Review Removals, SMB Misalignment, AEO a Mistake?, Local Product Inventory, ChatGPT Search

New Data on Review Removals

Review management tool Reviewflowz and Cartelis published a study of Google review-removal patterns. They tracked nearly 5 million reviews in the US and European countries during a two-week period in August. What they found was that just under 2% of new reviews were deleted within a week. However, removals weren't consistent or uniform; most businesses lost few if any reviews; a few lost multiple reviews. And 1% of businesses accounted for half of all review removals. One-star reviews were removed at about 3x the rate of five-star reviews. And owner responses were correlated with fewer five-star review deletions. Five-star reviews that received a response within two days were half as likely to be removed. Yet GBPs with 85% or more five-star reviews saw 2x the removal rate of profiles with a lower five-star percentage. Not unlike Yelp, reviews written by people without a Google review track record were more likely to disappear. The study also looked at the impact of review content (text, images) on removals. Review length, images and "stock phrases" (e.g., "highly recommended") had no measurable impact on whether a review was removed. Review velocity did, however. Review spikes generally increased removals (especially in Europe). Interestingly, employee name checks, despite Google's new policy, did not increase removal rates. US businesses lost reviews at about twice the European rate. Home services saw the highest removals, followed by healthcare. Hospitality had one of the lowest rates. Spain had the highest share of new reviews removed (2.9%), followed by the US (2.4%), Germany (1.8%), France (1.4%) and Italy (0.9%). US companies with between 4 and 10 locations appeared to be the most vulnerable to removals.