What changed on October 1, 2026
Google can now charge Local Services Ads advertisers for unanswered calls when the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. It applies to calls that come in during your ad schedule and within the business hours on your Business Profile (Google Local Services help; news coverage: PPC Land).
Voicemail doesn’t get you out of it. Google treats a call that reaches voicemail during business hours as connected, and charges it if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds, whether or not they leave a message (Google).
Google’s own help page on ad ranking also says missed calls can count against your responsiveness, one of the factors that decides where your ads show (Google Local Services help).
What it means for your business
A missed call always cost you the job. On Local Services Ads it can now also cost you the lead fee, and make your next ad show lower.
That hits hardest in your busiest weeks, when every tech is on a job and nobody is free to pick up.
What you can do
Match your ad hours to the hours someone can pick up
Unanswered calls are only billed inside both your ad schedule and your Business Profile hours. Trim either one to the hours someone can actually pick up.
Give calls a second place to ring
A second phone, the office or an answering service, so a call gets picked up instead of ringing out.
Text back every missed caller within seconds
It keeps the customer talking to you, even when the call itself was missed.
Look at your missed calls every week
If they bunch up at certain hours, that’s where to add cover first.
Where text-back helps, and where only answering helps
Text-back helps you
- Keep the customer: they get a text from your business in seconds and can reply with what they need.
- Cover the times nobody can pick up, like during a job or after hours.
- Get the details in writing: the problem, the address and a good time.
Only answering helps you
- Avoid the charge for an unanswered business-hours call. A text-back doesn’t turn a missed call into an answered one.
- Protect your responsiveness, which Google says missed calls can hurt.
So if you run Local Services Ads, you want both: a text-back for every missed call, and a way to answer more calls during business hours.
How we handle it for clients
Missed call text back is in every plan. For Local Services Ads advertisers we’re piloting overflow and after-hours answering: a voice assistant answers when nobody can, says up front that it’s an AI assistant, takes the details and passes them to you.