You can delete a Google review you wrote. You cannot delete one written about your business; you report it, and Google decides.

If it is your review: open Google Maps, go to Your contributions, find the review, and delete it. If it is a review of your business: open Google’s Reviews Management Tool, pick the review, choose the policy it breaks, and submit. Google says evaluation typically takes several days, you get one appeal if it is refused, and the review stays visible throughout. There is no fee and no paid plan involved at any stage.

What the ten-second version leaves out is why most reports fail. Google removes reviews for policy violations, not for being wrong, unfair or damaging, and it says so in its own instructions: do not report a review because you disagree with it. Around two thirds of the reviews businesses report are genuine customers with genuine complaints, and no amount of reporting moves them. The reviews that do come down are the ones that break a specific rule in Google’s contributed-content policy, reported under that rule, with evidence Google can check. This guide covers which reviews those are, how to report them so the report succeeds, the legal route for the small number that need it, and what to do with the majority that will never be removed.

What This Guide Covers

• Deleting A Google Review You Wrote
• Which Reviews Of Your Business Google Will Remove
• Route 1: The Reviews Management Tool
• Route 2: Reporting From Maps, Search Or Your Business Profile
• The Evidence That Gets A Google Review Removed
• How Long It Takes, And What The Statuses Mean
• The One-Time Appeal
• Route 3: The Legal Removal Request
• Review Attacks And Fake Review Campaigns
• What To Do With Reviews You Cannot Remove
• What Not To Do
• Frequently Asked Questions
• The Short Version

Deleting A Google Review You Wrote

This is the only case where “delete” is the right word. Reviews belong to the Google account that posted them, and that account can edit or remove them at any time.

1. On a computer: open Google Maps, click the menu, choose Your contributions, then Reviews. Find the review, click the three dots next to it, and choose Delete review (or Edit review to change the text or star rating).
2. On the Maps app: tap your profile picture or the You tab, then Reviews, find the review, tap the three dots, and choose Delete review.
3. From Search: search for the business, open its reviews, find yours, and use the three-dot menu on it.

Deletion is immediate and permanent. The business cannot do this for you, and it cannot see who you are beyond your public profile name. If a business has resolved your complaint, editing the review to say so is usually more useful to other readers than deleting it, and it is what most businesses would rather you did.

Which Reviews Of Your Business Google Will Remove

Google’s Maps contributed-content policy lists the categories it removes. Everything else stays, and Google is explicit that it does not mediate disputes between businesses and customers. Sort the review before you report it.

Report type	Typical time to a decision	Likelihood of removal when the report is sound
Profanity, personal information, links, obvious spam	1 to 5 days	High
Off-topic or wrong business	5 to 10 days	High
Fake engagement with evidence	1 to 2 weeks	Good
Conflict of interest (competitor, employee)	1 to 2 weeks	Good with documentary evidence, poor without
Allegations and misrepresentation	2 to 3 weeks	Mixed
Appeal after refusal	2 to 4 weeks from the original report	Roughly a third of refusals are overturned with new evidence
Legal removal request	2 to 4 weeks, sometimes longer	Low without a court order, very high with one

Defamation is deliberately not in the table. Google’s content policy does not have a defamation category, and in the United States it will not judge whether a statement is false; that is what the legal removal route and a court order are for, covered below.

Route 1: The Reviews Management Tool

This is the route to use for any review of a business you manage. It reports from your verified profile, which Google weights more heavily than an anonymous flag from Maps, and it is the only place you can see the status of a report and file an appeal.

1. Do the research first. Search your booking system, point of sale, CRM, email and call logs for the reviewer’s name and anything they mention: a date, a product, a staff member, an order. Screenshot the results, including empty results. Look at the reviewer’s public Google profile: how many reviews they have, when the account started reviewing, whether their other reviews are all one-star or all in another city. This is your evidence, and Google decides on what you submit.
2. Open the Reviews Management Tool at support.google.com/business/workflow/9945796, signed in to the Google account that manages the Business Profile. Confirm your email when prompted and select the business.
3. Choose “Report a new review for removal”, then select the review from the list.
4. Pick the policy reason. Choose the single reason that is easiest for Google to verify from the review itself: personal information, advertising, off-topic and profanity can be judged from the text; fake engagement and conflict of interest need your evidence. If a review breaks two rules, report the one that can be seen without investigation.
5. Submit. The tool confirms the report and shows it with the status “Decision pending”.
6. Reply to the review publicly from your Business Profile while you wait. Reporting does not hide the review, the reply is what prospective customers see in the meantime, and if the review is removed the reply goes with it.

