So what actually happened is you gave Google your phone number for the specific purpose of publishing it so customers of your business can contact you, and forgot. You should update your post so people aren't misled.

No, I gave my phone number to Google to gain access to Business Profile, as part of an identity verification process, and specifically didn't give them one to publish on the business listing. And they correctly didn't publish one. For 4+ years.

And then one day then decided to publish the one I'd given them for an identity check... in search results. I don't yet know why.

I don't believe the phone number in Google Play comes from Business Profile. Business Profile is a Maps thing. The way a phone number gets on the developer page of the Play Store is by you entering it into the Play Store developer console for that purpose.

Since it was published by you as public contact information for your business on Google, either a customer or one of the contractors Google employs to update phone numbers in Maps listings then added it to Maps.

Sorry, I got mixed-up between this and another thread. You're right, the Google Play one was provided separately (and has now been corrected).

My post was about the Business Profile one. Which started (seemingly randomly) containing the same phone number.

Maps business listings are publicly editable and continuously updated by Google from any source they can find. Especially phone numbers. Google employs people to search the Internet all day long for business phone numbers to update on Maps. You published the number publicly, specifically listed as contact information for your business, on a Google site even. There is no mystery here.

Could be! My only counterpoint is that every time they've previously made a change, they've emailed to say so, and I've searched my email (including spam) and not found any such mention this time around. /shrug/

You still need to update your post to include the obviously relevant information that you explicitly gave Google this phone number for the specific purpose of publishing it as public contact information for your business.

Only a reminder to never give out your phone number, I suppose.

I got a Twilio number to give to Google for my Play store listing. It simply takes a message and then emails it to me.

I should do this. Did you have to code something for it or will Twilio just do this if you set some settings?

You can set it up in the Twilio studio without having to write code. I'm not 100% positive, but I seem to remember there was a template for it and I just had to fill in the details

This is a fairly recent thing. I didn't realise that Google had actually started publishing this contact but for about the last year or so, they've required that you provide a phone number that they can publish for users to contact you.

Honestly, this policy seems absolutely backwards to me. I'm fine for customers to contact me via e-mail or my website, but why do Google get to suddenly mandate that I need to provide 24/7 global phone support to anyone (who doesn't even need to me my customer)?

Maybe they also provide an AI hotline they have to sell to you?

Especially since Google doesn't offer anything like that.

Google is too busy to be answering phones

You should consider deleting this or amending your blog post, it is highly misleading. Your phone number is on the CV and in your Google Play.

My phone number is on my CV, and that's deliberate (I want a job!). It's in plenty of other places online too.

But none of them (except the Google Play one, which I'm fixing) are associated with the business or were provided for the purpose of sharing when people search for a business that I happen to be involved with!

(I'm sure you wouldn't want your phone number to turn up every time anybody searched for your employer, even if you were happy for your phone number to appear on your personal website, right?)

There is one in your CV: https://danq.me/cv

Yes, there is.

I'm not claiming that my personal phone number shouldn't be online anywhere. There are plenty of places it's pretty easy to find!

I'm just saying that I didn't put my personal phone number onto a public Business Profile (only providing it for identity verification, many years ago). But then, randomly, one day Google decided to start publishing it to anybody who searched for that company name.