"Google's deleted my reviews" covers four completely different situations, and the reason it feels like a crisis is that people jump straight to the worst one.
The four are: individual reviews filtered out, a profile-level pause, no removal at all but a genuine slowdown in new reviews, and — least often, but it does happen — a consequence of how you've been asking. They look identical on the phone at six o'clock. They need different responses, and three of the four need no panic at all.
Platform behaviour and policy wording change, and enforcement varies by market. Treat the shape of this as durable and check the current specifics rather than trusting a blog post from last autumn.
The twenty-minute diagnostic
First, get an actual number. Not a feeling. Your total review count and rating, today, written down. Most missing-review panics start with a remembered number that was never quite right, and about a third of them end here.
If you don't have last month's figure, look at any screenshot, any report, any old email that quotes it. This is the step people skip, and it's the one that determines whether there's anything to investigate.
Second, name a specific missing review. Can you identify one review — a guest, a date, a quote — that was there and now isn't? If you can't name one, you probably have a volume problem rather than a removal problem, which is the third situation and needs a different page.
Third, check whether new reviews still appear. Ask a member of staff to check the profile from their own phone, not logged into your account. Then check whether anything at all has landed in the last week.
Fourth, look for a notice. Any warning, suspension message or policy notification on the profile itself. If there's a formal notice, that's your answer and everything else is speculation.
Twenty minutes, and you'll know which of the four you're in.
Situation one: individual reviews filtered
A handful gone, no notice, new reviews still arriving normally. This is the common one and it is largely out of your hands.
Spam and authenticity filtering removes reviews for reasons that have nothing to do with the content: an account with no history, several reviews posted from one network in a short window, text that pattern-matches something. A genuine, glowing, entirely honest review from a real guest can be caught by it.
What to do: log it and move on. Date, guest name if you know it, roughly what it said, and how you found out. One line in a note. Restoration is uncommon, and the log is worth more than the appeal, because a pattern across several months is the thing you'd escalate on.
What not to do: ask the guest to post it again. If it was filtered once, a near-identical repost from the same account is more likely to be caught again, and you've now asked a happy customer to do you a favour twice and produced nothing.
Situation two: a profile-level pause
No new reviews from anybody for days, and often a notice. Sometimes it follows a sudden burst of reviews — including a burst of positive ones.
What to do: stop asking for reviews entirely while it's paused. Continue collecting feedback directly — a note on the receipt, an email — so the fortnight isn't wasted. Screenshot everything, including the notice and the date. Use the official support route rather than a third party promising restoration.
What not to do: compensate by pushing harder somewhere else. Driving a spike of reviews onto a paused or newly restored profile is the behaviour most likely to extend the problem.
Situation three: nothing was removed, the tap turned off
This is the one that gets misdiagnosed most often, and it's the one you can actually fix.
Your count is stable, nothing's gone, but you had eleven reviews in June and two in August. That isn't moderation. That's your asking having stopped, and it nearly always has a mundane cause: the manager who used to ask left, the QR card got moved off the tables during a refurbishment, the printer stopped putting the link on the receipt, or the team just quietly stopped.
What to do: count how many reviews you got in each of the last three months and then go and look at the physical thing you rely on. Is the card still on the table? Does the QR still go to the right place? Asking stops happening in week three by default, and a QR code that scans fine can still produce nothing.
Three-quarters of the "Google deleted my reviews" conversations we have turn out to be this.
Situation four: how you were asking
The uncomfortable one. Certain practices reliably cause removals and occasionally a pause: only asking guests who say they had a good time, offering anything in exchange, posting on a guest's behalf or from a shared device, staff reviewing their own workplace.
Sometimes this is a decision someone made. Often it isn't — it's a well-meaning member of staff who started offering a free coffee for a review because it seemed like initiative.
What to do: find out what's actually being said and offered on the floor, from the people doing it, and ask without an accusation in the question. Then stop the offending practice immediately, and don't try to remove the resulting reviews yourself. What actually crosses the line is narrower and stranger than most people assume.
What to tell the team
One sentence, and say it before someone else does: "Some reviews have come off the profile. It's being looked into, keep asking exactly as normal" — or "stop asking until I say", if you're paused.
The failure mode here is silence, because in the absence of an explanation somebody will invent one, and the invented version is usually that the manager is in trouble or that reviews don't matter any more. Both are expensive.
The genuine protection
Don't have one platform be your only record. If the only place your guest feedback exists is a profile you don't control, then a moderation decision made by a system with no phone number is an existential event rather than an annoyance.
Your own collected feedback — even a spreadsheet, even a folder of receipt notes — means a bad fortnight on Google is a marketing problem rather than the loss of everything you knew about your own service. That's the whole reason we keep a copy of the review text as it arrives, and it's worth doing whether or not you ever pay anyone for it.