Google checks every new hotel review twice
The first check runs when the guest posts. The second comes about a week later, when the review is already on your profile.
by Markus Busch
A guest leaves you five stars on Monday morning. By lunch the review is on your Google profile, and someone at the front desk has already counted it. Google has not finished with it.
Google checks every review twice. The first check runs the moment the guest hits post, and it stops most fake reviews before anyone sees them. The second check runs after the review is live. Google says its systems keep watching reviews once they are published. By its own count, it blocked or removed more than 292 million reviews on Google Maps in 2025.
This matters more than it used to. Google Maps now uses Gemini, its AI, to summarize a hotel's reviews and answer travelers' questions about it. A review Google removes is a review the AI never reads.
Good reviews get their second check on day six or seven. That timing comes from Reviewflowz, a company that sells software to track deleted reviews. Together with the Paris consultancy Cartelis, it looked at every review on 9,048 Google profiles, every day, from August 11 to 24, 2026. Bad reviews were most often removed on day two or three. Good reviews were most often removed on day six or seven. After day eight, removals almost stopped.
So a review campaign looks better on day one than it really is. Count what is still online on day eight.
Five reviews on one day get removed three times as often. Google says it acts fast when a profile gets a sudden wave of fake reviews. The tracker looked at ordinary days. When a business got one good review that day, about 1 in 90 was gone within a week. When it got five to nine on the same day, about 1 in 30 was gone. A busy month made no difference. Only the busy day did.
Hotels create these days themselves. A wedding group checks out on Sunday, and the thank-you email with a Google review invitation goes to all 60 rooms at once. Send it over three or four days instead.
A reply within two days cut the risk roughly in half. Five-star reviews that got an answer from the business within two days were removed less often than those left unanswered. Replying the same day worked no better than replying on day two. The tracker can see which reviews stayed online, but not why, so this is a link, not proof.
It is still the easiest test of the three. Answer every new good review within two days.
One removal in five took the guest's whole account. Sometimes Google is not judging the review at all. Where the tracker could follow the guest, one in five removed reviews disappeared together with every other review that guest had written. A guest posting a first-ever Google review was more likely to lose it than one who reviews often. In those cases Google was judging the guest's account, and your review went with it.
Read also: Your guests wrote the reviews, and Google now decides who gets to read all of them
Enjoying this analysis? Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →