict sense. Either way, the practical effect for an advertiser is the same: leads showing up from places they never agreed to serve, each one billed at the normal Local Services Ads rate.
This is the fifth Local Services Ads change in two months
Taken alone, the October location report is a single unconfirmed story. Taken against what else happened to Local Services Ads since August, it is the latest entry in a pattern, and the reason a one-off check misses more than it catches.
| When | What changed | Status | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | Google began folding Local Services Ads into Performance Max, starting with home services advertisers. | Confirmed migration, not a bug | Whether your account has moved and what reporting access changed |
| 1 September 2026 | Local Services Ads began unlinking from some advertisers' Google Business Profiles. Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin said: "We identified a bug and are actively working to resolve it," adding it was "unrelated to the migration." | Confirmed bug | Whether your Business Profile link is still active, checked weekly, not once |
| September 2026 onward | Local Services Ads began routing some incoming calls to the wrong phone number. | Reported, covered separately below | Whether your call-routing number matches your actual intake line |
| 1 October 2026 | Google began charging for some missed Local Services Ads calls. | Confirmed policy change | Whether missed-call charges are showing up on your invoice and whether they're disputable |
| 1 October 2026 | Some profiles began serving outside their configured service area, per the Higman report above. | Reported, unconfirmed | Whether any billed lead in the last two weeks came from outside your service area |
Why a wrong location costs you money, not just relevance
Local Services Ads is pay-per-lead: Google bills you for a contact whether or not you can actually do the job. A lead generated from a city you never selected is not a free impression you can shrug off. It is a billed lead you likely cannot service, and if you respond late or decline it, it can also generate a bad review tied to a job you were never positioned to take. The cost shows up twice: once on the invoice, once in your profile's review score. That is also why this deserves an audit rather than a wait-and-see approach, Google's own Local Services campaigns overview confirms Service Area is the setting meant to prevent exactly this, which is what makes a bypass of it worth checking for directly rather than assuming it will surface on its own.
The five-point audit
- Confirm your Performance Max migration status. If your account was folded into Performance Max starting in August, check which dashboards and reporting views changed. We covered the full migration in a separate audit.
- Check your Google Business Profile link weekly, not once. Since the September bug, a working link can apparently break on its own. Confirm your profile still shows as linked inside the Local Services Ads dashboard, and if it has silently unlinked, open a support ticket rather than waiting for it to relink itself.
- Verify your call-routing number matches your intake line. We walked through this check in full in our call-tracking audit; run it alongside this one rather than separately.
- Review your missed-call charges against your actual call log. The dispute window and process are covered in our missed-call billing breakdown.
- Pull your last two weeks of billed leads and match each one's address or phone area code against your Service Area settings. Flag anything outside the cities and zip codes you configured, and dispute it through Google Ads support using the charged-lead dispute process or the invalid-lead troubleshooter, citing the lead ID directly. Neither tool currently names the October bug by name, so lead the dispute with the facts: the configured area, the lead's actual location, and the date.
Should you pause Local Services Ads while this is unresolved?
| Your situation | Reasonable default |
|---|---|
| Your audit above turns up no out-of-area leads and both links (Business Profile and call routing) check out | Keep running. One unconfirmed report isn't a reason to pause a working lead source you've just verified is clean. |
| Your audit finds one or two billed leads from outside your service area | Dispute those specific leads, keep running, and recheck weekly until Google confirms the bug is fixed. |
| Your audit finds a pattern of out-of-area leads, an unlinked profile, or misrouted calls together | Pause new spend while you escalate to Google Ads support with the dated evidence, since multiple failures stacking is a different risk than one unconfirmed report. |
For clients on Local Services Ads, we're not pausing spend over one unconfirmed report. We are running this five-point audit this week regardless, because the pattern across August to October is Google shipping changes to this product faster than it is confirming or fixing the side effects, and the only defence against that is checking your own account rather than waiting for a status update.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Local Services Ads location bug reported in October 2026?
On 1 October 2026, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Local Services Ads were serving some California advertisers' profiles in service areas they had not selected, including Illinois, New Jersey, Florida and Texas. LSA expert Anthony Higman, reviewing the affected profiles, said plainly: "These should NOT be serving in Fresno." Google had not confirmed the bug at the time of that report, and one alternative explanation raised is that Google may be auto-expanding targeting without the advertiser's permission rather than a bug in the strict sense.
Is this the same bug that unlinked Local Services Ads from Google Business Profiles in September?
No, they are reported as separate issues. The September 2026 bug, confirmed by Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin with the statement "We identified a bug and are actively working to resolve it," unlinked some advertisers' Local Services Ads from their Google Business Profiles, in at least one reported case requiring a support ticket to relink. Marvin also said that bug was "unrelated to the migration" of Local Services Ads into Performance Max. The October location issue is a separate, later report with no confirmed cause yet.
How do I check if my Local Services Ads account is affected by the wrong-location bug?
Pull your billed-leads report for the past two weeks and check each lead's address or phone area code against the cities and zip codes configured in your Service Area settings. A lead from outside that configured area is the symptom reported in October 2026. Google has not confirmed a fix, so there is no notification that will flag this for you automatically.
Should I pause my Local Services Ads campaigns until Google confirms a fix?
Not automatically. Local Services Ads is pay-per-lead, and pausing it removes a working lead source over one unconfirmed report. Audit your Service Area settings and recent billed leads first, dispute any lead that is clearly outside your configured area through Google Ads support, and only pause if your own audit shows the bug is actually reaching your account.
What else changed in Local Services Ads in 2026 that I should check in the same audit?
Four other changes landed in the same two months: Google began folding Local Services Ads into Performance Max for home services in August 2026, the September Google Business Profile unlinking bug above, Local Services Ads has been sending calls to the wrong number since September 2026, and Google started charging for some missed Local Services Ads calls from 1 October 2026. Each has its own check, covered in the audit below.
The takeaway
One unconfirmed report about service areas in Fresno is not, by itself, a reason to change anything. Five changes to the same product in two months, three of them confirmed by Google and two still unconfirmed, is a reason to check your account rather than assume the next one will be caught for you. Run the five-point audit above, dispute the specific leads it turns up, and keep checking weekly while Local Services Ads keeps changing faster than Google is confirming the side effects.
Sources & further reading
- Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Local Service Ads Bug Serving Wrong Locations"
- Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Working On Fixing Local Service Ads Bug"
- Google Ads Help, "Dispute charged leads"
- Google Local Services Ads Help, invalid-lead troubleshooter
- Google Ads Help, Local Services campaigns overview