Harassment and hate speech
Reviews containing slurs, threats, or targeted attacks on individuals, protected groups or the business itself violate Google's policies. Google's own wording covers content posted to harass other people or businesses, which is the clause a review-extortion demand sits closest to.
See Google's full content policy“Harassment: “We don’t allow users to post content to harass other people or businesses, or encourage others to participate in harassment.” Hate speech: “At Google, we believe that all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, caste, or any other protected status, have a right to access information and participate in its exchange without being subjected to hate speech. Do not post or share content that includes any form of hate speech.””
Qualifies for removal
- Review uses ethnic or religious slurs against staff
- Review threatens violence or harm
- Review targets specific staff member by full name with hateful content
- A run of ratings arrives alongside a message demanding payment to remove them
- The same person posts about one employee across several listings or accounts
Does NOT qualify
- Strong language criticizing service (frustration ≠ hate speech)
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.
- A named staff member targeted personally rather than the service described
- Slurs or attacks on a protected characteristic
- Threats, or language a reasonable reader would take as intimidation
- Repeated posting about the same individual across listings or accounts
- A screenshot of a message demanding money or goods to take reviews down, with the time it arrived set against when the reviews landed
The mistake that gets this rejected
Replying in public before filing. A heated reply invites escalation, and anything written there becomes part of what future customers read. Keep any reply to one neutral line.
Questions about this clause
Is rudeness enough?
No. A furious, insulting review about the service is still a review about the service. This clause is about attacks on a person, particularly on a protected characteristic, rather than about tone.
What if a staff member is named but not abused?
Naming an employee is not automatically a violation. It moves under this clause when the content targets them personally or exposes them to harassment.
Does review extortion fall under this clause?
Google's wording here covers content posted to harass other people or businesses, which is the clause a paid-to-remove demand sits closest to. But it is not the whole answer: Google runs a separate report for merchants facing review extortion, for cases where money or goods are actually being demanded, and it is a different route from the appeal on a single review. Where there is a demand and a screenshot of it, that report is the one built for the case.
Is a burst of one-star ratings harassment on its own?
Not by itself. A run of ratings with no text and no demand attached is argued on the pattern of arrival rather than on this clause, because nothing in it targets a person. What moves it here is a message, a named employee, or the same account following you across listings.
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.