I have an interesting story in that vein. (genericised to avoid shaming anyone) Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a sm

I have an interesting story in that vein. (genericised to avoid shaming anyone) Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a small firm that did a specific type of rental equipment. This was an industry that was traditionally very local and Yellow Pages oriented, to the point where leading brands were usually names like "A-Amazing AAA Aardvark Services". The page was good enough that it started ranking on out-of-region searches. So we built them a huge "directory" site. It had pages of spun content for almost every named city in the country, and we peppered it with a few listings of local service providers. It was on the edge of being an actual useful resource; they went to their industry trade show and could say "We're page 1 (and frequently result 1) for that service name in almost every city in the country." It had your usual late-2000s/early-2010s good-practice SEO stuff-- well-formed URLs, tidy redirects everywhere, a few paragraphs of text on every page. They started taking a listing fee, allowing coverage at a per-county level. It worked very well; getting real listings improved the actual user value of the rubbish content site and added further randomness to the generated content. But anyway, they got greedy. They still had people calling their central phone number and wanting them to do reservations for them, which let them take a much higher commission than a listing fee paid. We built them some tooling to manage that sort of reservations. This is essentially the business model the fake GBP you mention is, except that for one narrow segment of the country, they were the service provider. More importantly, they replaced all the individual vendor contact info with their own. They really wanted to hand over things to one of the owners' sons, who (along with the owner) had some very colourful pasts and questionable decision making abilities. So we let them go their own way, and continued to experiment with the model in other industries. Got good results in one other vertical, and a handful that just rotted on the vine. But when we turn away, the site starts tanking in rankings. Maybe SEO spam detection improved, maybe removing the phone numbers made it obvious there wasn't much real content there. They ended up making various frantic changes trying to salvage the flow, but it was never the same. When I left the agency in the late 2010s, they were making frantic rework efforts trying to recapture the lost magic. So I'd say the business concept can work, but it's weird how we have it being a SEO guy first. You'd think you'd find the service companies driving things-- by forming some sort of marketing/branding co-op with similar firms in different markets, they could split the costs of maintaining the SEO presence, and hiring a captive developer means they would be able to organize a flat rate dev contract rather than paying a high per-lead commission.