Google - Blog | Cloutly | Reviews, Reputation and Digital Marketing Insights

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace (code block)

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To add Google reviews to Squarespace, paste a widget snippet into a code block on a page, on a Core plan or above. Squarespace does not read a Google Business Profile, so a third-party service has to supply the reviews. The block you paste them into decides whether anything renders at all.

I checked this on 6 September 2026 against the Squarespace Help Center, Google's review snippet documentation and the FTC's consumer reviews rule. I could not sign in to a Squarespace account for this piece, so the pictures below are Squarespace's own help pages, each captured from the article the rule comes from. Squarespace publishes no screenshots of its own editor, so there is no picture here of the block menu.

Which Squarespace plan do you need to add Google reviews?

A review widget is JavaScript, and JavaScript in a code block is a paid feature. Squarespace's code blocks guide draws the line in two sentences: "On all plans, code blocks support plain text, HTML, Markdown, and CSS code surrounded by <style></style> tags", and "Adding JavaScript or iframes to code blocks is available in the Core, Plus, Advanced, Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced plans."

Those six plan names are not a mistake. The current lineup on Choosing the right Squarespace plan is Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, and Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced are older names Squarespace still honours. Squarespace puts no date on the change, only that "we sometimes change our plans to best group features for our customers". An older guide telling you to buy the Business plan means Core.

Plan	JavaScript in a code block	Code injection
Basic	No	No
Core	Yes	Yes
Plus	Yes	Yes
Advanced	Yes	Yes
Business, Commerce Basic, Commerce Advanced (older names)	Yes	Yes

Core is the first plan whose feature list carries the line "Custom code, including the code block and code injection".

Custom code is the last line of the Core tab. It is not on the Basic one.

On Basic you can still paste the snippet into a code block. The script will not run. Squarespace does not publish what you see in its place, so check the plan before you debug anything else.

Squarespace has no Google reviews feature

Squarespace does have a reviews feature, and it is the wrong one. Customer reviews emails a buyer automatically 14 days after you fulfil their order, and the limit is in Squarespace's own words: "Customers can leave reviews for physical, download, service, and subscription products. It's not possible to collect reviews for gift cards or broadly for your business." Those reviews live on product pages in a store. They never touch your Google profile.

The other route people expect is Squarespace Extensions, which Squarespace calls "the equivalent of plugins, add-ons, or apps". They connect on all plans. Reading the catalogue on 6 September 2026, there is no Google reviews widget in it.

Price the dependency before you connect one anyway. Squarespace says extensions "aren't official Squarespace integrations" and "fall outside our scope of support", and that after you disconnect one "the service may still have data you sent while the extension was connected". A snippet you delete in one click is the smaller commitment.

Either way, you are using a third-party snippet. The choice that causes trouble is which of Squarespace's three code surfaces to put it on.

Code block, embed block or code injection

Squarespace takes code in three places, and picking the wrong one causes most of the failures.

Route	What it is for	Use it when
Code block	Custom HTML, and JavaScript on Core and above	The reviews belong in one spot on one page
Embed block	oEmbed content from services Squarespace recognises	You are embedding a video or a social post, not a widget
Code injection	Site header or footer, every page	A floating badge or a script you want everywhere

The embed block is the trap because it has the right-sounding name. Squarespace's embed blocks guide says embed blocks "pull content from services that use the oEmbed standard or manually set embed codes", then closes the door in a single line: "To add other code to your site, use code blocks." A widget's script tag is not an oEmbed response. What you get is an empty box.

Code injection is site-wide, not sectional. Code injection puts code in the <head> tag or before the closing </body> tag on every page of the site, which suits a floating badge and little else. It runs on Core, Plus, Advanced and some legacy plans, and it has a documented hole: "Code injection won't appear on Index landing pages." A per-page version sits in the Pages panel, under the gear icon, then Advanced.

Fluid Engine or the classic editor: where the block can go

Fluid Engine is "the primary editing experience for sites on Squarespace version 7.1" and "isn't available on version 7.0 sites". Telling the two apart takes a second. A Fluid Engine section has an Add Block button in its top-left corner once you click Edit, and a grid behind the blocks as you drag them, which you can pin by pressing G. No button and no grid means the classic editor, where you add blocks by clicking a + icon instead. Every block area on version 7.0 uses the classic editor.

Fluid Engine lets you place a reviews block exactly, then rearrange it for phones. Squarespace's mobile layout guide is specific: "You can arrange the mobile layout of Fluid Engine sections without affecting the desktop layout." It stays one block, so the phone view needs no second copy of the snippet.

Version 7.0 restricts where blocks can go at all. You cannot add one to an album, blog, cover, events, gallery, index or store page. If the reviews belong on a page of one of those types, per-page code injection is the way in. Squarespace does not write that down as a recipe anywhere: it follows from the code injection article, and it is my inference rather than their instruction.

You cannot do either job on your phone. Squarespace's blocks guide says the app "doesn't support adding or rearranging blocks on layout pages, only editing existing ones". Do this at a desk.

