Got a Bad Local Services Ad Lead? How the Dispute Process Really Works

The old flow let you select a lead, pick a reason, and get a Google review within about 48 hours, with a credit if you were right.

Google replaced it with an automated credit system, fully rolled out by August 2024, where machine learning makes the call instead of a human reviewer.

There is no appeal anymore. If the system keeps a charge you disagree with, you cannot escalate that single lead to a person.

Before the charge: Leads get assessed the moment the customer makes contact. Ones the system flags as invalid or low quality never reach your bill at all, and they show up in your dashboard as not charged.

After the charge: Charged leads keep getting reassessed over time. If the models later decide a lead was low quality, a credit lands on your account automatically, usually within 30 days. The original charge still shows on your invoice, with the credit applied against it.

The four statuses: Every lead in your dashboard shows one of four states. Not charged means Google filtered it upfront. Charged means you paid. In review means the system is still evaluating it. Credited means you were charged and the money came back, either from auto crediting or as a bonus for leaving feedback.

Open your Local Services Ads dashboard, or the Leads page inside Google Ads if your account has migrated, and find the lead in question.

Select Rate this lead and choose Very dissatisfied, the only rating that can trigger a credit review.

Pick the most specific reason available, such as spam, a duplicate, a solicitation, or a wrong number. Vague reasons go nowhere.

Do it within 30 days of the lead date. Older leads are not eligible.

Wrong job type: If a homeowner calls about a service you never offered, the first question is why your profile lists that job type. Every category and job type left enabled is a door you now pay through, because Google will not credit what walks in it.

Wrong geography: Same logic. If leads arrive from towns you never serve, your service area is set too broad, and the old dispute refund for that mistake no longer exists.

We rate every lead on every account, every week: Consistency is the difference between feedback that trains the model and feedback that never gets submitted.

We watch the credit rate like a finance report: A falling credit rate paired with falling lead quality tells us the profile needs tightening before the budget says so. Our founder came out of mortgage banking, where every line of a statement gets reconciled, and that habit runs through how we check these accounts.

We fix causes, not symptoms: Narrowing job types, correcting service areas, syncing the Business Profile, and lifting response times, which ranking depends on heavily.

We flag pattern problems to Google support: One bad lead is rating feedback. Three weeks of them is an account issue that deserves a human, and knowing which is which comes from managing 50-plus of these accounts across trades and markets.