Missing Google Reviews, Solved?

Recently, since at least 2/7/25, business have reported that Google My Business reviews have been disappearing from their business profiles and total review counts have been decreasing or showing erratic numbers.

Some business owners have stated drops as much as 25% of their total reviews count.

Speculation as to the cause has ranged from a widely impactful action against suspicious or older reviews, some form of general filtering hiding reviews for unstated reasons.

Our review of client accounts has mostly shown that while the total review counts for a business are in fact reporting lower totals, in most cases the actual reviews are still accessible via either the client’s Google My Business account, or via Google Maps for that business. If you do not closely manage your online reviews, we recommend checking the summary counts, auditing the reviews currently showing and exporting available review data from Google My Business.

Status Update

Fortunately, on 2/9/25 Google’s Victoria Kroll publically responded regarding the issue, stating:

“We’re aware of an issue affecting some Google Business Profiles, causing some profiles to show lower-than-actual review counts due to a display issue. The reviews themselves have not actually been removed. We’re working hard to resolve this and restore accurate review counts as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience and will share updates on this thread as they become available.”

On 2/13/25 Victoria followed up stating “Most affected profiles now display accurate ratings and reviews. However, while we have made significant progress, some profiles may still experience a temporary lower count. These profiles should recover to pre-issue levels over the next few days. No reviews were unpublished due to this issue. If your review count does not return to the level it was before this issue in the next few days, please contact support.” Although at that time review count issues still seemed pervasive, by 2/18/25 the situation does seem improved. We still suggest you take the opportunity to access your Google My Business account and check on your review counts and perhaps your account setup and strategy in general.

Her pinned Google Community post can be subscribed to with your Google account and you have the option click the “I have the same question” button if it applies to you or your business. We allow recommend keeping an eye on related Google Community posts for updates just in case. Hope there will be a reasonable resolution to the matter.

How to Find Your Current Google My Business Reviews

Google Maps

If you wish to check Google Maps, simply visit maps.google.com and search for the name and/or address of the business in question, locate the correct business from the available selection and access their list of reviews.

Google My Business Account

Visit Google.com while logged in with the Google account used to manage your Google My Business profile.

You should be able to see various icons for managing information pertaining to your Google My Business account: Edit Profile, Read Reviews, Photos, Performance, Advertise, Edits Products, Edit Services, etc. Select Read Reviews and a modal window of your review will appear. Count the number of reviews and scan these for possible missing reviews if possible.

How to Count Reviews in Google My Business Accounts With Large Numbers of Total Reviews

Export Data Using Google Takeout

While it is possible to use the above methods to hand count review in the dozens or lower hundreds perhaps, some accounts may have earned many hundreds even thousands of reviews.

In such cases, we can recommend using Google Takeout, a tool that allows users to export data stored in your Google account.

You will need to be logged in with the Google account associated with the Google My Business listing you wish to export. Agencies with shared administration of many client Google My Business accounts should use the Google account used for such administration. NOTE: If you have shared administration of multiple Google My Business accounts this export will export data on all associated shared accounts in a single export.

Once logged in Takeout’s default is for an export/exfiltration of all Google account data. You only need on part of this data, so first uncheck all data types as shown below.

Then find the section down the list for Google Business Profile. The “Multiple Formats” button will provide access to a list of data types that belong to the Google Business Profile dataset. Locate “Reviews & Replies.” Currently JSON is the only option available, but if you are reading this in the futur check if a more friendly export datatype is available.

Progress to the Next Step using the button at the bottom of the page. Select a Destination from the options available:

• Send download via a link
• Add to Drive
• Add to Dropbox
• Add to OneDrive
• Add to Box

As mentioned, currently, this data can only be exported only as ZIP archive (or TGZ archive) containing series of JSON files plus a single HTML (“archive_browser”) file summarizing the export. The export may take up to 24 hours to complete. You can request a notification be sent to your email address when the export becomes available. In our experience, a limited export such as this will be available in minutes.

The exported file bundle will contain directories for each exported Google My Business property associated with your Google account. These directories, and most of the data, is not in easy human-digestible format, however, the reviews and responses should be in a file aptly named reviews.json.

Count the Reviews in Your Export

The JSON file is not easily readable, but fortunately we do not need to read it, exactly.

As you can see in the above example of export JSON each data element has a “key” or identifier such as “reviewer,” “comment,” “reviewReply,” etc. If you have very large number of reviews (say, in the hundreds or thousands), counting individual reviews is time consuming and prone to error. Instead, simply open your reviews.json file in a code editor like MS Code or a Word Processor like MS Word (or their equivalents) and have it find all instances of the key/identifier. Typically, “find” or “find and replace” features will return the number of instances of a word in the document. Since these keys/identifiers appear only once per review, their total equals the total number of reviews in the document. Compare this total with that shown publically for your Google My Business profile to find any mismatch.

Let Us Know

If your business has experience with missing Google My Business reviews or the above was helpful for you, please let us know below. Best of luck, hopefully it will be sorted soon. Keep calm and carry on.