Your Google rep is calling your client. Directly.

Agencies keep catching Google Ads reps emailing their managed accounts straight, “book a free call” and all, over the agency’s head. It’s not new. It’s not fixed. Here’s what’s happening and what to do about it if you run ads for clients in India.

A Google Ads account manager writes to an advertiser: “I noticed you haven’t booked a call with me yet.” She offers a free strategy session, references the account’s spend, signs off “on behalf of Google.” Nothing in the email is fake. The email address is genuinely google.com. And the advertiser it landed on has an agency already running that account, one that had no idea Google was reaching out.

That’s the complaint surfacing again this month in the PPC community, reported by Search Engine Roundtable. Agency owners posted screenshots on LinkedIn of Google’s outreach going straight to their clients, not to the agency’s own point of contact on the account, and not through the agency at all.

The chain it cuts through

Every managed ad account has a reporting line: the advertiser trusts the agency, the agency talks to the platform, and recommendations flow back up. It’s the same shape as any account-management relationship, and it only works if the middle link stays informed. These emails skip it.

This has been going on for over a decade

This isn’t a one-off glitch. Complaints about Google representatives reaching out directly to agency-managed advertisers date back more than ten years, and Google publicly committed to addressing third-party management concerns back in 2022. The pattern reported this month is the same one: a friendly “dedicated expert” invitation, a calendar link, a mention of the account’s customer ID, sent to the person paying the bills instead of the person managing the spend.

Google does now let recipients unsubscribe from this specific class of email, which is a genuine improvement over having no opt-out at all. What’s still missing is the more obvious fix: a way for an agency to flag, at the account level, “this is professionally managed, route outreach here.” That gap is what keeps the complaint recurring every few months.

Why it’s not just an annoyance

A free strategy call sounds harmless. But a Google rep talking budget and strategy directly with a client, without the agency’s framing or context in the room, can plant ideas that undercut a carefully built account structure: broader match types, higher Target CPA ceilings, Performance Max shifts, all recommendations that tend to increase spend on Google’s own platform. The client isn’t wrong to take the call, they don’t know any better. The agency just finds out after the fact, if at all.

For agencies working on retainers or performance fees, that’s a real business risk, not just an ego bruise. A client second-guessing your bid strategy because “Google’s own person” suggested something different is a harder conversation than it should be.

What this means if you manage Google Ads in India

Most Indian performance agencies and in-house growth teams manage accounts on behalf of founders, brand marketing heads, or SME owners who trust the agency precisely because they don’t want to deal with Google directly. That trust gap is exactly what these emails exploit, an unsolicited, official-looking email from Google carries real weight with a client who isn’t deep in ad ops themselves, and a “free consultation” is an easy yes when nobody has warned them it’s coming.

The fix isn’t complicated, it’s a five-minute conversation you have before it becomes a problem instead of after.

The honest read

Google isn’t going to stop running an account-management program, it’s a legitimate part of how the platform supports advertisers, and plenty of direct-managed advertisers genuinely want that relationship. The problem is specifically the accounts that already have professional management, where Google’s outreach isn’t additive, it’s a workaround. Until there’s a real “managed by an agency” flag Google actually respects, the burden sits with agencies to get ahead of the conversation with their own clients, rather than find out about it in a screenshot.