A review vanished: what happened, and how to find out on the day

A customer says they left you a review. It is not there. Search this and you will be offered thirteen reasons, then fifteen, then twenty, which is a list rather than an answer.

Start with the distinction that narrows it fastest: the review was almost certainly filtered, not deleted. Filtering is automatic, it happens before the review is ever public, and legitimate reviews get caught by it constantly.

The two minute check

1. 01Ask the customer to open Google on their own phone, signed into the account they used, and look at your listing. If they can see their review and you cannot, it has been filtered rather than removed.
2. 02Ask them to check their Google account's contributions list. If the review is there, it exists. If it is not, it was never submitted, which is more common than anyone expects.
3. 03Check whether it is only that one review missing, or several from the same period.
4. 04Check whether anything changed on your profile recently: a merge, an ownership change, a suspension, a verification.

Those four answers put you in one of four situations, and each has a different response.

Situation one: it never got submitted

The customer typed it, got interrupted, and never pressed post. Or they left it on the wrong business, which happens more often with chains and with businesses sharing a name.

Not a problem to solve. Ask them to try again, with a direct link rather than instructions.

Situation two: the filter caught it

The most common real cause. Google's automated filter checks every review before it goes live, and it looks for patterns rather than judging honesty.

Things that trigger it on genuine reviews:

• Multiple reviews submitted from the same network or device in a short window. The QR code on the counter is the classic version of this, because everyone who scans it is on your wifi.
• A reviewer with no other activity. A brand new account whose only contribution is a five-star review of you looks exactly like a bought one.
• Links or promotional wording in the review text.
• A burst of reviews after a long quiet period, which is why a review campaign after a dormant spell often produces fewer visible reviews than expected.

Situation three: the reviewer's account went

When a Google account is deleted, suspended or restricted for reasons entirely unrelated to you, every review attached to it disappears.

Nothing you can do, nothing you did. If you lose a review and the reviewer's profile has vanished too, this is what happened, and the review is not coming back.

Situation four: several went at once

This is the one worth taking seriously, and there are two very different explanations.

The benign one is a profile change. Reviews can disappear temporarily during a merge or an ownership transfer and return once synchronisation completes. If you merged a duplicate last week, wait before panicking.

The other is that Google runs periodic large-scale review audits that remove reviews across many businesses at once. Some of those businesses did nothing wrong. If yours did, the consequences run in a sequence and losing the reviews is the first step of it rather than the whole of it.

The part the lists never cover: finding out on the day

Most businesses discover a missing review weeks later, by accident, usually when a customer mentions it. By then you cannot reconstruct what changed or when.

1. 01Turn on review notifications in your Business Profile. Unreliable on their own, and free.
2. 02Record your review count and rating on the same day each month, in a spreadsheet. Thirty seconds, and it is the only way you will ever notice a batch removal.
3. 03Reply to every review within a couple of days. Replying makes you read them, and reading them is how you notice one is gone.
4. 04If you use a review tool, set it to alert on count decreases, not just new arrivals. Most alert only on the latter, which is the less important event.

Nobody notices a review appearing late. Everybody notices a rating that dropped a month ago and cannot say why.

What not to do

• Ask the customer to post it again immediately. A resubmitted identical review from the same account is more likely to be filtered, not less.
• Ask several people to review you on the same day to make up the difference. That is the pattern the filter exists for.
• Contact support about a single filtered review. There is no mechanism to un-filter one.
• Assume a competitor did it. Reports only succeed against actual policy breaches.

The durable answer to all of this is a steady flow rather than bursts, which is covered in review velocity, and asking in a way that does not look like a campaign, which is how to ask.