Promoting a competitor
Reviews that exist primarily to promote a competing business, link to alternatives, or advertise services violate Google's content policy.
See Google's full content policy“Don’t post content for advertising or solicitation purposes. This includes: Promotional or commercial content. Posting email addresses, phone numbers, social media links, or links to other websites in your reviews.”
Qualifies for removal
- Review says 'go to [competitor].com instead'
- Review contains a phone number for a different business
- Review primarily exists to drive traffic elsewhere
Does NOT qualify
- Customer mentioning they switched to a different provider (just a fact)
Evidence that clears this clause
Whoever reads your report can see the review, the reviewer's public profile and your listing. Nothing else. Anything that lives only in your own systems has to be described, not assumed.
- The review names another business by name and recommends it
- It contains a phone number, URL, social handle or discount code for someone else
- The account has posted near-identical text on several listings in the same trade
- The wording reads as promotional copy rather than as an account of a visit
The mistake that gets this rejected
Filing this as a fake review. Intent is hard to prove; the promotional content is right there in the text. Quote the promotional line and name the advertising clause, so the filing points at something Google can read for itself.
Questions about this clause
What if the review only mentions a competitor in passing?
A comparison inside a genuine account of a visit is normally allowed. The clause bites when the promotion is the point of the review rather than an aside.
Does a link on its own qualify?
An outbound link or contact detail for another business is one of the clearer cases under this clause, because it serves no purpose in a review of you.
Want this policy applied to your reviews?
Run the free audit and we'll score every review on your listing against this policy and the others. No card, no signup to see the report. A removal is $150 to $250 per review, billed only when Google actually removes it.
All of them in one place: the policy reference · check a review against it · Google review policy violations explained · remove fake Google reviews · straight answers · by industry
Free tools
Check a single review against every clause at once, or work out what a removal would actually do to your star average. Both run in your browser, with no account.
The other content-policy categories
A review can break more than one clause at once, and a filing names the clause with the cleanest evidence rather than all of them.
How this plays out in your trade
The same policy clause gets abused differently depending on the business. These pages set out the attack pattern trade by trade.
Short answers about filing
Filing against this clause, start to finish
Knowing which clause a review breaks is the first half. These cover the filing itself, and what a rejection actually means.