Why do reviews we know were left disappear from our Google profile?

Three different disappearances

Before diagnosing, establish which kind of loss you are looking at. Ask the reviewer to open their own Google account and check their contributions list.

If the review still appears in their contributions but not on your profile, it was filtered or removed at the listing level. If it is gone from their contributions too, the account was actioned or the review was deleted. If the whole account is gone, so is everything it ever wrote, including reviews of other businesses.

The collection patterns that get reviews filtered

Google does not publish its filtering rules, so what follows is pattern observation, not doctrine. It is consistent enough to plan around.

• Bursts. Fifteen reviews in one afternoon after months of silence looks like a campaign, because it is one.
• Shared network or device. Reviews left on the company tablet, in the truck, on the shop wifi, share signals. Handing a customer your device is the single most common way to get a genuine review deleted.
• Brand new accounts with one contribution. A first-ever review from an account created minutes earlier carries little weight and is easy to filter.
• Incentives. Offering anything of value for a review violates Google's policy and, separately, raises consumer protection questions that vary by jurisdiction. Confirm with counsel before running any incentive program.
• Text that reads like a template. Several reviews with the same phrasing because a rep coached the wording.

What durable collection looks like

Ask every eligible customer, from the customer's own phone, shortly after the work is complete, with a direct link, and let the volume be whatever it is. Steady beats spiky. A profile that gains a few reviews every week for two years is far harder to disrupt than one that gained a hundred in a month.

Timing beats persuasion. The window right after a technician leaves a satisfied customer is worth more than any follow-up sequence. That is an operational problem more than a marketing one, which is why review requests belong in the job workflow. When request timing is driven by job completion events from the field service system, the ask lands when sentiment is highest. That is a straightforward piece of field service integration.

When a review was removed by a report

Competitors and disgruntled parties do report reviews. So do reputation vendors. There is a reinstatement request path, and it works occasionally, but success is not something anyone can promise.

The defensible posture is volume and recency rather than protecting individual reviews. If losing three reviews meaningfully changes your profile, the underlying problem is that you have too few. Monitoring the count and the average as a tracked series, rather than noticing by accident, is worth building into your reporting so a drop is visible the week it happens instead of the quarter it happens.