Reviewers who were never customers
A review must reflect an actual customer experience with the business, not a phone interaction, a quote request, a drive-by, or something the reviewer heard second-hand.
See Google's full content policy“Contributions to Google Maps should reflect a genuine experience at a place or business. Fake engagement is not allowed and will be removed. This includes: Content that is not based on a real experience or does not accurately represent the location or product in question.”
Qualifies for removal
- Reviewer never used the service, only called and complained about phone wait time
- Reviewer reviews a restaurant for parking issues at a different store nearby
- Reviewer rants about pricing they saw on a website but never visited
Does NOT qualify
- Customer who actually used the service complaining about quality (this is a real opinion)
- Customer who waited too long during an appointment (real visit, real complaint)
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.
- No record of the reviewer in your booking system, invoices, POS or email, searched under partial spellings and first name only
- The review describes a service, product or package you do not sell
- The dates named do not line up with your opening hours, your season, or a period you were closed
- The reviewer's public profile shows no other contribution, or a burst of ratings left minutes apart
The mistake that gets this rejected
Writing "this person was never a customer" and stopping there. Google cannot search your systems and will not take the assertion on trust. The filing has to say what you searched, how you searched it, and what came back empty. That is the difference between an assertion and evidence.
Questions about this clause
What if they used a different name than the one on file?
Say so explicitly and describe the searches you ran, including partial and first-name-only matches. A filing that pre-empts the obvious objection reads far stronger than one that ignores it.
Does a phone enquiry count as a visit?
Google's policy is about experience with the business, and a genuine interaction can count even without a purchase. A caller who was quoted a price and disliked it has an experience. Someone who only heard about you does not.
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.