Google Confirms It’s Investigating Missing Reviews: What This Means for Your Practice

Have you checked your Google Business Profile this week and noticed your review count looks off? You’re not imagining it.

Practices across the country, chiropractors included, are reporting reviews vanishing overnight, with some unable to collect new reviews at all right now.

The good news: Google has confirmed it’s aware of the problem, and everything points to a technical issue on their end, not something your practice did wrong.

What’s Actually Happening

Since late June, business owners and local SEO professionals have been reporting the same issue in Google’s Business Profile forums: reviews disappearing without warning, and profiles suddenly unable to accept new ones. In at least one documented case, a business’s star rating dropped all the way to zero.

Google has confirmed that it’s actively investigating. A spokesperson explained that when Google’s systems flag suspicious review activity, they sometimes respond by removing reviews and pausing a profile’s ability to collect new ones, and that any reviews removed in error will be restored.

According to Amy Toman, a Google Product Expert who has been tracking the issue closely, the trigger seems tied to spam detection: after a business reports a fake or spam review, the entire profile can get flagged, which hides all of its reviews rather than just the one that was reported.

Pro Tip: If you’ve recently reported a fake or spam review on your Google Business Profile, keep a close eye on your total review count over the next week or two. This appears to be one of the more common triggers behind the current wave of complaints.

Why This Matters for Your Practice

Reviews are one of the clearest trust signals a prospective patient sees before they ever call your office. They also feed directly into how Google decides which practices show up first in local search results. A dip in visible review count, even temporarily, can shake a patient’s confidence at exactly the moment they’re deciding who to book with.

This isn’t a reflection of your care or your practice’s reputation. It’s a platform-side glitch playing out across thousands of businesses in every industry, healthcare included. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating if it happens to land on your listing this week.

What To Do If This Is Happening to You

There’s no confirmed timeline for a fix yet, so the most useful move right now is to stay calm and avoid anything that could make your profile look more suspicious to Google’s spam filters. A few steps worth taking:

• Take a screenshot of your current review count and star rating so you have a record if anything needs to be disputed later.
• Hold off on asking a large batch of patients to leave reviews all at once. A sudden spike can look like exactly the kind of pattern Google’s algorithm is currently flagging.
• Check the Google Business Profile forum to confirm whether your issue matches the pattern others are reporting.
• Keep doing what’s working. Practices with a steady, natural cadence of reviews built over time tend to be far less exposed to sudden algorithm shifts than practices that rely on bursts of activity.

Our client was a good example of this in action. His practice saw a 43% increase in calls in just 30 days, built on a consistent, above-board approach to earning reviews over time rather than chasing a quick spike. That kind of steady foundation holds up even when Google’s systems get twitchy.

If your practice is on one of our upper-level plans, our team is already monitoring your listing for exactly this kind of disruption, so you don’t have to watch it alone. That’s the advantage of having a dedicated team paying attention to the platforms your patients are searching on every single day.

The Bottom Line

Google’s review issue is a reminder that the platforms driving new patients to your door are constantly shifting, sometimes overnight and without warning. You don’t need to track every algorithm change yourself. That’s what we’re here for.