Your Chiro Agency

July 15, 2026

Your Google reviews disappeared. Here's what to check first

By Benjamin Pochon

You open your Google Business Profile on a Monday morning and the reviews are gone. Years of them. The number it took your practice a decade to earn now reads like you opened last week.

Before you do anything — before you call Google, before you email your agency, before you ask a single patient to re-post — open your own public listing in an incognito window and look at it the way a patient would.

That one step decides everything that follows. In July 2026, two different things happened to Google reviews about a week apart. From inside your dashboard they look identical. They require opposite responses. Get the diagnosis wrong and you either burn a week escalating a bug that was never yours, or you sit still while the evidence you needed goes cold.

The two-minute check that decides the next two weeks

Open an incognito window — or log out, or pull your phone off wifi. Anything that isn't your logged-in admin session. Search your practice name and look at the listing a patient sees.

Reviews are visible to the public but missing from your dashboard. That's a display problem, not a data loss. Your patients see your reviews. Google sees your reviews. Only your admin view is wrong.

Reviews are gone from the public listing too. That's a real loss, and the clock has started. Screenshot everything now.

Either way, take timestamped screenshots of both views before you touch anything else. Evidence is cheap to collect on day one and impossible to reconstruct on day ten.

July 3: the reviews really were gone

On 2026-07-03, reviews vanished from live public listings across a wide range of businesses. One documented case dropped from roughly 4,651 reviews to 63 in about 24 hours.

Google acknowledged the problem on the record. Its statement, in full:

"When our systems detect suspicious reviews, we take a range of actions including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews on the profile to prevent further abuse. We are investigating the issue and will restore any reviews that were incorrectly removed."

Read that middle clause twice, because it's the part nobody tells you: Google also pauses the profile from receiving new reviews. So during an incident like this, your review requests can silently go nowhere. Patients tap the link, write something kind, hit submit — and it never appears.

This matters more than it sounds. A practice that doesn't know its profile is paused will conclude that its review system is broken, or that the front desk stopped asking, and start "fixing" a process that was working fine. If your reviews stalled dead the same week they vanished, that is not your team. Check the incident before you change anything.

Two more details matter. It was public — patients searching your practice that week saw a listing stripped of its trust signal. And Google said so out loud, which is the single most useful thing that can happen to you during an outage, because "other businesses are reporting the same incident" is the strongest sentence you can put in a support ticket.

July 9: the dashboard lied

Six days later, something different happened. Practice owners opened the Google Business Profile dashboard and read "You have no reviews yet" — while the live public listing still carried every review they had ever earned. In the case documented in the Digital Applied playbook, the public listing still showed all 916 reviews while the management dashboard showed none.

This one was first documented publicly by Amy Toman, a volunteer Google Product Expert — not a Google employee. Product Experts are unpaid community contributors; she was reporting what she observed, not speaking for Google. And as of this writing, Google has still not officially acknowledged the dashboard bug at all — no statement, no cause, no timeline for a fix. Which is itself worth knowing: the silence is not evidence that your reviews are gone. It is evidence that Google has not said anything.

The correct response to this incident is almost nothing. Verify in public. Screenshot the mismatch. Wait.

Do not escalate. Do not start rebuilding. And above all, do not ask patients to re-post their reviews — a sudden burst of new reviews is exactly the pattern that trips a spam filter, which is how a cosmetic bug becomes a real problem you created.

When they're genuinely gone: what a report that goes somewhere looks like

If the public listing confirms a real loss, the path is the Google Business Profile Help Center → Contact Us. A report worth sending:

  • Names the dates the reviews were received. Approximate ranges are fine.
  • States plainly that no review policy was violated. Say it directly.
  • Includes timestamped before/after evidence. The screenshots you took on day one.
  • Notes that other businesses are reporting the same incident, if that's true and you can point to coverage of it.

Two things nobody wants to hear. Reviews removed for genuine policy violations are not restored — that's the system working as designed, not a bug worth appealing. And Google sometimes removes reviews and blocks new ones from posting when it detects suspicious activity on a profile. If new reviews aren't landing either, that's a signal about your profile's history, not about the outage.

The HIPAA trap a generalist agency will walk you into

Here is where a marketing problem quietly turns into a licensing problem.

When you escalate a missing review — or when you reply to any review at all — you must not confirm that the reviewer is a patient. Not in the public reply. Not in the support ticket either, which is the part people miss.

Naming the person, referencing their visit, describing what you treated them for, or arguing the clinical facts is a disclosure. The reviewer can say whatever they like about their own care; that's their information to share. You cannot confirm any of it. Your own defensive instinct — let me just prove this was a real patient — is the exact move that creates the exposure.

So the report you send Google talks about volumes and dates, not people: "We received approximately 40 reviews between January and June 2026, and they are no longer displaying." Never the version that names someone and describes what you treated them for.

This is the line a generalist marketing agency crosses without noticing, because in every other industry the obvious way to prove a review is real is to identify the customer and produce the transaction. In healthcare, that same move is the violation — and it's your license on the line, not the agency's. If you'd like the wider version of this, we build content and response systems that are compliant by design.

This is general education, not legal advice. Run your review-response and escalation policy past your own counsel or compliance officer before you need it.

The compliant way to ask for reviews and respond to them — including the HIPAA basics of a public reply — is a separate system, and we've written it up in full: earning reviews the right way. This post is about the other half of the problem, the one nobody plans for: what to do when they vanish.

The uncomfortable part: some of this is self-inflicted

Not every disappearance is Google's fault. The behaviours that trip the spam filter are common in practices — and are frequently sold to practices as best practice:

  • Review gating. Only asking the patients you already know are happy.
  • Incentivised reviews. A discount, a raffle entry, a free adjustment. Anything of value, offered in exchange.
  • Bulk asks from one device or IP. The tablet at the front desk, twelve reviews in a single afternoon, all from the same network.

Those get reviews filtered, and they can get new reviews blocked. If your reviews went missing and you've been doing any of the three, start there — before you write to Google about a conspiracy that turns out to be a policy.

What to actually do this week

Check the public listing. Screenshot both views. Then make the call once — display bug or real loss — and act accordingly. Patience for the first, evidence for the second. The failure mode isn't slowness, it's escalating the wrong one.

And when the reviews come back, the underlying question doesn't go away: a profile whose reviews stalled two years ago is fragile in a way that has nothing to do with an outage. That's the same foundation we argue you should get right before buying another ad — a complete Google Business Profile with real review velocity behind it is what makes a bad Google week survivable instead of existential.

If your reviews are missing right now and you'd like a second pair of eyes on which of the two situations you're in, book a growth call. We'll look at the public listing with you, tell you whether it's worth escalating, and help you write the report if it is — without naming a single patient. If it turns out to be a display bug and the answer is "wait," we'll tell you that. That answer is free.

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