First: are you actually suspended?
Before anything else, sign in to your Business Profile and look for a suspension or reinstatement notice. A suspended listing disappears from Maps entirely, and owners frequently miss the email — it lands in spam, or goes to an address nobody checks any more.
There is a quieter version too. A profile can be under review or have specific fields disabled without a dramatic notice, which shows up as a sudden drop rather than a disappearance. If you see anything about verification or reinstatement in the dashboard, stop reading this page and deal with that first, because nothing else will work until it is resolved.
Second: what changed on the profile?
Edits are the single most common cause of a sudden drop, and they are often not yours. Google accepts suggested edits from the public, and it also updates listings automatically from other sources. Your primary category can change, your hours can be altered, and your address format can be rewritten without you touching anything.
Check the primary category first, because it is the setting with the most direct effect on which searches you appear for. A garage switched from “Auto repair shop” to something adjacent will vanish from the searches it used to win. Then check hours, the business name, and whether the address is still shown or hidden as intended.
Third: is a duplicate splitting your signals?
Duplicate listings appear more often than owners expect: an old listing from a previous address, one created by a former employee, or one generated automatically from a directory. When two listings exist for the same business, reviews and ranking signals split between them and both perform worse than one would.
Search your business name and your phone number on Google Maps and see what comes back. A duplicate that has been sitting quietly for a year can suddenly start outranking the profile you actually manage, which reads exactly like a drop.
Fourth: has the competition actually moved?
Sometimes nothing happened to you. A competitor collected twenty reviews in a month, finished a profile that had been half-built for years, or opened a location closer to the searcher than yours. Google's local results weigh relevance, distance and prominence, and a rival improving on any of those pushes you down without any fault of yours.
This is also where searcher location matters more than owners realise. You may still rank exactly where you did for people near your premises and have lost ground three miles away — which is invisible if you only ever check from your own desk.
Fifth: are you sure it dropped?
Checking your own ranking by searching for yourself is unreliable. Results change with the searcher's location, their history, and whether they are signed in — so the position you see is not the position your customers see. A great many reported drops are measurement artefacts.
Check properly before treating it as an emergency: search in an incognito window, drag the map to a customer's area rather than your own, and look at the Performance tab in your Business Profile for the queries that actually trigger you. If calls and direction requests have not moved, the drop may not be real.