Why customers can't leave a review on your Google Business Profile

The email Google now sends when it pauses your reviews

For a few days at a stretch, some businesses can't receive a Google review at all. Google's software finds a run of fake reviews on the listing and takes them down. New reviews are paused while it sorts the risk out. Most owners did nothing to cause it, and there is no button that undoes it. What changed in September 2026 is that the owner gets told.

The email is short. It says Google spotted a spike in spam reviews on your Google Business Profile, the free listing that puts you on Maps, and that it removed them so they don't affect your rating. It also says new ratings and reviews are "temporarily paused", and that Google lifts the pause once the risk is handled, "typically within a few days". Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable published the text on 22 September 2026.

What a pause costs you is quiet. Your front desk keeps handing out review cards, the requests keep going to the customers who liked you, and none of it lands anywhere. The listing gives the customer no explanation either. Then the pause lifts, and the week that went missing never gets named.

This lands on ordinary businesses, which are the listings I open most weeks. A dental practice that asked six patients for a review last week can collect nothing at all and never find out why. Same for a medspa running a post-treatment text, or an HVAC company with a review card in every truck.

Plenty of other things stop a review from showing up. A listing can be unverified, the link on the card can be dead, or the customer never signed in. All of them leave the count sitting still, same as a pause does.

The fix is a number on paper, and it takes about two minutes a week. Without it, a frozen listing and a slow week feel exactly the same from behind the front desk.

Why the number on your listing moves at all

The star rating and review count read like a record of what your customers did. Google edits that record as well, in bulk, every day of the year. It runs software across listings that hunts for fake reviews, and that software doesn't wait for somebody to complain.

The size of that work is public. In 2025 Google blocked or removed more than 292 million reviews that broke its rules, while publishing more than 1 billion it kept. It took down 13 million fake business profiles in the same year. Both figures come from New ways we're protecting businesses on Maps, Google's own Maps enforcement post, published 16 April 2026.

Through 2025 that cleanup ran on listings in every town, and nothing on the profile itself ever said when it had been there. That is why a flat count on a listing I was auditing could have been a Google sweep or a slow month. Now, when the cleanup is big enough to pause your listing, the email says so on the day it lands.

Local search people aren't all convinced the software is ready. Amy Toman, quoted in the same Search Engine Roundtable piece, raised the worry that a busy business with an ordinary run of new reviews could trip it and get paused for nothing. From the outside a good month and a spike look much the same.

The two-minute check to run every Monday

Here is the whole routine, short enough to do standing up.

1. Open your Google listing on your phone and read the two numbers under the business name: the star rating and the number of reviews.
2. Write both down with today's date. A sticky note works, though a note on your phone works better, because you will still have it in March.
3. Do it again every Monday morning, before the day gets away from you.
4. If the count sits still for a week while your requests keep going out, treat a pause as a live possibility and go read your email.

If you run more than one location, keep a line for each one. The pause is applied to a single profile, so one address can be frozen while another keeps taking reviews normally. That's easy to miss when you only ever check the busiest site.

Four Mondays of this and you have a baseline. When I audit a dental or HVAC listing I ask the owner what the count was a month ago, and I get a guess.

A written record also gives you something to argue with. In early July 2026, owners started posting that reviews had vanished off their listings. PinMeTo collected those reports on 6 July. One profile in that writeup went from roughly 4,651 reviews to 63 inside a day, which is one vendor's account of one business, so treat it as an isolated warning. Google said it was looking into it. Anything it had pulled by mistake would go back.

An owner who can say what the count was last Tuesday has something to hand Google.

What to do while the pause is on

Google's email says no action is required from you, and for the pause itself that's true. It lifts on its own. A few things are still worth doing in the meantime, and none of them take long.

Keep asking. A customer who leaves happy on Thursday won't come back in ten days to try again by herself. Write the name and the date somewhere every time you ask, in whatever system you already use, so the list exists when the listing reopens. After the pause ends, go back to those people once.

Avoid a sudden run of 20 new reviews the week the pause lifts. A burst like that is close to the pattern the software is built to catch, so space the list out over the following weeks.

If real reviews vanished along with the fake ones, ask Google to look again. The email says you can do that if you think reviews were taken by mistake. Give the reviewer's first name and roughly when they left it.

Replying to the reviews still on the page costs about ten minutes, and it doesn't depend on the pause at all, so it's the one job on this list that works exactly as it always did.

Tell whoever hands out the review cards, too. The front desk is where a pause shows up first, because staff notice that nobody is leaving anything and they assume the link is broken. Ten seconds of explanation saves somebody a morning spent rebuilding a QR code that worked fine all along.

The same number an assistant reads

One more reason the count deserves a note on your phone. ChatGPT pulls up the same listing your customer sees. So does Google's AI Overview, the answer Google writes at the top of the results page. Both take the rating and review count straight off it, and during a pause the number they take is the stuck one.

Nobody has a number for how much it matters, and the plain point stands without one: the number an assistant reads about your business is a number Google edits.

So write your two numbers down this morning. It takes less time than reading this paragraph, and in three months it will be the only record you have of what your listing said before Google changed it.