Can you get a Google review removed in Australia?

Short answer: sometimes, and less often than you want.

Google removes reviews that break its content policies. It does not remove reviews for being unfair, inaccurate in your view, or written by someone having a terrible week. "This never happened the way they said" is not, by itself, grounds for anything.

That distinction is the whole article, so it is worth being precise about where the line sits.

What Google will remove

These are the grounds Google publishes for reporting a review on your Business Profile.

Fake and misleading content. A review not based on a real experience, or one that does not represent the place or service. This is the ground people reach for most and it is judged on Google's evidence, not your certainty.

Paid or incentivised reviews. Content posted because a business offered payment, a discount, or free goods or services. This explicitly includes reviews posted after someone was offered an incentive to revise or remove an earlier one.

Conflict of interest. Current or former employees, contractors, competitors, family. A review from the business two doors down is a policy breach, not just annoying.

Offensive content. Obscene, profane or sexually explicit material.

Personal information. Someone's personal details posted without their consent.

Notice what is not on that list: wrong, exaggerated, unreasonable, one-sided, or written by someone who ignored the sign on the door. A genuine customer's genuine bad opinion stays up. That is the deal, and honestly it is what makes the other reviews worth anything.

How to report one

1. Open your Business Profile, find the review, and use the three-dot menu on it to report it.
2. Pick the policy it breaches. Pick the one that actually fits — a scattergun report is easier to dismiss than a narrow, obviously-correct one.
3. Wait. Nothing happens immediately, and no email confirms the outcome in most cases.
4. Check the review. Gone, or still there, is the whole feedback mechanism.

If it is refused and you genuinely believe it breaches policy, you can escalate through Google's Business Profile support and, for repeat problems, the Business Profile community forum. Escalation works best when you can point at a specific policy line and a specific fact — "this account has reviewed eleven plumbers in three suburbs in one day" is worth more than "this is unfair".

The trap: don't try to fix it with incentives

Here is where an Australian business can turn a bad review into a legal problem.

Offering someone something to take a review down is itself a breach of Google's policy on incentivised content. Offering customers a discount for a positive review, without disclosing it, breaches the Australian Consumer Law. So does filtering — asking how the experience was and only sending the review link to the people who say "great".

The ACCC's stated position is that incentives must be offered regardless of whether the review is positive or negative, and must be clearly disclosed, because an undisclosed incentivised review is presented as impartial when it is not.

This is enforced. The Federal Court ordered Service Seeking to pay $600,000 over misleading customer reviews, and HealthEngine $2.9 million over conduct including publishing misleading patient reviews. PhotobookShop paid $39,600 in infringement notices over influencer reviews on Instagram.

The cost of burying one two-star review is not worth any of that.

What to do instead, in order

1. Reply to it properly. A good reply does more for the next reader than a removal would, because a profile with zero negative reviews reads as either brand new or curated. We have worked examples of what to write.

2. Report it only if it genuinely breaches a policy. Check the list above honestly. If it is a real customer with a real complaint, skip to step three.

3. Fix the thing. If three reviews in a month mention the wait on Saturdays, the reviews are not the problem.

4. Ask everyone for reviews, all the time. Not just the happy ones — everyone, every time, with no incentive attached. That is both legal and effective. The maths is unglamorous: one bad review among twelve is a blip, and among two hundred it is invisible. Volume is the only lever you fully control.

5. Let it age. Google surfaces recent reviews prominently. A bad review from eighteen months ago, under a steady flow of newer ones, does very little work.

For health practices, one extra wrinkle

If you are a registered health practitioner, there is a further consideration before you reply at all: AHPRA's advertising guidance says a practice does not have to remove, or try to remove, a review on a platform it does not control — but engaging with reviews may itself count as advertising with a testimonial. That is worth reading properly before you touch the reply button.

The bit nobody wants to hear

Most bad reviews are not removable, and chasing the ones that are is usually a worse use of an evening than answering the ones that are not.

The businesses with good ratings are not the ones that got reviews deleted. They are the ones that ask everybody, answer everybody, and fix what keeps coming up.

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Checked against Google's published Business Profile review policies on 18 September 2026. Policies change — check the current version before relying on this.