Your Google reviews disappeared: why and what to do

Most disappeared Google reviews were filtered automatically rather than deleted by a person. Google runs spam detection continuously, and genuine reviews get caught in it regularly. Frustrating, and usually explainable by how they were collected.

Why they vanish

A sudden burst. The most common cause. A business decides to get serious about reviews, asks forty customers in a fortnight, and thirty reviews arrive in ten days after two years of nothing. That pattern looks bought, so the system removes them.

Reviewer accounts with no history. Someone creates a Google account purely to review you and never uses it again. Those carry little weight and are more likely to be filtered.

Same network or device. Handing customers a tablet in your shop, or asking everyone to review while on your wifi, means several reviews arriving from one connection. That reads as manipulation.

Links or promotional language in the review text.

Reported by someone. Competitors and unhappy customers can report reviews, and reports sometimes succeed even when the review was genuine.

Profile changes. Occasionally reviews go temporarily during a merge, an address change or a suspension, and return once things settle.

What to do

Collecting reviews without triggering filters

The method that works and holds up:

Ask steadily. One or two a week, continuously, rather than thirty in a fortnight. This also looks better to customers reading your profile, because recent reviews signal an active business.

Text them a link. They review later, from their own phone, on their own connection. This is the single most important change if you have been handing people a tablet.

Ask in person, follow up by text. The ask lands better face to face at the moment they are happy. The link makes it easy afterwards.

Never incentivise. Discounts or prize draws for reviews breach Google’s guidelines and are a genuine risk to your profile, not just to individual reviews.

Never write them yourself. Obvious, still happens, and it is detectable.

How to get more Google reviews covers the full method.

If a specific review was removed unfairly

Different situation from a batch disappearing. If one particular review vanished and you suspect it was reported by a competitor, the support route is the same but your case is more specific and easier to argue.

Equally, if a fake negative review has appeared, that has its own process. How to handle a fake review covers reporting it.

The wider point

Losing reviews hurts because reviews matter enormously for local ranking and for the customer deciding between you and someone else. A business with 90 recent reviews at 4.8 beats one with 12 old ones in most local results.

Which is why the response to losing some is not to panic-collect, but to build a habit that produces a steady flow indefinitely. A business asking every customer, every week, ends up with a review profile that survives the occasional filtering event without noticing.

The businesses that get hurt by this are the ones who did nothing for two years, made one big push, and lost the lot.

What we do

Review requests are part of our managed plans at £49-£199 a month, sent steadily after jobs rather than in bursts, which is both more effective and less likely to trigger filtering.

If reviews have disappeared from your profile and you are not sure why, tell us roughly how many went and how you collected them and we will give you an honest view of the likely cause and whether appealing is worth your time.

Related: why customer reviews matter.