Understanding Review Filters

Local business review filters are automated processes used by search engines and websites to hide or remove certain types of review content on their platforms. While some entities also manually remove reviews that don’t meet their standards, programmatic filters can do this work without human intervention. The result for local businesses is that some of the incoming reviews they earn may not go live on their local business listings, or only be visible if a user opts into seeing demoted content. Additionally, existing reviews may also suddenly go missing if a platform updates its policies or processes. Historically, Google and Yelp’s review filters have had the most impact on local brands.

The primary reason local business review entities employ filters is to defend the reputation and revenue of their platforms. Review spam is a massive, global problem, and the publication of it degrades the trust users feel in the publisher. If a platform becomes known for displaying untrustworthy content, its user base could decrease, resulting in less eyes and clicks on its revenue-generating elements like paid ads. By identifying a set of signals associated with fraudulent reviews and flagging this content for removal or suppression, review platforms are protecting the quality of users’ experience as well as the earnings of their brands.

Meanwhile, review platforms exist within an ever-changing legal dynamic where the degree to which online entities are held accountable for the content they publish is a matter of ongoing debate in every nation. Platforms must practice awareness of laws and regulations to avoid litigation, making fraudulent review content a serious threat to company funds.

Google annually reports that it has removed millions of reviews and reviewer profiles, and while Yelp is less transparent, it has two totally different displays for all businesses – one for reviews it “recommends” and the other for those reviews it doesn’t “recommend” because they are not deemed trustworthy by the platform.

Review spam is a serious problem. In 2021, a major study estimated that Google suffers the most from this type of fraud, with an estimated 10.7% of their huge review corpus being suspicious, followed by Yelp at 7.1%. Given the scope of this issue and its real-world implications for the public who may be misled by illegitimate sentiment, local business owners can readily understand the need for review filters and even be glad that they exist. However, there are two key drawbacks to the filtering scenario:

1. A local business owner may disagree with a platform about what qualifies as untrustworthy content. For example, an owner may recognize a legitimate customer in the real world who has left them a review, but if that customer’s Yelp profile is new, their content may be demoted. This can cause unhappiness for the business because the reviews they are working hard to earn aren’t being given the maximum chance to be visible to the public and generate sales.

2. Google, in particular, has a habit of removing legitimate reviews along with spam whenever it takes any mass action regarding its review corpus. Reviews that were publicly visible on Monday and doing their part to support sales and rankings can disappear on Tuesday if Google has run an update or changed its policies, and retrieving that content can sometimes be impossible.

On the one hand, then, review filters are a necessary component of keeping the public safe from fraud. On the other hand, they can cause stress for business owners when authentic reviews are lost or hidden due to the standards (and sometimes accidents) of the major review platforms. If you are tasked with marketing a local business, your wisest course of action is to understand how review filters work so that you can take some steps to avoid triggering them whenever possible, and also so that you know what to expect due to the inevitable impact of these processes.

The filtering dynamics of platforms like Google and Yelp are proprietary and, to a large degree, secret. However, company representatives have made certain statements about their filters over the years, and SEOs and marketers have run a variety of experiments to gain a better understanding of how these processes work. Meanwhile, review sites typically publish formal guidelines for what is and isn’t allowed in review content. Taken altogether, these sources make up what we know about the workings of review filters.

In your effort to avoid review loss and suppression, begin by reading:

1. Google’s Prohibited and Restricted Content Guidelines which outline Google’s policy for the removal of reviews that contain harassment, hate speech, personal information, impersonation, misinformation, fake engagement, adult content, dangerous or illegal content, and a variety of other signals.

2. Yelp’s Content Guidelines, which similarly prohibit offensive content, intellectual property theft, breaches of privacy, impersonation, and extortion.

While all of these factors are still at play, it’s important to know that local SEO experts have documented what appears to be the implementation of a completely new AI-based Google review filter some time in 2022. That same year also witnessed significant reporting of review loss. As the above linked article by Mike Blumenthal asserts, 93% of business owners reporting review loss in that wave were those actively asking customers for Google reviews, many via the widget Google offers for generating a handy link to the review profile. Blumenthal also identified patterns of review loss with correlation to the age of the Google Business Profile and its chosen categories.

While findings like these don’t mean that local businesses shouldn’t ask for reviews, create new listings when they open brand new locations, or choose specific categories, what it does highlight is how an AI-driven filter may be more dependent on patterns rather than single signals of potential spam. This may result in more false positives, leading to increased removal of legitimate reviews simply because they are part of a pattern Google has deemed suspicious. Business owners should proceed slowly in soliciting reviews and have realistic expectations about sometimes losing reviews to the filter, spotlighting the necessity of earning reviews on multiple platforms so that reputation is present in many places around the web, including the company’s own website.

