The author can edit or delete a review at any time, so without your own copy you have no proof once you report it.
A review arrived that is not true. It describes a visit that never happened, or describes something that happened completely differently. You have one star and a paragraph that everyone who looks you up will read.
You cannot delete a review yourself, on Google or anywhere else. You can only report it. And the first thing most pages on this topic will not say, because it does not sell well: Google removes a review that violates its policies. It does not remove a review because you asked, and not because it is untrue.
Valtela does not remove reviews either. Nobody has the means to, and anyone offering it is offering something they cannot deliver. What we do is show what happened and when, and prepare the record a report or a claim actually needs.
This is the whole difference, and it is worth knowing the answer to first.
Breaks policy, and reporting is worth it:
Does not break policy, even when it is hard to read:
"It was expensive." "We waited a long time." "The staff was rude," even if they were not. One star with no text. An opinion you disagree with that describes a real visit.
Google says this directly:
"Don't report reviews just because you disagree with them."
Google Business Profile Help, read September 14, 2026
An unhappy customer has the right to be unhappy in public. You respond to that review, you do not report it. And most reviews that genuinely break the rules disappear without anyone reporting them: in 2025 alone Google blocked or removed more than 292 million policy-violating reviews and more than 13 million fake profiles.
Google, Maps blog, read September 14, 2026, citing the 2025 Trust and Safety Report
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it cannot be undone. The author can edit or delete their review at any time. If they delete it after you report it, your evidence disappears too. If they edit it, the wording you were talking about is gone. And if Google removes it, you will not see it again either.
Before anything else:
If several arrived at once, do this for each one. It looks excessive until the moment you need it.
A cluster of negative reviews
Evidence for suspicious review activity · Blue Fern Coffee · caught Jul 31, 2026 7:04 AM
What happened
| Reviews in the window | 3 |
| Time window (hours) | 24 |
| Rating before | 4.6 ★ |
| Rating after | 4.3 ★ |
Reviews involved
★☆☆☆☆ new.account.581
Review left with no text.
Posted Jul 31, 2026 2:41 AM · first caught Jul 31, 2026 7:04 AM
The rest of the document carries a second review and the state of the listing around the incident.
Google writes:
"If you come across a review on your Business Profile that violates Google's policies, you can report it."
Google Business Profile Help, read September 14, 2026
The process: open your reviews, choose report on the specific one, pick a reason, and submit.
What to watch for. Pick the reason that actually fits. Reporting "false" against a review that only criticizes your prices gets rejected and uses up your one shot. Reporting "not about this business" against text that genuinely describes a different company makes sense.
How long it takes. Google states:
"Reviewing your report usually takes a few days."
A report under review shows as escalated, and you get an email with the result.
This is the fact the Czech version of this page does not have, because it does not exist there. In August 2024 the Federal Trade Commission finalized a rule making it illegal to write, sell, buy, or host a fake consumer review, including a review from someone with no genuine experience of a business.
Federal Trade Commission, final rule announcement, read September 14, 2026
The rule went into effect nationwide and carries civil penalties the FTC can pursue directly, separate from anything Google does with a report. A fake review is no longer only a platform policy problem: it is a federal violation, and the agency that enforces it is the same one that regulates deceptive advertising generally.
Federal Trade Commission, 16 CFR Part 465, read September 14, 2026
This does not change how you report a review to Google, and it does not speed up a Google decision. What it changes is the seriousness of writing or buying one in the first place, and it gives a business a second authority to name if a pattern of fake reviews is severe and provable enough to matter beyond one report.
A rejected report has one appeal. Google writes about the appeal itself:
"Reviewing and deciding on an appeal can take up to five business days."
Google Business Profile Help, read September 14, 2026
And until you have a decision, do not file a second appeal about the same issue:
"Don't submit multiple appeals about the same issue before you receive a decision."
same source
An appeal is only worth filing if it adds something the first report did not have: proof the author was never a customer, a pattern only visible across several reviews at once, or a quoted line that proves it is about a different business.
If the appeal fails, the review stays. Reporting the same thing again goes nowhere, and nobody, including us, controls whether a review gets removed. What works better at that point: a short, factual, unemotional, signed reply. You are not writing it for the author, you are writing it for the hundreds of people who read it after them.
The plan runs $599 a year, and the exact price with everything it includes is on the pricing page.
If someone is outright extorting you over reviews, the page on review extortion has the exact steps.
If you are not sure whether your current way of collecting reviews follows the rules, and if reviews are dropping on their own with nobody demanding anything, the page on disappearing reviews covers that.
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.