The four real causes
- The review broke Google's policies — most often because it contained a link or contact details, was left by staff or family, or was written in exchange for a discount or entry into a prize draw.
- The reviewer's account was removed or flagged. If Google decides an account is not a genuine person, everything it ever posted goes with it, including honest reviews of your business.
- The review is on a different listing. If a duplicate profile exists, reviews can land there instead — they are not gone, they are somewhere you are not looking.
- Google is reprocessing. After an edit to your profile, or during one of Google's periodic platform faults, reviews can vanish and return within a day or two with no action from you.
What to do in the first 48 hours
Do nothing drastic. A significant share of vanished reviews come back on their own within a couple of days, particularly when a batch disappears at once — that pattern usually points to a Google-side fault rather than anything about your business.
While you wait, check whether a duplicate listing exists by searching your business name and phone number on Maps, and check whether the missing reviews are visible on your profile when you are signed out. If a single review went and the others are fine, it is far more likely to be a policy or reviewer-account issue than a bug.
Why incentivised reviews are a trap
The most avoidable cause is asking customers for reviews in exchange for something. Discounts, prize draws and free add-ons all breach Google's policies, and when Google detects the pattern it can remove the reviews in bulk — sometimes long after they were posted, which is why a business can lose a batch that seemed fine for months.
The safe version is simply asking, at the right moment, and making it one tap. That produces fewer reviews per hundred customers than a prize draw, and every one of them survives.
When it is worth escalating
If a genuine review from a real customer has been removed and it has not returned after a few days, you can raise it through Google's review management tool, which lets a business owner check the status of reviews and appeal removals. Have the reviewer's name and the approximate date to hand.
Be realistic about the outcome. Appeals succeed sometimes and fail often, and there is no route that guarantees restoration. If your review count has been visibly damaged, the reliable fix is a routine that keeps new ones arriving, because recency counts for more in ranking than raw volume anyway.