Yelp is, in some ways, a more problematic environment because of their longstanding policy of prohibiting all forms of review solicitation. Unlike on Google, you are not allowed to ask customers for reviews on Yelp, meaning that you have less control over the types of reviews you receive or how you go about acquiring them. This gives business owners less leeway in attempting to avoid filtering. As mentioned above, most businesses have Yelp reviews that have been suppressed so that they show as “not recommended” and some reviews may never appear at all. In addition to the factors cited in Yelp’s guidelines, theorized causes of review filtering include:

• The reviewer’s profile is too new
• The reviewer’s profile has too few reviews associated with it
• The reviewer’s text is “too positive”
• The reviewer’s IP address does not match the location of the business being reviewed
• The review is deemed too short to be of use to the public

Some practitioners recommend the following tactics for helping reviews to become “recommended” and unfiltered on Yelp, but proceed with caution here, as using any tactic aggressively might bring further scrutiny to your company’s own profile and none of these actions are guaranteed to work:

1. Locate the profile of a user whose review is on the “not recommended” page.

2. Yelp has a widget that enables you to “compliment” that user on their review.

3. You can also “follow” the customer and add them as a friend.

4. You can tag the review as “useful”, “funny”, or “cool”.

While you may encounter marketing articles suggesting you encourage your customers to improve and grow their individual Yelp profiles so that their content is less likely to be filtered, it’s not very practical advice, and for the most part, your main role as a local business owner will be to avoid violating Yelp’s guidelines, yourself, so that you aren’t engaging in any practice that could result in penalties.

If you’ve come to this article because you’ve recently experienced review loss, take the following steps:

1. Revisit the relevant platform’s guidelines to be certain that no action on your part may have caused your reviews to be filtered. For example, be sure your lost reviews didn’t stem from a forbidden tactic like offering incentives in exchange for reviews, or that the lost reviews weren’t written by your staff.

2. Visit the profiles and publications of your favorite local SEOs to see if any of them are mentioning a new widespread review loss event. If so, you’ll know you’re not alone and that someone has likely already reported the problem to Google.

3. Visit the Google Business Profile Help Community forum and search for terms like “missing reviews” and “lost reviews”. There are always some reports of missing reviews in the forum, but assess whether you are seeing a large volume of these threads and read some of them to determine whether your lost reviews are conforming to a date or pattern being described by others.

4. Create your own post on the forum, detailing the number of reviews lost, the date they were lost, and if possible, screenshots of the lost reviews (*note, it’s a good idea to periodically document your reviews for this reason, and also to understand that customers can sometimes screenshot their own reviews for you if they are still visible within their own Google profiles). If you are lucky, a forum volunteer expert may escalate your thread to Google if they feel you have legitimate cause for complaint in the loss of non-fraudulent reviews. However, be prepared for the reality that Google may never reinstate the reviews you’ve lost.

5. Continue to acquire new reviews to replace any that have been lost, and diversify the number of platforms on which you are receiving reviews so that your reputation is still dynamic even when sentiment goes missing on a single platform. Be sure you are publishing reviews on your own website, because they, at least, are never in danger of being filtered or removed.

There have been multiple instances in which Google has mass-removed reviews either intentionally or as a result of a bug. Sometimes, particularly in the case of bugs, some or all of the reviews have been reinstated, but the ongoing work of review filters is a simple fact of doing business locally online.

Your best safeguard against damages from review loss is simply to develop exceptional customer experiences that regularly generate fresh reviews. It helps to know that the majority of customers prioritize recent review content. In fact, 39% of review readers use toggles (also known as filters) to be shown newest reviews first on their favorite platforms. While one of the headaches of review loss lies in the fact that overall review count is believed to impact local search rankings, it’s some consolation to know that if the reviews you lost are older, your new, incoming reviews will have a substantial influence on most customers.

Review filters are a necessity for large platforms attempting to manage millions of reviews at scale. When they work properly, they protect the public and local business owners from fraud, but we are still in the beginning stages of technology and accountability when it comes to digital content. It will be the responsibility of the publishers and regulators to ensure that filters are as fair and accurate as possible, and to put meaningful processes in place for platform users to experience resolution when mistakes occur. This is a developing scenario in which we have to hope for ongoing improvements.

• Responding to Customer Reviews
• Do You Need Professional Reputation Management?
• Building a Local Business Website
• Content Planning for Local SEO
• Local SEO Certification - In this six-part Certification, you’ll receive nearly six hours of on-demand, instructor-led content, covering the fundamentals, local competitor research, location data management, reputation management, and measuring and tracking success.
• In Real Life: Local SEO Tactics - In this course, local business owners learn how to get the most out of their SEO strategy using skills and knowledge they already have.
• The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide - A comprehensive beginner's guide to SEO marketing for small businesses.
• The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Our local business review survey outlines key takeaways regarding the impact of reviews on consumer behavior and local business success. Learn more about the fundamentally important inclusion of online local business reviews in any local SEO strategy.