Google showing competitor’s phone number in Instagram snippet when searching my brand name – is this normal?

Hi everyone,

I came across something unusual and wanted to understand if this is expected behavior from Google Search.

When searching for my brand name together with a phone number query, Google shows Instagram results from a competitor. In the snippet preview, it displays the competitor’s phone number alongside a mention of my brand name.

To clarify:

  • The phone number belongs to the competitor.
  • The Instagram result is not my profile.
  • The snippet appears to combine the competitor’s number and a mention of my brand (likely within the same post).
  • There is no hacking involved as far as we can tell.

My question is:

Is this just dynamic snippet generation based on passage-level indexing, where Google pulls matching terms from the same document regardless of entity ownership?

Has anyone experienced something similar where brand terms and competitor contact information appear together in snippets due to contextual mentions?

Would appreciate any technical insights.

Thanks in advance.

Posted Feb 16, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

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