Getting, answering, reporting and understanding Google reviews. Every article answers one question, checked against Google’s own help pages, with the date.
You cannot buy fake Google reviews safely, and this page does not tell you where. Google treats reviews paid for directly or in kind as fake engagement, and a profile caught with them can be blocked from receiving new reviews and have its existing ones unpublished.
You cannot delete a review that someone else posted. The two moves you have are “Report”, which asks Google to check the review against its content policy and to remove it only if a rule is broken, and “Reply”, which is what every later reader sees under the review.
A review request that works is four lines: name the person, thank them, say that a review on Google helps other people choose, and give the link. What it must never contain is a number of stars, a condition, a reward or the name of a member of staff, because Google’s policy forbids all four.
Answer it in the language it was written in, and treat it as an ordinary review otherwise: the same reply box, the same rules. Google translates reviews into the language of the reader’s own device, so you and your next customer may be looking at two different versions of the same words.
Reply to it in public, and report it in the Reviews Management Tool as content that is not about your business. Google removes a review only when it breaks a published rule, and a review meant for another company is what its off-topic rule describes; the reply is what your next customer reads while you wait.
The Reviews Management Tool is Google’s own page for owners: you sign in with the account that manages the profile, report a review for removal, and check what happened to reports you filed before. It is also where the single appeal lives, for a review Google looked at and left in place.
The fastest honest way is to ask people while they are still in front of you, with the review link from your own profile, and then to keep asking. Google says a new review can take a few days to pass its policy check, and that reviews paid for, directly or in kind, are removed.
Usually it is the account you are signed in as: Google says you must sign in to the Google Account associated with the profile, and in the Maps app your profile sits behind the Business tab at the bottom right. The other causes are an out of date Maps app, or reviews switched off for the whole profile.
No. A review carries the reviewer’s public Google Maps profile, which Google describes as a name, a photo and a bio plus that person’s other public contributions, and an email address is not part of it.
Google publishes your score as the average of all ratings published on your profile, so the answer is arithmetic: multiply your current score by the number of published ratings, then work out how many new fives lift that average to your target. Google says it may take up to 2 weeks for a new review to change the score.