How to Delete Google Reviews in 2024 [Step by Step Guide]
Did you know that 81% of people check Google Reviews before visiting a business? Even more striking, 93% say online reviews impact their buying decisions.
But what happens when a bad review - fair or foul - tarnishes your reputation?
Unfair or fake reviews can deter customers and damage your business's online reputation.
In this article, I’ll solve this problem for you. We’ll learn everything you need to know about managing Google reviews.
We’ll explore:
But let me first tell you how removing inappropriate reviews helps your business.
There are several reasons you’d want to delete Google reviews.
Unfair or inappropriate reviews are given by frustrated users who sometimes exaggerate their bad experience with a business.
Fake reviews contain misleading information, posted by someone who never used the business, or from competitors trying to sabotage a business.
Outdated reviews are negative reviews from a time when the business was actually bad. It may have improved its services or products since a negative review was posted.
Spam reviews don't provide valuable information about the business itself. They may include personal attacks, unrelated topics, or self-promotion.
No business owner wants such reviews to suppress genuine consumer feedback.
That’s why deleting reviews that are not genuine can help present a more accurate picture of customer experience.
But the most painful reason that actually motivated me to write this article is – review bombing.
Review bombing means flooding a business with a lot of negative reviews in a short span of time to damage its reputation or sales.
These reviews are usually fake or exaggerated and aim to hurt the business. Review bombing is usually backed by the competitors of a business.
There are many unethical, paid services offering review bombing and fake Google reviews. The process is quite simple.
If you’ve upset someone, they can even do it for free, thanks to social media.
While doing research, I found a subreddit solely created for review bombing small businesses.
Well, I actually found many other communities and telegram groups, but it’ll be unethical to share such platforms.
These bad reviews and 1 star ratings can not only affect your Google Maps SEO rank, but also have a huge impact on sales and overall business reputation.
But as I said, review bombers are smart. They don’t post 100s of reviews in a single day.
So how do I identify these reviews or any type of fake reviews?
If you’ve a small business that doesn’t get a lot of reviews every month, identifying fake reviews is easy.
But if you have a business with a pretty big customer base, multiple locations and hundreds of thousands of reviews, manual process becomes difficult.
That’s where you need automation.
🦀
You can use Google Maps Reviews Scraper by Lobstr.io to collect all customer reviews from Google Maps within seconds.
This powerful Google reviews scraper gives you all insights you need to verify if a review is genuine or fake.
So how do we investigate review bombing using Lobstr?
We already have a really detailed guide on How to scrape Google Maps Reviews at scale?. Check it out for a complete tutorial.
That’s it.
You have your results in a Google Sheet. Sort the reviews by 1 star rating and number of reviews by user.
Now filter them by date posted and analyze the review text. You’ll see a repetitive theme and a specific pattern in the fake reviews text.
Unable to do it yourself? Well we live in the AI era.
You can use ChatGPT to analyze the reviews from the CSV or Excel file for you.
But since ChatGPT Plus is paid and I’m broke, we’re going to use a better option.
I personally use Google AI Studio for help in analyzing such data. It’s free, super easy, and you can directly import Google Docs, Sheets, and Drive files to it.
AI will automatically give you a detailed analysis of potentially suspicious reviews.
But the million-dollar question remains unanswered.
Can I delete these fake or inappropriate reviews?
The short answer is Yes. You can delete any type of negative reviews that fall under certain categories.
Google actually removes most of the spam reviews for you.
Google uses a spam detection algorithm to deal with spam reviews on Google business listings. They in fact deleted 55 million fake reviews in 2020.
But sometimes (actually most of the time) Google can miss spam or fake reviews. Some fake reviews are written so perfectly, they don’t get flagged automatically.
So if a review goes against Google’s review policies, you can remove it yourself by reporting it to Google.
Google can delete any review that violates any point of its review policies grouped under 2 categories.
Deceptive content means reviews that don’t reflect the genuine user experience.
Deceptive behavior includes fake engagement, impersonation, misrepresentation, and misinformation.
Inappropriate content and behavior includes many things – from harassment and offensive content to off-topic, hate speech and illegal content.
This policy affects both negative and positive reviews. Many genuine reviews are flagged as inappropriate and get deleted due to this policy.
So how do I delete Google reviews that are fake or unfair?
There’s no ‘delete reviews’ button in your Google My Business dashboard. You can’t delete any genuine review.
To delete an unfair negative review, you can report it to Google and they will remove it if it violates Google’s review policies.
Google will now review your removal request and if it’s not a genuine review, there’s a high chance it will be deleted.
There’s another way of doing it too.
This method works best for review bombing because most of the reviews in that case are similar and easy to detect.
The trick is to wait for a few days and Google will inform you about their decision.
If the reviews are still not deleted, you can dispute the issue and appeal for another review.
But what if I have to report 100s of reviews?
Doing it manually will not only take a lot of time but it’s also super inconvenient.
In that case, you can contact Google Small Business Support, and send all the fake review links.
When the review gets flagged, it then goes to a team of people for a manual review. This can take several days.
Google doesn't give a specific timeframe for removing a review, but it generally takes anywhere from 24-48 hours to 60 days. Most reviews are reviewed within 1 to 4 weeks.
As mentioned above, Google support team does not remove reviews that highlight genuine customer experience.
Flagging such reviews will have a very negative impact on your future appeals.
But how do I deal with negative reviews if I can’t delete them?
You can not have 100% satisfied customers. Do not expect positive feedback from all customers.
Every business has some unhappy customers and their feedback helps you improve your service quality.
Deleting Google reviews is good to avoid spammy comments but this won’t work if you want to delete real reviews highlighting your business’s weaknesses.
Here are some tips to deal with negative reviews professionally and gracefully.
Also, remember, a well-crafted response to a bad review can show potential customers that you care about feedback and take steps to improve.
Now let’s answer some frequently asked questions.
You can delete your own Google review using a desktop computer by following these steps:
Currently, deleting Google reviews is only available on desktop computers and not through the mobile app.
No, businesses generally cannot see deleted Google reviews directly within their Google Business Profile dashboard.
Once a review is deleted, it's gone from public view and likely inaccessible to the business owner.
Google reviews are mostly permanent, but you can try flagging them for removal if they violate Google's policies or edit them if you want to change your experience.
Google reviews vanish for a few reasons.
No, Google prioritizes honest reviews and doesn't allow businesses to buy removal. They can only flag reviews that violate Google's guidelines.
The number of flags doesn't directly affect removal. Google reviews hinge on violating their policies, not the number of flags.
One flag can trigger removal if it provides clear evidence of a policy violation.
No, people won't know if you report their Google review. Google keeps the reporting process anonymous to protect user privacy.
There's no way to directly hide reviews. Google designed the platform for transparency, so businesses can't selectively hide reviews.
No, Google Reviews cannot be deactivated in the traditional sense. Businesses cannot disable the review function entirely on their Google Business Profile.
The exact number of 5-star reviews to offset a 1-star review on Google depends on a few factors.
That’s a wrap. This was my step by step guide on how to delete Google reviews. Do check out Google Maps Reviews Scraper to collect Google reviews at scale.
For multiple Google business listings, use Google Maps Search Export to all listings in a flash.
Self-proclaimed Head of Content @ lobstr.io. I write all those awesome how-tos, listicles, and (they deserve) troll our competitors.