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How to Remove a Review on Google

Posted by Jenn Sargeant

There has been a time or two when someone wrote a review on a listing that is clearly not at the right business. You may be really worried about the negative review and your first instinct may be to remove the review. We really hate to be the ones to tell you this but you cannot remove a review on Google (at least at this time of this blog post is written). Google will remove a review if it doesn’t fit in the review policies. Google review policies state that the review cannot include advertising, spam, phone numbers / email addresses / URLs, off-topic review, conflict of interest, illegal content, copyrighted content, sexually explicit material, impersonation, personal and confidential information, or hate speech.

Google will need time, sometimes a few days, to look over the review on the listing but in the meantime we have some tips to help you handle the situation:

  • Flag the review as inappropriate
    • Find the listing on Google Maps, click on ‘review summary’ and click on the amount of reviews listed, hit the flag icon on the review that you’d like to submit for review, fill out the form and hit submit
  • Respond to the review
    • Since it could take some time for Google to take action, we recommend responding to the review. This could be a little frightening but it’s important for others to see that the business responded to the review. In the response you can say, “We don’t understand why you left this review, it doesn’t seem to pertain to our services. Please consider removing or contacting management.”

We hope that this blog post gives you some ease when you stumble upon a review that doesn’t hold merit. Don’t forget to be patient when submitting the review to Google but don’t be afraid to be persistent. Feel free to reach out to Upright Communications if you ever need assistance with your local listings and local marketing. We can set up a 15-minute phone call to go over your strategy!