Why are my Google Customer Reviews Missing?

"We've had legitimate positive client reviews go missing. We work extremely hard to abide by all of Google's best practices with reviews and don't understand how/why our reviews are getting filtered. This is the second time reviews have gone missing this month. We work extremely hard to make our clients happy and it's a huge professional courtesy when they leave us a positive review. I want to understand why they are being filtered when they clearly don't violate any of the review rules." - Kaitlyn Smith 4556

If you are missing reviews from your Google My Business Profile, one of these reasons may apply:

Review shows on Search but not Maps, or vice versa
Sometimes, a review takes longer to show on Google Search than on Google Maps, or the other way around. This is exceedingly common after merging Google My Business profiles. If your reviews still don't show after a week, you can contact Google Support.

Reviews after business profile reinstatement
If your reviews went missing after Google reinstated a disabled or suspended profile, contact Google Support to have them investigate for you. You can reach Google Support here.

Other missing reviews

To protect customers, Google removes reviews with inappropriate content, advertising, spam, off-topic reviews, or conflicts of interest. You can learn more about Google's review policies here.

Errors

Sometimes, Google's algorithms remove legitimate reviews. After a review is removed, Google says they can’t restore it and further states, "These removal measures help keep reviews relevant, helpful, and trustworthy."

So why is this happening and what can you do about it?

THE CAUSE

In mid-2021, Google's review algorithm was updated to protect users from fake, spammy or scammy reviews. Unfortunately, the filters are not running at their best. Resulting in thousands of businesses seeing a drop in their review count. Often the change was so surprising and unexpected, that owners couldn't remember or discover which review was missing.

Google's new "filter" was inaccurately flagging legitimate reviews - many that were years old suddenly disappeared with no way for the owner to reach out and ask their previous customer for more feedback.

For a small business like maid service or roofing who often only sees a client once - these hard earned reviews being removed can really hurt a legitimate business.

But reaching out to Google for support may prove useless due to the crippling lack of customer service when it comes to any Google service. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

THE SOLUTION

The best way to protect your feedback from clients is to take a screenshot using your computer's print screen, snipping tool, clip or screen capture tool. If you are on a mobile device or tablet, be sure to use the screen capture tool that is built into your camera. Save reviews to your files should anything happen to your review. And as a good rule of thumb, always respond to your reviews, both the negative and positive and be sure to thank your customer for their time, their loyalty or in the event of a negative review - try to find a solution for both you and your client.
If your customer's review did not violate any guidelines and your profile was not recently moved - you can post about the issue on Google's Customer Forums and add your voice to the thousands of others who are experiencing erroneous removals.
Contact Google Support through email here.
Consider another method (or two) to collect reviews. There are many alternative review collection options available but almost all will have flaws so you might want to just focus on collecting screenshots of reviews and building a review page on your website that showcases your positive feedback.

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Why are my Google Customer Reviews Missing?

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