The email arrives the same day the count drops, not the week you happen to notice yourself.
A reviewer count went down. You noticed yourself, or somebody told you, and now you are trying to work out whether this can be watched automatically without an alert firing over every small wobble.
It can, but only with limits, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. Google does not publish one fixed list of reviews you could safely diff every night. It publishes a count, and a selection of individual reviews that can shift even when nothing changed on your end.
This page is the whole arithmetic: what it can reliably tell, where it stays quiet on purpose, and why that silence is the more honest choice.
Every night, your public Google listing loads again and one number gets compared against what was recorded last time: the review count. When it is lower than yesterday, an email goes out the same day, showing what it was and what it is now.
The email states both possible explanations side by side: Google may have removed the review, or the author may have deleted it themselves. It never picks between the two, because from the outside, reading a public page, that distinction is not visible.
Of the two figures Google shows on a listing, the review count is the safer one to compare night after night. It is a whole number, not a derived value that lags behind reality. The rating runs on a different clock, and Google says so plainly:
"It can take up to two weeks for a business's rating to update after receiving a new review."
Google Business Profile Help, read September 14, 2026
If the alert compared the rating as strictly as the count, it would flag movement that has nothing to do with yesterday, just an average still catching up. The review count does not carry that lag, which is why the whole mechanism stands on it.
Alongside the count, Google shows a selection of individual reviews: name, stars, text. It looks like a fixed list, but it is not stable the way line items on a receipt are.
A review passes moderation before it shows up, and that can take a few days. After two listings merge, which reviews appear to belong where can temporarily reshuffle. Google can also suppress content on some listings for a while without deleting anything for good.
Because of that, the exact set Google shows can differ between two nights without anything actually disappearing. An alert that treated every such difference as proof of deletion would raise a false alarm most weeks, and most of those alarms would be about nothing at all.
This is the part most competing pages leave out, because it is an admission of a limit rather than a sales line.
Alongside the count-drop email, the watch separately tracks which specific reviews it used to see that no longer appear in Google's current selection. If it flagged every one of those as removed, the list would eventually fill with reviews that quietly came back a week later, gone only from the selection, not from reality.
So a rule applies, not a promise: a review is marked removed only when the number missing from the prior list is no larger than the drop in the count itself. When more are missing than that, none of the extra ones get marked.
Not because nothing happened, but because at that moment there is no way to tell a real loss apart from a reshuffled selection. A guessed answer would be worse than no answer.
This caution costs something, and it is only fair to say what plainly. A review that disappears in the exact same moment a new one arrives never shows up in the count at all.
The number stays the same, or even climbs, and the alert stays quiet, because it has nothing to compare against yesterday, even if that review really was removed. There is no way to see this manually either, since Google publishes one running total, not a dated record for every review.
And even where the watch does catch a genuinely missing review, it never says who removed it. A review deleted by Google and a review deleted by its own author look identical from outside: one fewer entry in the same count.
You get an email saying the count dropped, but not certainty about which specific review it was. Open your own review list and you will find what is still there; what is missing beyond that, nobody names that night.
The reverse holds too. A quiet week means nothing in particular. It only means the count did not change between two nights, and the alert has nothing to report.
Some of this can be done by hand, writing down the date and the count regularly. The difference is speed: checking once a week means a real drop surfaces days later, and you can only react that much later. Checking once a month means comparing against a memory a month old, and memory is a poor record for numbers.
Valtela runs this arithmetic every night for every listing on the plan, as part of the license rather than as an add on. A license year runs $599 a year, with an extra card at $79 a year, and the full pricing page has the rest.
What Valtela never does: remove a review, restore one, or negotiate with Google about either.
If a disappearing review sent you looking for a broader explanation of why reviews vanish at all, the page on disappearing reviews lays out every reason Google and practice both point to.
If you want to know what else gets checked every night besides the count, the listing monitoring page covers the other values compared the same way.
And if you want to see what a month of this watch looks like in practice, with real numbers and dates, the monthly report is exactly the document that would land in your inbox.
Every citation on this page comes from one of these pages. The link goes to the original source, not to our summary of it.
$599a year, plus $79 for each extra card. See the full price.