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You’re not imagining it: many Google reviews are actually disappearing, even if you didn’t do anything ‘wrong’ according to Google’s stringent business review policy.
Beginning sometime in 2025 (and swelling to all-time highs early this year), data from tens of thousands of business listings showed review deletions ballooning across categories. Businesses across pest, lawn, HVAC, retail, food, and hospitality are seeing both positive and negative reviews removed for no clear reason.
It’s not a glitch. Rather, it’s the result of major changes in how Google moderates reviews.
Google has significantly tightened its spam filters and automated moderation to fight fake, incentivized, and suspicious reviews.
Problem is, this initiative has backfired for thousands of legitimate home services businesses. Genuine reviews are vanishing overnight, and branch managers are losing large batches of feedback from real customers without warning.
So what exactly trips the wire here, and how can owners prevent these mass deletions from happening?
We’ll tell you what a safe review strategy looks like.
Google review deletions are surging across all industries
The rate of review deletions across Google Business Profiles is at an all time high right now.
Analysis across tens of thousands of business locations shows review removals increasing more than 6x between early 2025 and mid-year, with elevated deletion rates continuing through late 2025 and into early 2026.
Again, this is happening to pretty much every consumer-facing business. But home services businesses are being hit especially hard because:
- They generate reviews frequently
- They often serve customers in short, high-volume bursts
- Review requests are commonly sent in campaigns rather than continuously
And Google’s systems are now much more sensitive to those exact patterns.
What changed? AI moderation at scale
As with most seemingly random issues cropping up in the past year, the problem is rooted in over-reliance on AI.
Google has dramatically expanded its use of automated review moderation, powered by advanced AI systems designed to detect manipulation and inauthentic behavior.
Below are several of the behaviors Google’s AI moderator is designed to flag:
- The reviewer’s profile or IP address has committed violations in the past
- Multiple reviewers used the same IP address to leave reviews for you. (Multiple people in a household or office)
- Reviews are the result of incentives
- There are URLs in the reviews
- The reviewer wrote the review while connected to your WIFI network (or while using an onsite "review station")
- The reviewer is outside of the typical market area (different state, region or country)
- Content of the review is inappropriate or violates Google’s Guidelines
- The same review appears elsewhere online (word-for-word on another review site like Yelp or Angi)
- Unusual review collection patterns (like a sudden surge in new reviews)
- Reviews from friends, family or employees
Reading through this list, it’s easy to see how a well meaning customer could break several of these rules and trigger a deletion.
While the intent is to protect trust, the side effect is that real businesses need to be careful about how they ask for reviews, how often, and at what point after service.
The biggest risk factor for home services: review velocity
Several of these ‘suspicious’ behaviors aren’t relevant for home services businesses. For example, since services are rendered at customers’ homes, it’s highly unlikely a review was removed because the customer left it while at your brick-and-mortar location.
Realistically, most of your reviews are being deleted for the same reason: after a period of getting very few reviews, you suddenly received a ton in a very short period of time. That’s an easy way to trigger Google’s current AI moderator.
Importantly, the problem isn’t that your business is receiving a ton of reviews. If you use a tool like Applause, you likely get 5-10x as many reviews as competing businesses in your area. Google has no issue with that.
The problem is timing. Sudden spikes look suspicious. On the other hand, a steady stream of reviews, no matter how many, won’t register as unusual.
If your business:
- Sends one large email blast to all customers soliciting reviews
- Runs a short-term review push campaign after a busy period
- Has a stop-start cadence to review requests (ex: you push for reviews until you hit a certain volume, then stop completely).
You are much more likely to see a windfall of review deletions.
While coordinated review campaigns may feel efficient from a marketing perspective, it looks suspicious from where Google’s standing.
Why home services businesses are being hit harder than most
Home services companies, especially pest and lawn, are more likely to see seasonal spikes in demand and deliver a high volume of jobs in a short time period.
The problem is that natural business spikes don’t always look natural to algorithms.
When dozens of reviews arrive within days, even from real customers after real jobs, automated moderation systems may interpret the pattern as artificial and remove reviews in bulk.
This is why you’re seeing large groups of reviews disappear at the same time, versus just one or two individual reviews being removed selectively.
How to stop getting reviews removed: focus on consistency
Until recently, businesses just needed to focus on getting as many reviews as they could, no matter the method. This advice no longer works.
Today, the safer and more effective approach is to continuously get a consistent number of reviews over time. That means you’re better off soliciting reviews on an ongoing basis instead of doing one-off campaigns.
Steady, predictable review activity looks trustworthy to Google and will ensure you don’t lose genuine 5-star reviews.
What to do if reviews get deleted
If you’ve noticed that a valuable, genuine review has been deleted, you can contact Google via the Help Center to see if they can restore it.
However, Google is dealing with an absurdly high volume of requests related to deleted reviews, so the likelihood the review will be restored in a timely manner is pretty slim.
In this case, being proactive is your best bet. Commit to consistent, ongoing review collection and you shouldn’t trip Google’s AI moderator.
Get reviews the right way with Applause
The businesses that will win going forward are the ones that generate real reviews, from real customers, after real jobs, every single day. That’s exactly what Applause is built for.
Applause lets home services businesses put review requests on autopilot. Applause integrates directly with your CRM to automatically request reviews after every completed service, so customers can effortlessly leave honest feedback while the experience is still fresh in their mind.
Because Applause is always on, you get a high volume of reviews on a consistent basis. No sudden spikes.
In a world where reviews can disappear overnight, a steady, automatic review engine is the key to stellar peer-to-peer feedback.
Ready for a more reliable, automated way to get real 5-star reviews? Chat with our team about Applause today.
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