Between February 16th and February 24th, Google faced a global, widespread issue, and had removed hundreds of millions of reviews from live Google Business Profiles – seemingly by mistake.
As a consequence, the overall review counts shown by Google did not match the actual number of reviews shown.
This was true both from the Google UI, and from the GMB API.
The missing reviews don't really seem to share a clear pattern. The ratings could be 1 to 5 star, and the content can be empty, short, or very long. Some missing reviews were answered, and some weren't.
Google has been gradually bringing back most of the missing reviews since, but has not communicated on the issue.
As of February 24th, it appears all of our client reviews were brought back, and the review counts now appear to be representative of the actual number of reviews available.
It’s not the first time Google reviews are suddenly removed in bulk
This much had happened before.
Back in February 2025, Google had removed a bunch of reviews it suspected were generated by AI or were just fake. When that happened, the removals massively affected 5 star reviews, including some very legitimate 5 star reviews. The same thing happened again in October - November 2025.
When that happened, the overall review counts dropped within a few hours for all profiles affected. This was a definitive update, and as much as you could complain to Google and ask them to re-instate them, the deed was done.
What happened at the beginning of February 2026 was different.
But in February 2026, the reviews were removed from the list of reviews, but not from the counts.
Most business owners probably never even noticed, because their counts were unaffected.
It’s unclear whether the rating was ever impacted, but some have stated that it wasn’t, and that the missing reviews’ scores were still being counted for the average ratings.
Importantly, those reviews were still accessible through the contributors’ profiles. So you can see the reviews from the contributor’s review list, but not from the reviewed business’ review list.
A few agencies and other online reputation management solutions got together on this forum thread, sharing what they were noticing if you want more details.
Then suddenly, most of the reviews came back towards the end of that week and by February 6, most of the profiles we monitor were back to almost-normal, with just a few of those “ghost” reviews on some profiles.
Google admitted to an issue around the same time, but it’s not to the right issue.
On February 10, Victoria Kroll, Product Operations Manager at Google posted to this Google thread that they were aware of an issue causing some Google profiles to show lower than actual review counts, due to a “display issue”.
Everything seems to indicate this was an unrelated incident, that had nothing to do with the actual missing reviews.
On February 13, she posted an update saying the issue was mostly fixed.
In short, Google has admitted to lower aggregated counts than the actual number of reviews, but what people have been observing was reviews missing from the list of reviews with aggregated counts unaffected (i.e. higher than the actual number of reviews).
Most likely, this was yet another issue, maybe some sort of backlash after fixing the actual issue.
It happened again on February 16
On February 16, even more forum threads started lighting up with reports of a new issue, this time even more significant. Here are a few of the conversations that occurred:
- https://localsearchforum.com/threads/question-about-missing-review.63039/
- https://localsearchforum.com/threads/a-new-deleted-hidden-reviews-record.63068/
- https://support.google.com/business/thread/410592353
- https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMyBusiness/comments/1r6ji9e/the_nightmare_continues_5day_deletion_filter_and/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMyBusiness/comments/1r7z3hg/google_business_profile_api_buggy_again_anyone/
This last thread is about the Google Business Profile API specifically, with multiple API users reporting different counts between the aggregated (overall) count that Google shows to users, and the actual number of reviews.
Except in this case, the number of reviews available was actually lower than the count (which is the opposite of what Victoria Kroll had reported).
We’ll keep posting updates here as the situation evolves.
Reports of "five-day shadow bans"
Simultaneously, and adding to the confusion, there have been reports of "shadow-bans" on Google reviews.
The reported behaviour is that on some Google Business Proifles, new reviews get posted fine, and then removed five days later.
We haven't observed this with any of our customers, which seems to indicate this might be linked to unrecommended / borderline practices – most likely review gating.
Review gating is the process of selecting what customers a company asks for reviews, based on their satisfaction (or estimated satisfaction).
I wrote about it briefly in this Linkedin post.
In general, unless you have clearly observed new reviews being removed exactly 5 days after being posted, I wouldn't think this has anything to do with what might be happening on your Google Business Profile.
What to do if you're affected
At the time of writing this on February 24th, the issue should be entirely resolved.
If reviews are still missing on your GBP profiles, I would recommend you start with a complete audit of exactly how many reviews are missing, and ideally what reviews are missing.
Try to see if there's a clear pattern in those reviews.
If you think all your reviews were brought back, of if you just don't know for sure, I can't recommend enough keeping a copy of your google reviews, with accurate dates.
You'll have evidence to share with Google support if ever required, and most importantly you'll know what's happening.
Software like reviewflowz does this automatically of course, but you can also just run periodic exports, or copy & paste the reviews you get on a weekly or monthly basis. Even a daily screenshot stored to a google doc would get the job done. You can get that converted into a list with AI these days, although it will take a few iteratinos.
Google will randomly remove some of your customers' words about your business like they own that content.
This will keep happening.
Store your own copy of your customers' reviews.
