{"id":11087,"date":"2026-07-06T23:55:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T15:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11087"},"modified":"2026-07-06T23:55:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T15:55:08","slug":"google-is-investigating-reports-of-reviews-going-missing-and-pausing-reviews-on-local-listings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11087","title":{"rendered":"Google is investigating reports of reviews going missing and pausing reviews on local listings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p> <div id=\"articleContent\" itemprop=\"articlebody\"> <div class=\"bialty-container\"> <p>After several days of complaints from businesses, Google has confirmed it is investigating reports of missing reviews from Google Local listings and has paused the ability of Google Business Profile listings to receive reviews.<\/p> <p><strong>What Google said. <\/strong>A Google spokesperson told us:<\/p> <ul class=\"wp-block-list\"> <li>\u201cWhen our systems detect suspicious reviews, we take a range of actions including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews on the profile to prevent further abuse. We are investigating the issue and will restore any reviews that were incorrectly removed.\u201d<\/li> <\/ul> <p><strong>What is the issue. <\/strong>As I documented on the Search Engine Roundtable, there are dozens of complaints in the\u00a0Google Business Profile Forums with business owners and local SEOs saying reviews have mysteriously disappeared. In addition to reviews going missing, many of these businesses are not even able to get new reviews on their local listings. <\/p> <p>It seems Google\u2019s review spam detection algorithms are picking up on patterns and aggressively removing and blocking reviews on suspected Google Business Profiles. It is unclear if this is caused by spammers abusing some Business Profiles or Google\u2019s algorithms were tweaked and being too trigger happy.<\/p> <p><strong>More details. <\/strong>Amy Toman, a volunteer Google Product Expert in the Google Business Profiles, posted on\u00a0LinkedIn:<\/p> <blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"> <p>If you or a client are in this situation, you can post on the forum if you\u2019d like, but know that Google is aware and working on it. No timeline for resolution stated yet.<\/p> <p>There is a new issue I\u2019m seeing on Google listings, where after reporting fake or spam reviews, listings are receiving a review block and all reviews are being hidden. And in at least one case, their rating is reduced to 0.<\/p> <p>Google has been alerted and they now say they\u2019re aware of the missing review issue and are working to resolve it.<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p><strong>Why we care. <\/strong>If you noticed that many of your reviews went missing and\/or you are not getting any new reviews this week, this might be related this issue.<\/p> <p>Google is investigating the issue and hopefully we will see many, if not all, of these reviews come back and new reviews resume.<\/p> <\/div> <hr\/> <p class=\"article-disclosure\"> <em>Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page\u2019s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.<\/em> <\/p> <hr\/> <div class=\"author-about py-4\"> <div class=\"card bg-light\"> <div class=\"card-body p-2 clearfix\"> <div class=\"authorImage float-start me-3 mb-2\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-fluid rounded avatar-border flex-shrink-0\" alt=\"Barry Schwartz\" width=\"140\" height=\"140\" src=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/05\/1630496745425.jpeg.webp\" title=\"Google is investigating reports of reviews going missing and pausing reviews on local listings\u63d2\u56fe\" \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-fluid rounded avatar-border flex-shrink-0\" src=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/05\/1630496745425.jpeg.webp\" alt=\"Barry Schwartz\" width=\"140\" height=\"140\" title=\"Google is investigating reports of reviews going missing and pausing reviews on local listings\u63d2\u56fe1\" \/> <\/div> <div class=\"author-body\"> <div id=\"authorBio-251\" class=\"author-desc\"> Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.<\/p> <p>In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the &#8220;US Search Personality Of The Year,&#8221; you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O&#8217;Clock.<\/p> <p>Barry can be followed\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rustybrick\/\">on X here<\/a>\u00a0and you can learn more about\u00a0Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site. <\/p> <\/div><\/div> <\/p><\/div> <\/p><\/div> <\/div> <p> <!-- START SIDEBAR LOWER SPACE --><\/p> <p><!-- END SIDEBAR LOWER SPACE --><\/p><\/div> <p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>News#Google #investigating #reports #reviews #missing #pausing #reviews #local #listings1783353308<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After several days of complaints from businesses, Google has confirmed it is investigating reports of missing reviews from Google Local listings and has paused the ability of Google Business Profile listings to receive reviews. What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us: \u201cWhen our systems detect suspicious reviews, we take a range of actions including [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[75,44263,1804,174,12377,83,44264,2026,9429],"class_list":["post-11087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-careers","tag-google","tag-investigating","tag-listings","tag-local","tag-missing","tag-news","tag-pausing","tag-reports","tag-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}