You might not actually own the assets your business runs on.
A domain, a hosting account, a Google Business Profile, and a phone number are the four things a trade business depends on every single day — and the four things most owners have never checked the ownership of. Most of the time it doesn't matter, until a vendor relationship ends badly and it suddenly matters more than anything else in the business. Here's how to check each one this week, and what to do if the answer isn't what you expected.
Why does it matter who owns your domain, hosting, and Google profile?
Because whoever holds the registration controls whether your website stays online, whether your Google listing keeps showing up in search, and whether your phone number keeps ringing to your business. If that party is a vendor rather than you, a billing dispute, a bad renewal, or a company shutting down can take your business's public presence down with it.
None of these four assets are complicated to own correctly. A domain registration, a hosting account, a Google Business Profile, and a phone number each have a clear, checkable owner — an account, an email address, a login. The problem is that almost nobody checks, because everything works fine right up until it doesn't.
The moment it stops working fine is predictable: a vendor relationship ends on bad terms, a company gets acquired or shuts down, an invoice goes unpaid during a slow month, or a single employee who set everything up leaves without documenting where the logins live. Any of those can turn 'my website' into 'a website someone else controls, that I happen to be the subject of.'
This isn't a reason to distrust every vendor. It's a reason to keep these four things separated from any single vendor relationship, the same way you'd keep your business bank account separate from any one client's accounts payable department.
How do you check who owns your domain name?
Log into the account at your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains successor, etc.) using credentials you personally hold, and confirm the registrant name, email, and billing contact are your business, not a vendor. If you don't know your registrar or can't log in, a public WHOIS lookup shows the registrar of record as a starting point.
Every domain has a registrar — the company where it's registered — and a registrant, the legal owner on file. If you've never logged into that registrar account yourself, that's the first sign to investigate. Ask your web developer or marketing vendor directly which registrar the domain sits at and request the login, or request that you be added as the account holder.
If a vendor resists sharing this or says it's 'easier if they just manage it,' that convenience argument is exactly the lock-in risk described above — it's convenient for them, and it's a liability for you. A domain can be transferred to your own registrar account without taking the website offline; the transfer process typically takes several days and doesn't require touching the live site.
How do you check and reclaim your Google Business Profile?
Sign into your Google account, open your Business Profile, go to Business Profile settings, then People and Access. If you're listed as Owner, you control it. If you're a Manager, or not listed, ask the current owner to grant you Owner access — Google's own transfer process moves primary ownership without losing your reviews, photos, or history.
This is the single easiest of the four to check and the most commonly mishandled, because a marketing vendor or web developer will frequently create the profile on your behalf using their own Google account — sometimes with your knowledge, often without much explanation of what that means.
Google's own process handles this cleanly: the current owner adds you as an Owner (not Manager) through People and Access, and can then transfer primary ownership to you outright. New owners have to wait seven days before they can do certain admin actions like removing other users or transferring ownership again — a safeguard, not a bug — but the profile, its reviews, and its history stay exactly as they were through the whole process.
If the party holding ownership won't grant it or has gone unresponsive, Google's support process for business profile ownership disputes exists precisely for this situation, though it moves slower and requires documentation proving you're the real business — a license, a utility bill, or tax paperwork tied to the business address.
How do you check who controls your business phone number?
The test is simple: could you take this exact number to a different phone provider tomorrow if you needed to? Numbers issued by a marketing vendor as part of a call-tracking package are sometimes leased rather than portable — meaning if you stop paying that vendor, the number stops working, and every truck, business card, and past customer's saved contact points at a dead line.
Confirm with whoever set up your phone system whether the number is registered under your business's carrier account or the vendor's. If it's the vendor's, ask specifically whether it can be ported to a carrier account in your name — legitimate call-tracking numbers usually can be, but it needs to be requested and confirmed before you're relying on the number, not after a dispute starts.
The same caution applies to any number a marketing vendor adds for tracking purposes and asks you to publish as your primary contact number instead of your existing one. A tracking number layered on top of your existing published number is low-risk. Replacing your published number with one you don't control is not.
What should you do if you find out you don't actually own one of these?
Start with the one that's easiest to fix and go from there — usually the Google Business Profile, since Google's ownership-transfer tools handle it directly and don't require the other party's cooperation to request access. Domain and hosting transfers are the next easiest, and mostly require asking directly and, if refused, escalating to the registrar with proof you're the business on file.
The phone number is worth handling carefully rather than urgently — porting a live business number the wrong way can create an outage, so confirm the new destination is fully working before releasing the old one. If a vendor relationship is actively deteriorating, prioritize documenting what you have before the conversation gets adversarial: screenshots of current settings, the registrar, the account, anything that proves the current state.
None of this requires confrontation to start. 'Can you add me as an owner so I have a backup login' is a reasonable, low-conflict way to open every one of these conversations — and a vendor with nothing to hide will typically say yes without much friction.
| Asset | How to check | How to reclaim |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Log into the registrar directly, or run a public WHOIS lookup | Request registrant transfer or an authorization code from the current registrar |
| Hosting account | Ask who's billed for hosting and where the account lives | Request a new account under your billing, or an export of site files |
| Google Business Profile | Business Profile settings → People and Access | Ask the current owner to add you as Owner, then transfer primary ownership |
| Phone number | Ask whether the number is on your carrier account or a vendor's | Request a port to a carrier account in your name |
Questions we get asked on this
- If the domain is registered in the vendor's name rather than yours, they control the renewal and can let it lapse or refuse to transfer it — this is a common source of disputes when a relationship ends badly. The fix is preventive: confirm the registrant is your business before the relationship starts, not after it ends. If it's already registered under a vendor, request a transfer while the relationship is still functional.
- Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain through any registrar's free lookup tool or a site like whois.icann.org — it will show the registrar of record, even if privacy protection hides the registrant's personal contact details. From there, contact that registrar directly or ask whoever manages your site which login they use.
- No. Reviews, photos, posts, and Q&A are attached to the profile itself, not to whichever account currently holds ownership. Transferring primary ownership through Google's own People and Access settings moves control without touching any of the profile's history or content.
- For the Google Business Profile specifically, Google has a support process for ownership disputes that doesn't require the other party's cooperation, though it requires documentation proving you're the legitimate business. For a domain, escalate to the registrar directly with proof of business ownership. For hosting, a non-responsive vendor is the strongest argument for treating the relationship as over and rebuilding on infrastructure you control from day one.
- It's common, and not automatically a problem — the issue is whose name the account is billed under. A developer managing your hosting day-to-day is fine as long as the account itself, and its billing, is registered to your business. Ask directly; a developer with nothing to hide will confirm this without hesitation.
- No. Add them as a Manager so they can post updates, respond to reviews, and manage day-to-day activity — that access is sufficient for any legitimate work. Primary Owner should stay with you or someone inside your business, because only the primary owner can remove other users or transfer ownership again if needed.
Not sure who holds the keys to your own accounts?
Tell us what you currently have logins for and what you don't, and we'll help you map out exactly what to request and from whom — no obligation attached to the audit.
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