Restricted and illegal content
Reviews referencing regulated goods, illegal activity, or content Google restricts outright. A narrow category, but an unambiguous one when it applies.
See Google's full content policy“For some products or services subject to controls and local regulations, you must follow certain guidelines when posting content. The content you upload may not feature calls to action or offers for the sale of products or services that are subject to local legal regulations. This includes, but is not limited to, alcohol, gambling, tobacco, guns, health and medical devices, regulated pharmaceuticals, adult services, and financial services.”
Qualifies for removal
- Review solicits or offers regulated goods through your listing
- Review accuses the business of a crime while promoting how to obtain something illegal
- Review contains content Google restricts outright, including sexually explicit material
- Review is being used as a channel to advertise an unlawful service
Does NOT qualify
- A customer alleging you did something wrong, without any restricted content
- Strong accusations that stay within ordinary complaint territory
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.
- Content about regulated goods (alcohol, tobacco, firearms, pharmaceuticals, gambling) outside a legitimate account of your service
- Sexually explicit material
- Content promoting illegal activity
- Attempts to solicit or sell through the review
The mistake that gets this rejected
Assuming that any mention of a regulated product qualifies. A bar review that mentions drinks is a normal review. The clause is about content that itself breaks the restriction, not about the industry you happen to be in.
Questions about this clause
We're a licensed dispensary. Are reviews mentioning our products removable?
Not under this clause just for mentioning them. A review describing a lawful transaction with a lawful business is not restricted content, because this clause targets content that is itself restricted. Whether a given review breaks a different clause is a separate question.
How fast does Google act on explicit content?
According to Google's help page on reporting reviews, "Review evaluation typically takes several days" (support.google.com/business/answer/4596773), with nothing published per category. We have not measured one. What this category has going for it is that the violation is visible in the review itself, with no context to establish first.
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.