The tool has limits worth knowing. It is not available to accounts that manage a very large number of locations, and it only lets you report reviews on profiles the signed-in account manages. Reports are one review at a time; there is no bulk report.

Route 2: Reporting From Maps, Search Or Your Business Profile

The same report can be filed from three other places, and they all land in the same review queue.

From your Business Profile in Search. Search for your business while signed in as the profile manager, choose Read reviews, click the three-dot menu on the review, and choose Report review. Pick the reason and send. This is functionally the same as the tool but without the status tracking, so if you use it, note the date.

From Google Maps as any user. Open the business, find the review, click the three dots and choose Report review or Flag as inappropriate. The reasons offered are off-topic, spam, conflict of interest, profanity, bullying or harassment, discrimination or hate speech, personal information, and not helpful. Anyone can do this, and it is useful for a second report from a colleague or customer, but an anonymous flag carries less weight than a report from the verified owner.

From the Maps app. Same menu, same reasons, on the review inside the business listing.

Whichever route you use, use it once. Reporting the same review repeatedly, or having staff mass-report it from personal accounts, is the behaviour Google’s fake-engagement detection is built to catch, and it marks your profile as a source of abusive reports rather than helping the review along.

The Evidence That Gets A Google Review Removed

Google’s report form gives you little room for explanation, so the evidence has to be in the choice of reason and, on appeal, in the form you fill in. What works, category by category:

No such customer. Exports or screenshots of searches across your systems for the name and any details given, showing nothing, with the date range visible. If the review describes a service you do not offer, a location you do not have, or a day you were closed, say so; a review about a Sunday visit to a business closed on Sundays is a clean off-topic or fake report.

Competitor, employee or relative. A LinkedIn profile, a staff record, a company website, a shared surname and address, or a previous email showing the relationship. Google’s policy bars current and former employees, contractors, and anyone with a competing or personal affiliation from reviewing, so the relationship is the violation on its own.

Reviewer profile signals. An account with one review, created the week the review was posted; an account whose other reviews are all one-star businesses in the same industry in different cities; a reviewer name that matches a competitor’s staff page. Screenshot the profile page with the date.

Coordinated attack. A table: review date and time, reviewer name, account age, review count, and the shared phrase or template. Ten reviews in 48 hours from accounts with no other activity is a pattern Google’s systems recognise, and it is the category with the highest removal rate when the pattern is real. Report each review individually under fake engagement and reference the pattern in the appeal form if any are refused.

Personal information, profanity, links. The review text is the evidence. These are the quickest removals because no investigation is needed.

Unsubstantiated allegations. Quote the sentence that accuses you of a crime or unethical conduct, and if you have a document that shows it is false (a licence, an inspection report, a refund record), have it ready for the appeal. Google’s policy prohibits unsubstantiated allegations of criminal wrongdoing, which is the closest it comes to a defamation rule.

How Long It Takes, And What The Statuses Mean

Google’s own line is that reported reviews may take up to 72 hours to be evaluated and that evaluation typically takes several days. In practice the timing depends on the category.

Report type	Typical time to a decision	Likelihood of removal when the report is sound
Profanity, personal information, links, obvious spam	1 to 5 days	High
Off-topic or wrong business	5 to 10 days	High
Fake engagement with evidence	1 to 2 weeks	Good
Conflict of interest (competitor, employee)	1 to 2 weeks	Good with documentary evidence, poor without
Allegations and misrepresentation	2 to 3 weeks	Mixed
Appeal after refusal	2 to 4 weeks from the original report	Roughly a third of refusals are overturned with new evidence
Legal removal request	2 to 4 weeks, sometimes longer	Low without a court order, very high with one

Reports sitting in “Decision pending” for weeks are common and do not mean the report is lost. The three statuses you will see in the tool are Decision pending, Report reviewed with no policy violation found, and Escalated, which means Google has passed it to a specialist team and will email you. A removed review simply disappears from the list and from your profile.

The One-Time Appeal

If the tool returns “Report reviewed, no policy violation”, you get one appeal per review. In the Reviews Management Tool choose Appeal eligible reviews, select the review, and complete the form. This is the first point at which you can write anything of length, so this is where the evidence goes.

Write it as a case file. Quote the exact words from the review that break the policy, name the policy category, and describe the attached or linked evidence in one or two sentences each. “Reviewer states they visited on 14 June. We were closed for refurbishment from 10 to 20 June; photos of the closure notice and our Business Profile’s temporary closure status for those dates are attached. This is not a genuine experience at this location.” Do not write about how unfair the review is, how it has hurt the business, or how good your service normally is; none of that is a policy, and it signals to the reviewer that you are disputing an opinion.

Google emails the appeal decision. There is no second appeal in the tool. After that, the remaining routes are the legal removal request for content that is unlawful, and Business Profile support for cases where the tool itself has malfunctioned, which is not a route for re-arguing the decision.

Route 3: The Legal Removal Request

Separately from policy reports, Google accepts legal removal requests through its legal help form, where you select Google Maps and the type of legal issue. This is the route for a review that is unlawful rather than merely against policy: one that a court has found defamatory, that infringes copyright, or that publishes information a law protects.

In the United States, Google will generally not remove a review as defamatory on your say-so, or on your lawyer’s. Section 230 shields it from liability for what reviewers write, so it has no incentive to adjudicate, and its practice is to act on a court order that identifies the specific statements as defamatory. Getting one means suing the reviewer, which usually means first subpoenaing Google for the reviewer’s identity, then proving a false statement of fact (not opinion), fault, and damage. It is slow and expensive and rarely justified for one review, and a threatening letter to the reviewer that you do not intend to act on is exactly the intimidation the FTC’s 2024 review rule prohibits.

Outside the US the bar is lower in places. In the European Union the Digital Services Act requires Google to act on notices of illegal content, including defamatory content under national law, within a reasonable time and to explain its decision. In the United Kingdom and Australia a properly drafted defamation notice identifying provably false statements of fact can produce removal without a court order, though it is far from guaranteed. In every jurisdiction the request needs the specific false statement, the reason it is false, and the evidence.

Review Attacks And Fake Review Campaigns

A review bomb, a competitor buying one-stars, a former employee with a grudge and several accounts, or a viral incident that brings in hundreds of reviews from people who were never customers is a different problem from a single bad review, and Google handles it differently. Its systems detect volume anomalies and will sometimes remove a wave automatically, or temporarily restrict new reviews on a profile while it investigates. That protection is not guaranteed, and it can take days to trigger.

What you can do is document the pattern while it is happening: export the reviews with timestamps, capture the reviewer profiles, note shared phrasing, and report every review individually under fake engagement. Then contact Business Profile support through the Help menu in your profile, describe the campaign with the table attached, and ask for the profile to be reviewed for coordinated abuse. If the attack is tied to something you can identify, such as a competitor or a news event, say so.

Two things that make it worse: replying angrily to each review, which feeds the campaign, and responding with your own burst of five-star reviews from friends and staff, which is the one thing that reliably gets a profile penalised. Google’s enforcement since 2024 includes warning notices on profiles where it has removed suspicious reviews and restrictions on receiving new reviews, and it applies those to the business, not the attacker.

What To Do With Reviews You Cannot Remove

Most negative reviews are genuine customers, and for those the only tools are the reply, the resolution, and the volume of everything else.

Reply within a day or two. Address the reviewer by name, acknowledge the specific issue, say what you have done or will do, and offer a direct route to resolve it. Write it for the next hundred readers, not the reviewer. Do not dispute facts in public, do not mention that you reported the review, and never reveal anything about the customer that they did not put in the review themselves; naming their order or their medical appointment in a reply is a privacy breach that can get your reply removed and your profile flagged.

Resolve it, then ask. A customer whose problem has been fixed will often edit their review if asked politely, and an edited review that says “the manager called and sorted it” does more for you than a deleted one. Asking is allowed. Offering money, discounts or anything else in exchange for changing or removing the review is not, under both Google’s policy and the FTC rule.

Outweigh it. Your rating is an average, and Google weights recency. Asking every customer for a review, with a direct link to your review form, at the moment the job is done, is the single most effective thing a business can do about its Google rating, and it is entirely within the rules as long as you ask everyone rather than only the happy ones. Selectively asking, known as review gating, is a policy violation.

What Not To Do

The shortcut	Why it fails
Reporting every negative review	None are removed, and a pattern of baseless reports marks your profile as abusing the tool
Mass-reporting from staff accounts	Looks like coordinated manipulation, which is what fake-engagement detection targets
Buying positive reviews to bury the negative one	The fastest way to a warning banner, review restrictions, or profile suspension, plus liability under the FTC rule
Paying a “guaranteed removal” service	Nobody can guarantee removal. The credible firms work the same reports, appeals and legal routes described here, just with more experience; anyone promising a guarantee is either lying or buying reviews
Threatening the reviewer	Prohibited intimidation under the FTC rule, and it usually produces a second review about the threat
Deleting and recreating your Business Profile	Reviews are attached to the place, not the profile. They come back, and you lose your history

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Delete A Google Review I Wrote?

Open Google Maps, go to Your contributions, then Reviews, click the three dots on the review, and choose Delete review. It is immediate and permanent. You can also choose Edit review to change the text or rating instead.

How Do I Delete A Google Review Of My Business?

You cannot delete it. Report it through Google’s Reviews Management Tool under the policy it breaks, with evidence, and Google decides. Reviews that are negative but genuine are not removed.

How Long Does Google Take To Remove A Review?

Google says up to 72 hours to evaluate and typically several days overall. Clear violations often go in under a week; fake engagement and conflict of interest reports commonly take one to two weeks; appeals add two to four weeks.

Can I Get A Google Review Removed For Being Fake?

Yes, if you can show it: no matching customer in your records, a reviewer profile with no history, a competitor or employee relationship, or a pattern of near-identical reviews. Report under fake engagement or conflict of interest and put the evidence in the appeal form if the first report is refused.

Can Google Remove A Defamatory Review?

In the US, generally only with a court order, submitted through the legal removal form. Google’s content policy does prohibit unsubstantiated allegations of criminal or unethical conduct, which covers some of the same ground and can be reported normally. In the EU, UK and Australia a legal notice can sometimes work without an order.

What Is The Google Reviews Management Tool?

A Google support page at support.google.com/business/workflow/9945796 where a profile manager can report reviews, see the status of each report, and file a one-time appeal. It is free and is the best route for business owners.

Does Reporting A Review Hide It?

No. It stays visible until Google removes it. Reply to it publicly in the meantime.

Can I Appeal If Google Refuses To Remove A Review?

Once per review, through Appeal eligible reviews in the Reviews Management Tool. The appeal form is where to put your evidence. Around a third of refusals are overturned when new evidence is provided.

Can I Pay Someone To Remove Google Reviews?

You can hire a reputation firm to run the reports, appeals and legal routes properly, which is worth it for campaigns and complex cases. No one can guarantee removal, and any service that does is either misleading you or breaking Google’s rules in a way that will rebound on your profile.

Will Deleting My Business Profile Delete The Reviews?

No. Reviews are attached to the place on Google Maps, not to your management account. Removing your profile removes your ability to manage and reply; the reviews remain.

The Short Version

Your own review: Maps, Your contributions, Reviews, three dots, Delete. A review of your business: sort it first. If it names a person, includes links or profanity, is about somewhere else, or comes from someone who was never a customer or is a competitor or employee, report it through the Reviews Management Tool under that policy, gather the evidence before you start, reply publicly while you wait, and use the one appeal with a case-file explanation if it is refused. A provably false accusation with real damage is a legal matter, and in the US that means a court order.

A real customer with a real complaint is not removable by any route. Reply, resolve, ask for an update, and ask every customer for a review so the average moves. If it is a campaign rather than a review, document the pattern as it happens, report each one, contact Business Profile support, and get help.