Google Guaranteed (Now Google Verified) vs Google Ads: Two Different Products.

With Local Services Ads you pay for each valid lead. With Google Ads you pay for each click, whether or not it turns into anything. That single difference drives most of the practical contrast between them — LSA shifts junk-traffic risk to Google, Google Ads leaves it with you.

Google's documentation lists text or email contact (US and Canada), voicemail or automated engagement such as appointment scheduling, answered phone calls where a conversation takes place, missed calls you follow up by text, email or voicemail, and booking requests (US and Canada). A call that rings out and is never returned is not in that list.

Google states that leads it determines to be invalid or low quality are not charged, and that already-charged leads get reassessed over time and may be issued credits automatically. You can also report poor-quality leads through the feedback surveys. Note Google's own caveat: automatic credits are available only in the US and Canada, and not for healthcare providers, tax specialists, or EMEA advertisers.

There is no fixed price: Google says pricing varies by location, job type, lead type and bidding mode. The largest public benchmark, SearchLight Digital's February 2026 study of 888 contractors and $6.72 million of spend, put the blended Local Services Ads cost at $53 per lead, with electrical at $39, HVAC $51, plumbing $57 and drain and sewer $59, and a cost per paying customer of $233 against $472 for Google Ads. Treat those as reference points and measure your own cost per booked job after a month.

You almost certainly hit your monthly maximum. Google derives that ceiling from your average weekly budget multiplied by the average number of weeks in a month. Individual weeks are allowed to exceed the weekly figure, but once the monthly maximum is reached your ad stops appearing for the remainder of the month. If you are running out early, the weekly budget is the number to raise.

They matter a great deal. Reviews feed into where you appear in the LSA ranking and strongly affect whether someone taps your listing over the two beside it. Because LSA gives you almost no creative control — your profile, hours and reviews are essentially the whole ad — review volume and rating are among the few levers you actually have.

No. Google matches your listing to searches based on the service categories you select and your service area. If keyword-level control matters to you — because your best jobs come from a specific long-tail query, for instance — that is a genuine argument for running Google Ads alongside LSA rather than instead of it.

Google Ads is faster to start, since LSA screening takes time and you may not have the reviews to rank well yet. But LSA's screening barrier is exactly what makes it valuable once you are through it. The usual sequence is to start Google Ads while your LSA verification and reviews build, then shift weight to LSA as it becomes competitive.

It's still a trust signal: it shows Google has checked the business. What changed in October 2025 is the backing. The old Google Guaranteed badge came with a money-back guarantee for customers unhappy with work booked through Local Services Ads; Google discontinued it when it moved to Google Verified, with claims accepted for services booked before December 7, 2025. Don't advertise a Google guarantee to customers any more.

Google Guaranteed was the badge for home-service businesses such as plumbers, roofers and HVAC companies, and it came with Google's money-back guarantee. Google Screened was the equivalent for professional services such as lawyers and financial planners, without that guarantee. Since October 20, 2025 both, along with License Verified by Google, have been replaced by a single Google Verified badge, and businesses already verified moved over automatically.

Yes, and for an established contractor that is often the right configuration. They occupy different positions on the results page and are billed separately, so they do not cannibalise each other in the way two overlapping Google Ads campaigns would. Watch total cost per booked job across both rather than optimising each in isolation.

Different job entirely. Both Google products capture people already searching; Meta reaches people who are not searching yet. If you are choosing between search and social rather than between two search products, our LSA vs Meta Ads and Google Guaranteed vs Meta Ads comparisons address that directly.