If you've heard advice telling customers to mention a specific staff member by name in their Google review, here's the uncomfortable part: that guidance is now a policy violation. But before you worry about every review that happens to name an employee, there's a real distinction worth understanding, because Google is not banning what you might think it's banning.
What's Actually Happening
Google confirmed to Search Engine Land in early July that it is investigating widespread reports of Google Business Profile reviews disappearing, in some cases wiping out thousands of reviews within a single day. One business reportedly saw its review count drop from roughly 4,651 to 63 in about 24 hours. A Google spokesperson said the company's systems detect suspicious reviews and respond by removing them and temporarily pausing new reviews on the profile to prevent further abuse, restoring anything removed in error. What's still unclear, even to outside researchers, is whether this wave is driven by a genuine spike in fake reviews, an overly aggressive detection system, or both.
What Google Has Actually Confirmed
Separately from that active bug, Google's own policy documentation and an April 2026 blog post lay out exactly what its review system is built to catch:
Fake engagement
Incentivized reviews
Review gating (steering only happy customers toward a public review)
Pressuring or soliciting reviews while a customer is still on site (Noted in an early 2026 policy update).
Google says its systems blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025 alone, restricted more than 782,000 accounts, and removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles, all while still publishing more than 1 billion legitimate reviews. That's not a minor cleanup effort. It's enforcement at real scale, and it's the backdrop for a specific rule that catches a lot of local businesses off guard. You may have seen a figure like "600% increase in review deletions" circulating in SEO blogs. That number doesn't trace back to Google anywhere; the confirmed figure is the 292 million above, straight from Google's own report.
The Staff-Naming Rule, and Why It's Not What You Think
Buried in that same policy update: Google now explicitly prohibits asking staff to solicit reviews that identify a specific employee by name. Some marketers had recommended the opposite: prompt customers to name a staff member, on the theory that specificity makes a review look more authentic. That advice is now the exact kind of solicitation Google's policy flags.
NOTE: The rule targets the ask, not the content. The distinction is business solicitations to customers versus organic mentions, not whether a name shows up in the text.
A customer who spontaneously writes "Jake fixed everything in ten minutes, ask for him" is not a problem. That's a real, human review, and you should welcome it.
What's prohibited is the business side: training staff to request that customers name them, building it into a script, or making it part of how you solicit reviews.
How Would Google Even Catch This?
Fair question, and Google hasn't published the answer, so treat what follows as an informed guess, not confirmed policy.
A single review naming an employee is essentially indistinguishable between solicited vs organic; there's no way to infer intent from a single piece of text. But a directed campaign doesn't produce one review, it produces a cluster: several reviews naming the same person, arriving close together, often with similar phrasing, because that's what happens when multiple customers get the same prompt around the same time.
That clustering is the kind of pattern Google's confirmed velocity detection is already built to catch, even if the system isn't specifically scanning for staff names.
The other enforcement path has nothing to do with algorithms: complaints, screenshots of internal scripts or training material, or a business publishing its own solicitation instructions somewhere that gets found.
Policies like this often exist less to catch every instance automatically and more to give Google clear grounds to act once evidence turns up some other way.
What's Still Just a Rumor
Some of the broader detection theories floating around SEO blogs fall into that same guessing bucket, plausible-sounding ideas about how Google's spam classifier might work, but never confirmed by Google itself:
IP or Wi-Fi fingerprinting: the idea that a review gets flagged because it came from the business's own network.
Location-history mismatch: the idea that a reviewer's device location history not matching the business address triggers a flag.
Both are reasonable guesses about how a spam classifier might work. Neither is documented Google policy, so don't treat them as facts to build a strategy around.
What To Actually Do [Verified]
Never offer discounts, payment, or exchanges for reviews, and never selectively ask only happy customers to leave one.
Stop training staff to ask customers to name them in a review. Organic staff shoutouts are still great; the solicitation is what's prohibited.
Keep review requests steady rather than bunched together. Sudden spikes are exactly what Google's detection systems are built to catch.
If legitimate reviews vanish, report it through Google's Business Profile support channels with supporting evidence, rather than asking customers to repost them.
Don't request or pressure reviews while a customer is still on site, including through in-store kiosks or Wi-Fi prompts tied to the visit.
Ultimately, none of this means you should stop being proud of good reviews that happen to mention your team.
It means the ask has to stay hands-off: no incentives, no on-site pressure, no scripts that tell customers what to say or who to name.
Do that, and the bug Google is currently investigating isn't something you need to worry about causing.
>> If interested in learning more about a Review-Collection process that's consistent with these requirements, please see our review funnels page.
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