Guides
Who owns your website, domain and Google Business Profile?
Four things can each be in a different person's name: the domain, the hosting, the site and the Google Business Profile. You can check all four yourself without a technician. If any one of them is not yours, fix that before you pay anyone for search or AI work.
How do I find out who controls my domain?
Look up your domain at ICANN Lookup, ICANN's public lookup tool at lookup.icann.org. It runs on RDAP, which ICANN made the official source for domain registration data in place of the old WHOIS on January 28, 2025. ICANN's rules cover .com, .net and the other generic endings. Under its Registration Data Policy, registrars must publish two things you care about: the registrar (the company the domain is registered with) and the expiration date.
What the lookup usually will not show is your name. The same policy has registrars redact the registrant's name, street address and phone when redaction applies. Many results come back with those fields hidden. So the lookup tells you where the domain lives and when it runs out, but not whose account it sits in. The only way to prove that is to log in to the registrar and see the domain in your own account. If you do not have that login, whoever has it controls your domain.
Why it matters. ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy has the registrar send the registrant a reminder about a month before the domain expires, another about a week before and one more within five days after. If the registrant on file is a former agency, or uses the agency's email, those reminders go to them. If nobody renews, the registrar must cut off the domain's DNS before deleting it. Your website goes dark. If your email runs on the same domain, it goes dark too. After deletion there is a 30-day window to restore the name. The restore is requested by the registrant at expiration, through the registrar that deleted it. If the registrant is your old agency, they are the ones who can ask.
If it is not you: ask the person who holds the account, in writing, to move the domain into a registrar account in your name. A domain in a former agency's account is often the hardest thing on this list to get back. It only gets harder once a renewal is missed.
How do I know who owns my hosting?
Look at the invoice. Who is billed? If the hosting bill comes from your web vendor and not from a hosting company, the vendor is the customer of record and you are the vendor's customer. Your site lives in their account.
On a managed platform there is often no separate hosting at all. The site is a feature of the vendor's service. It does not survive canceling that service. That was the case for Anderson Dock & Lift, which we moved off a managed vendor's platform in August 2026.
If it is not you: the fix is a site on hosting bought in your name, with your card. There is usually nothing to transfer out of someone else's product. That is what a Full Rebuild is for.
Can I change my own website?
Ask one question: can you change the phone number on your own website tonight, without asking anyone? If yes, you have edit access and the files are reachable. If no, you have neither.
If it is not you: ask for an admin login of your own, in your name, not a shared one. When a vendor or an employee leaves, you remove their login and keep yours. Then save a full copy of the site (pages, images and the database if there is one) to your own computer. Even a partial copy makes a rebuild faster.
Who owns my Google Business Profile?
Sign in to Google with the email you think owns the profile and go to business.google.com. Open your profile, select More, then Business Profile settings, then People and access. That list shows everyone who has access and their role.
Google has two roles: owner and manager. One owner is also the primary owner. The difference matters:
- Owner. Full control. Owners can add and remove users, edit the profile and remove the profile.
- Primary owner. A profile can have many owners but only one primary owner.
- Manager. Mostly the same access as an owner, but a manager cannot add or remove users and cannot remove the profile.
If a former marketer is the primary owner and you are only a manager, they can remove you from your own profile. You want to be the primary owner.
If you cannot see the profile at all: go to business.google.com/add, enter your business name and address and pick your business from the list. If Google says someone else may manage the profile, select Request Access and fill out the form. Google emails the current owner, who has 3 days to respond. If they do not respond, you may be able to claim the profile yourself, though Google says that option isn't always available. If you run a service-area business with no shop or office (you drive to the customer), Google's page sends you to Google support instead. Choose "Transfer ownership of listing" as the issue.
What Google requires of agencies. Google's ownership guidelines call anyone who manages a profile they do not own an authorized representative. They name SEO companies as an example. Representatives must never claim a profile without the owner's express consent. They must transfer ownership to the business owner immediately when asked. Google also encourages owners to own the profile themselves and add representatives as managers. That is how we work. You own it. We are added as a manager and removed when you say so.
What about Search Console and Analytics?
These two hold your history: which searches your pages showed up for and how many people visited. They are worth the same check.
Search Console. Owners see the list under Settings, then Users and permissions. Google has three levels: owner, full user and restricted user. A former vendor who verified the site is a verified owner. Deleting them from the list is not enough. Google says that as long as their verification token stays in place (a file, a meta tag or a DNS record), a deleted owner can verify again. Remove the token too.
Google Analytics. Open Admin, then Account access management. The role you want is Administrator, which Google describes as full control, including adding and deleting users. If the only Administrator is someone who no longer works for you, ask them to make you one before anything else.
Why does this come before search and AI work?
Everything else in search and AI visibility sits on top of these accounts. Google's guide to optimizing for its generative AI features says a Business Profile can help a local business show up in AI responses. If you do not own that profile, someone else controls what AI reads about your business there. A new site on a domain you do not control can be taken away with the domain.
So we start there. On a Full Rebuild we confirm the domain, email and Business Profile are yours before anything is built. On a Tune-Up we work inside your accounts as a manager, never the owner. Stop working with us and you keep all of it. Our process lays out what you hold at each step. The GEO Audit is where every job starts.
Sources. ICANN, "ICANN Update: Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS," January 27, 2025, icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-update-launching-rdap-sunsetting-whois-27-01-2025-en. ICANN Lookup, lookup.icann.org. ICANN, "Registration Data Policy," effective August 21, 2025, revised May 12, 2026, icann.org/en/contracted-parties/consensus-policies/registration-data-policy. ICANN, "Expired Registration Recovery Policy," updated February 21, 2024, icann.org/resources/pages/errp-2024-02-21-en. Google Business Profile Help, "Manage your Business Profile owners & managers," support.google.com/business/answer/3403100. Google Business Profile Help, "Request ownership of a Business Profile," support.google.com/business/answer/4566671. Google Business Profile Help, "Business eligibility and ownership guidelines," support.google.com/business/answer/13763036. Search Console Help, managing owners and users, support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7687615. Analytics Help, "Access and data-restriction management," support.google.com/analytics/answer/9305587. Google Search Central, "Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search," last updated July 10, 2026, developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide.