Your Google reviews are disappearing. Here's what's actually happening, and what to do about it.

A friend of mine, who happens to be a contractor and client called me recently with a problem he hoped I could solve.

He'd opened his Google Business Profile that morning and noticed his review count had dropped from 47 to 39. Eight reviews, gone. No notification. No email. No explanation. The ones missing were some of the ones he was proudest of, reviews where customers had written detailed paragraphs about specific jobs his crew had finished last summer.

He thought he'd been hacked. He thought a competitor had reported him. He thought maybe he'd accidentally deleted something.

He hadn't. What happened to him is happening to small business owners across Northwestern Ontario right now, and most of them don't know why.

If you've checked your Google reviews lately and the number is lower than you remember, this post is for you.

What Google actually changed in 2025 and 2026

In early 2025, Google integrated its Gemini AI system into the moderation engine that filters Google Maps reviews. The stated goal was to crack down on fake reviews, review farms, and AI-generated content. The stated success has been enormous.

Google says it blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025 alone, up roughly 21% from the year before. Review deletion rates jumped 600% between January and July 2025 once Gemini was switched on.

The number that should worry every local business owner: about one in five review attempts in 2025, roughly 22% of all review activity, was classified as policy-violating. That's not just farms and bots. That's real reviews from real customers getting swept up because the patterns look suspicious to a machine.

The enforcement is no longer manual, no longer rare, and no longer focused only on obvious fraud. It runs continuously, in the background, looking at patterns across the entire platform. And in April 2026 Google quietly expanded the criteria, updated its Rating Manipulation policy, and turned on Gemini-powered moderation for edits to your profile information at the same time.

That last piece matters too. Profile suspensions for "deceptive content" have been spiking since late April, with a mass suspension wave reported on April 27 and a second wave May 3-4. Some local businesses are losing not just reviews but their entire profile overnight.

The patterns Gemini is flagging right now

Talking to other agency operators and reading through the Local Search Forum and the official Business Profile community over the last few weeks, the same five patterns keep coming up. Each of these is a way that perfectly legitimate reviews are getting removed in 2026.

• Reviews that name specific employees by first name. "John did a great job" or "Mike was awesome" used to be the ideal review. In 2026, Gemini treats first-name mentions of staff as a personal-information moderation trigger and quietly removes them. This is the single most common removal pattern in the threads I'm reading.
• Reviews that show up in spikes. If you finish a big job and send a thank-you note to twelve customers in the same week asking for a review, and seven of them write one in the next three days, the spike itself looks suspicious to the algorithm. It doesn't matter that the work was real and the customers were happy. The shape of the data is the problem.
• Reviews left on-premise. If a customer leaves a review while still inside your business, using your wifi, on a device that pings the same physical location your business profile is at, Gemini increasingly treats that as a policy violation. QR codes on a counter or in a waiting room are now a risk vector. On-premise review requests are explicitly prohibited under Google's current guidelines, even if they used to be standard practice.
• Reviews that are edited after the fact. When a customer posts a review and then edits it, the edited version gets extra scrutiny and is more likely to be removed than the original would have been.
• Reviews that share linguistic patterns with other reviews. This catches both AI-template reviews and reviews that follow a script you sent out. If your "thank you for your business" email includes suggested phrases customers can mention, and three customers use the same phrasing, the pattern itself can trip the filter.

The honest read is that Gemini is far better at detecting fake reviews than the old system was, and it's also far less forgiving of legitimate behaviour that resembles fake behaviour. The trade-off is happening in the open.

The three buckets every local business is in right now

After looking at this carefully across Kenora, Dryden, and the surrounding towns, every business I've checked falls into one of three buckets.

Bucket 1: Lost reviews, didn't notice

You haven't looked at your total review count in a while. You assume it's roughly what it was last time you checked. Some of your reviews have already been removed and you don't know which ones. This is the majority. Most of the businesses I audit are here.

Bucket 2: Noticed the drop, no idea why

Your review count is lower than you remember. You've checked. You've maybe asked a customer or two if their review is still showing and they say no. You don't know whether you did something wrong, whether you got reported, or whether this is just happening to everyone.

Bucket 3: Profile suspended

The whole thing is gone. You log in and see "suspended" or "your profile is under review for deceptive content." This is rarer but happening more often in 2026 than it ever has before. The appeal process takes anywhere from three business days to six weeks, with a modest success rate.

If you're in bucket 1 or 2, the right move is to get on top of this now, build a defensible review process, and learn what triggers the filter before you lose more. If you're in bucket 3, the situation is more urgent and you need to start the appeal process immediately while also operating as if your profile won't come back.

The 30-second review-health check

Run this in the next two minutes on your own business.

1. Open your Google Business Profile. Look at your total review count today.
2. Compare it to a screenshot, an email notification, or a previous report from any earlier date this year. Has the number gone down?
3. Scan your recent reviews. Are any of them missing that you remember reading before?
4. Look at the most recent ten reviews. Do any of them mention an employee by first name?
5. Look at your review timeline. Are there visible spikes (five or more reviews in a single week) that align with you sending out a request batch?
6. Check whether any reviews show as "filtered" or "pending" rather than published. Sometimes they're not deleted, just suppressed.
7. If you use QR codes in your shop or office, note where they live and how often customers scan them on-premise versus off.

If you found anything in steps 2 through 7, your review process needs an update. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the rules changed under you.

What to actually do about it

The work splits into two parts. Protecting what you have, and changing how you ask for new reviews going forward.

For protecting what you have: take a screenshot of your current review page once a month, full screen, including the total count. Save it dated. If reviews disappear later, you have evidence for an appeal. Use the "missing review" tool inside the Business Profile dashboard, attach your screenshots, name the reviewer, give the approximate date, and explain why you believe the removal was incorrect. Google's response rate is modest but the appeal works for some businesses.

For new reviews going forward: ask the customer at a moment when they're not on-premise. Send the review request 24 to 48 hours after the work is finished, by text or email, from a number or address that doesn't match your business location. Space the requests out so the inflow looks natural. Ask for specific reviews, the kind that mention the actual job or product, not generic "great service" reviews. Avoid asking the customer to name specific staff members in the review itself. Don't suggest phrasing. Let the customer write what they actually thought.

This is a slower review-collection process than what most local businesses are used to. The trade-off is that the reviews that come in are far more likely to stay.

This connects to the bigger picture I wrote about in the post on why your website, Google profile, and reviews work as one system. The review feed is one of the three signals the AI search engines and Google's own algorithm use to decide who shows up locally. If your review count keeps quietly bleeding because the collection process is built around 2022 best practices, the rest of the system loses force too.

If you need help

If you want a clear picture of how your review history looks under the new 2026 rules, including which of the five patterns above might be putting your reviews at risk, that's part of what the Kenora Visibility Audit covers. We check your current review feed, flag the at-risk reviews before Gemini does, and give you a defensible review-collection process to use going forward. Three business days. Four-page report. No sales call. Just the report.

For ongoing protection, Managed Presence is the standing arrangement. Monthly review snapshots get saved as evidence. Missing-review appeals get filed when reviews drop. The collection cadence stays inside policy. The reviews that come in are the ones that stay. From $13 a day. Built in Kenora.

The contractor got two of his eight reviews back. The others are gone and probably staying gone. The good news is that the next forty he collects will be built on a process that doesn't put him in the same hole again.