Conflict of interest
Former employees, competitors, and people with a financial stake in disparaging a business cannot leave reviews about it.
See Google's full content policy“Content that is based on a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest may include current or former employment, a contractual or consultory relationship, or other professional or personal affiliations that demonstrate a conflict of interest (such as industry competitors, familial relationships, etc.).”
Qualifies for removal
- Review explicitly states reviewer is a former employee with grievance
- Review is from a competing business owner
- Review is from someone clearly paid to disparage the business
Does NOT qualify
- Customer mentioning they're 'never coming back' (real customer leaving)
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 same account has left a positive review for a direct competitor
- Employment records showing the reviewer left your business, and when
- The review uses trade vocabulary or internal process detail an ordinary customer would not know
- A cluster of similar reviews arriving in one window from accounts of similar age
The mistake that gets this rejected
Naming who you think wrote it. Identity is almost never provable from the outside, and an accusation you cannot support makes the whole filing read as a grudge. Point instead at what anyone can verify by opening the reviewer's public profile.
Questions about this clause
Does a former employee's review always qualify?
Not automatically. It qualifies when the review is about the business as a competitor or an aggrieved insider rather than as a customer. An ex-employee who genuinely bought from you afterwards is in a different position.
What about a review from a competitor's spouse or relative?
The policy covers people with a competing interest, and Google reads that beyond the person who signs the review. The connection still has to be shown with something checkable rather than asserted.
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.