Complaints Over Google Reviews Being Removed Again

There has been an uptick in complaints from businesses around Google local reviews disappearing or being removed. We had something similar last October and it was fixed in December and now I am seeing more complaints about reviews going missing.

There are many many threads with complaints about this across the Google forums and in the Local Search Forums – I’ll embed them below.

Joy Hawkins highlighted the issue the other day and while it is not impacting all businesses, it does seem like an unusually number of businesses are impacted.

Lost 20+ reviews a couple weeks ago.. were at 994 or so, now at 974 with 0 reviews added after the beginning of Feb.

I have customers that told us they gave us a great review.. nothing shows.

We ran 200+ jobs in the past 15 days and ask for reviews on all of them… Yet 0 are…

— Rob Brooks (@therobertbrooks) February 18, 2026

Hiroko Imai thinks this might be related to an update to the Google Business reviews policies, he said on LinkedIn, “The Google Business Profile policy has been updated. Here’s why you may have seen a sudden drop in reviews recently.” The Wayback Machine is bugging out on me, so it is hard for me to do a comparison right now but I’ll post more details below of the change.

Here are some comments from businesses:

I have seen another day of reviews being deleted/hidden as reported by Local Viking all within about the last 30 minutes, but instead of being single reviews many are multiple reviews, with the highest being 76 deleted reviews for a restaurant location . . . all over the last 4 years, and a mix of mostly 5 star but also 1, 2, 3 and 4 star reviews.

Seeing same issue. Real reviews, not spam junk.

According to their team, they report this whenever a review is removed, although it can make its way back. When checking manually, most of these removals are sticking.

This week, the three 5 star reviews were removed leaving just the spam 1 star, and a 2 star review. This is a huge reputational hit to my business and as a new business its not like I have even a customer a day that I can ask for a review. I’m just starting out and do 1 or 2 weddings a year and maybe a dozen family sessions.

We received 260 reviews last week, yet 100 of them were removed today. Apparently they have been flagged as spam or not being organic? Our rating has dropped .2 and will continue to do so. Why are we being penalized for bringing in legitimate reviews?

The Reviews menu on Google maps often disappeared for me since Feb 11th

Here are some of the complaint threads:

Are any of you noticing this?

Hiroko Imai said about the policy changes that these caught his eye in the document:

• “Content exhibiting unusual volumes or patterns of review contributions that are indicative of efforts to manipulate a place’s rating.”
• “We do not allow merchants to: Offer incentives – such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services – in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review.
• Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers
• When soliciting reviews, merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included.

Hiroko wrote, “This means we should also remove reviews if there’s any doubt about the authenticity of the writing process. While they don’t explicitly use the term “gating,” I appreciate that they mentioned “selectively soliciting positive reviews from customers.””

Forum discussion at threads above.