The basics: Google is rolling out a unified verification badge that will replace the multiple LSA badges starting October 20th, 2025.
This is part of Google’s moves which will also discontinue their Money Back Guarantee certification associated with the Google Guarantee badge. This certification badge meant that — prior to October 20th — any customer who wasn’t satisfied with the service they received could submit a form to request reimbursement so long as it was within 30 days of the initial service date.
The good news is that, if you have a current LSA account, you don’t need to do anything — the account will naturally update to the new banner. At the same time, any prospective users will still need to go through the LSA verification, but will receive the same badge as all other businesses.
Why is this important?
Basically, Google says their aims are to reduce confusion among users that stemmed from the various different badges associated with LSAs, and what they all meant.
This means Google’s removing the Google Guaranteed, Google Screened, License Verified by Google, and Money Back Guarantee program badges. In fairness, these are a lot of different badges that are, on the surface, not immediately discernable to the average person, so it makes sense to try and unify them into something more intuitive.
Google has pointed to wanting to build trust within their platform, so through this unified verification badge, users will be able to hover over it to see what checks the business has completed.
What do you need to do?
Luckily these implementations are being facilitated by Google so you personally don’t have to do anything on that end to start.
That said, if you’re a current LSA advertiser, you want to review your account as soon as you get the chance — you’ll want to ensure your documents are up to date, otherwise your ads could be disrupted.
In fact, this is a good reminder that, in general, you should check up on the necessary documents regularly, not just right now. It’s easy to forget that and just assume everything’s running as it should and never checking in to confirm — meanwhile, should documents become out-of-date or any potential points of failure stop functioning, you end up with your system not running properly (or at all) for months or even years until you stumble upon a problem.
In this vein, we recommend monitoring your performance as well — both in general and, in the case of this new LSA badge development, currently, with an eye specifically on anything that could be impacted by this change. Depending on which badges your business was verified with previously under the old system, you may see a shift in performance now that all advertisers are receiving the same Google Badge.
Overall, this isn’t necessarily the biggest deal around, but it’s something worth paying attention to both as Google kicks off this initial rollout and over the next while as we start to see potential results of this trickle in. We recommend keeping an eye out — both on making sure you’re all set up to receive this new badge, and on the data that comes in once this new system is fully implemented.
