Why Google reviews disappear, and what to do about it

An owner logs in, the count has dropped from 63 to 58, and the assumption is always the same: a competitor has reported them, or Google has done something malicious.

Almost never. Reviews go missing for a short list of ordinary reasons, and knowing which one you are looking at tells you whether to act or let it go.

The spam filter, which is most of them

Google runs automated filtering across reviews continuously, not just at the moment of posting. A review can sit visible for months and then be removed when a pattern it belongs to gets flagged. That is why disappearances often look random and delayed.

The patterns that get caught:

A burst. Twenty reviews in two days, after eighteen months of none, is the classic trigger. It is what an incentive campaign looks like and what buying reviews looks like, so it is what the filter is tuned for. This is the single most common own goal, and it is usually committed by a business that has finally got organised and emailed its entire customer list at once.

Reviews from accounts with no history. A brand new Google account whose only ever activity is a five-star review of one business is weak evidence, and it is treated that way.

Same device, same network. Handing your phone to customers so they can review you, or having staff review from the shop wifi, clusters reviews in a way that is trivially detectable.

Text that reads as solicited. Reviews containing discount codes, or several reviews using near-identical phrasing, get read as coordinated. Sending customers a suggested wording produces exactly this.

The self-inflicted one

Incentives. A prize draw, a free coffee, ten per cent off next time. It breaches Google's policies, and in the UK the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought incentivised and fake reviews firmly into consumer protection enforcement.

The reviews get stripped, usually in a batch, often months later, and the business concludes that Google has malfunctioned. It has not. It found what it was looking for.

Changes to the listing itself

If the count dropped sharply and all at once rather than by a few, look at the profile rather than the reviews.

A merge. If you had two listings, an old one and a new one, and Google merged or unmerged them, reviews move around and some are lost.

A category or name change. Substantial edits can trigger a re-review of the listing.

A move. Changing the address, particularly across a meaningful distance, can detach reviews tied to the old location.

Suspension. If the whole profile has been suspended, the reviews are not deleted, they are hidden with everything else. That is a different problem with a different fix, and it is urgent.

The ones that are nobody's fault

The reviewer deleted their account, taking their review with it. Nothing to do.

The reviewer deleted the review, possibly because you fixed their problem and they took it down themselves, which is a good outcome dressed as a bad one.

Policy violations in the text. A review containing abuse, a personal attack naming a member of staff, or someone's phone number can be removed for content reasons even though it was genuine and negative. You will occasionally lose a bad review this way.

What to actually do

First, check the profile, not the reviews. Open the Business Profile manager and look for a suspension notice, pending edits, or a duplicate listing. A structural problem is worth fixing today and is often reversible. A handful of filtered reviews is not worth an afternoon.

Second, count properly. Compare against a screenshot rather than a memory. Review counts also fluctuate briefly during Google's own indexing, and a drop that recovers within a week was never a removal.

Third, if the reviews were genuine, use the reinstatement request. Google provides a flow for this in its help centre. Be specific about which reviews and why they were legitimate. It is slow and it often fails, but it costs nothing.

Fourth, stop doing whatever caused it. If you emailed 400 past customers on a Tuesday, that was the cause, and doing it again will produce the same result.

The only durable protection

A business getting a few reviews every week, from customers asked at the point the job finished, from ordinary accounts on ordinary devices, does not have a disappearing reviews problem. The pattern is indistinguishable from what it actually is, which is a business that does a lot of work and asks about it.

Losing four reviews out of 200 is an accounting curiosity. Losing four out of fourteen is a crisis. The difference is not luck, it is the flow, which is the argument for making the asking automatic rather than occasional.

Reviews are one of the seven parts we score under Proof, and stability is part of what gets scored. A profile whose review count goes up and down is telling you something about how those reviews were obtained.