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace, step by step

Build the widget before you open Squarespace. Pick the layout and theme in your review service, point it at the right Google location, and copy the snippet it gives you.
Open the page and click Edit. Hover over the section where the reviews belong, then click Add Block, or a + icon in the classic editor.
Choose Code from the block menu, then click the pencil icon on the block to open its editor.
Leave the Type menu on HTML and paste the snippet. Squarespace is blunt about this one: "Code blocks set to CSS or JavaScript display code as text by default. To render CSS or JavaScript in code blocks, select HTML from the drop-down menu." Pick JavaScript and your visitors read your script tag instead of your reviews. Leave Display Source switched off.

The snippet is usually one line with an id in it:
```
<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>
```
That one is ours. Cloutly holds the connection to your Google location, offers nine layouts, and gives back one line. A Squarespace code block takes it as it is, and so does any other site that accepts an HTML snippet. The review widgets page shows the layouts. Keep the async attribute whatever service you use, or the browser stops building your page until the widget arrives.
Put the block next to the ask. Directly beneath the booking or enquiry button on a service page, not down at the foot of the homepage. A reviews block in a footer is decoration. One above the form is evidence.
Save, then open the live page in a private window. The editor proves nothing, for the reasons below.

What the snippet renders once it is in the block. New reviews turn up on their own.

Why your review block is blank

Check these four documented causes in this order.

You are logged in. Squarespace says so on the code blocks page: "As a security measure, sometimes your code won't appear when you're logged in, even if visitors can see it." Click Preview in Safe Mode, or use a private window.

You are on Basic. See the plan table. The block is sitting on the page and the script is not running.

The page sits inside an Index. Squarespace lists this in its own troubleshooting: "Your code might not render if you've added it to a page within an Index."

Ajax loading is on. Version 7.0 only. Ajax loading swaps page content without a full reload on five template families, Brine, Farro, Skye, Tremont and York, and Squarespace warns that it "may conflict with embedded custom code". The tell is a block that works on a hard refresh and disappears when a visitor arrives through your own navigation.

Squarespace support will not troubleshoot any of it. It says code-based customisation "falls outside the scope of our support", and names the part that bites: "how it functions with our responsive design, particularly its appearance on mobile devices." Check the block at 390 pixels wide yourself, and run a speed test afterwards. Third-party JavaScript is the usual culprit when a page that used to load quickly stops.

Stars, filtering, and keeping the block current

Two things to settle before you publish, and one habit to start. The parent guide on how to embed Google reviews carries the long version, including the Places API and the screenshot route.

An embedded block will not put stars under your own result in Google. Google's review snippet documentation says that where the reviewed entity controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or Organization structured data "are ineligible for star review feature", and the example Google gives is a review about a business placed on that business's own site "through an embedded third-party widget". Your widget's review schema is still worth switching on: it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. Stars under your own result are not what it buys.

Filtering is where a review block gets legally interesting. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials went into effect on 21 October 2024, and its review suppression provision, 16 CFR 465.7, covers representing the reviews on a part of your site dedicated to reviews as most or all of the reviews you received, while negative ones are held back. The carve-out is the part worth designing around: a review is not suppressed if you remove it under a rule you apply to every review regardless of what it says. So pick a rule you can state in one sentence, apply it to all of them, and ask every customer rather than a screened few. None of this is legal advice, and the FTC's questions and answers is the plainer read.

One block on every page is the lazy version. Coastline Physio, a fictional practice, runs two clinics, and the same snippet on both pages is what most sites ship. Point each clinic page at that clinic's reviews instead, then keep them arriving. A block whose newest date still reads 2025 a year from now argues against you in public, so send the Google review link after each appointment. How to get more Google reviews covers the rest.

FAQ

Can I add Google reviews to Squarespace for free? Not on Basic, because JavaScript in code blocks starts at Core. Above Basic, your only cost is the widget service. Free tiers usually limit how many reviews show and leave the vendor's name on the block.

Is there a Google reviews plugin for Squarespace? No. Squarespace does not use plugins the way WordPress does, and its nearest equivalent, Extensions, had no Google reviews widget in the catalogue on 6 September 2026. A code block and a snippet is the route.

Why does my code block show the code instead of the reviews? The Type menu is set to JavaScript. Set it to HTML, and check that Display Source is switched off.

I use Wix as well. Is it the same? Close, but the block and its limits differ. Wix takes the snippet in an Embed HTML element, which is an iframe that will not resize itself, and the phone version is a second element needing its own copy of the snippet. There is a separate walkthrough for adding Google reviews to a Wix website.

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website (no app needed)

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To add Google reviews to a Wix website, paste one line of HTML into Wix's Embed HTML element. Wix cannot pull reviews from a Google Business Profile by itself. You need either an app from the Wix App Market or a snippet from a review widget service. Both give you a block on the page that refills itself as new reviews come in.

Checked on 6 September 2026 against Wix's own help centre, Google's review rich results documentation and the FTC's consumer reviews rule. The click paths below are the Wix Editor, with a note on Wix Studio further down. I could not sign in to a Wix account for this piece, so the editor screenshots are Wix's own, taken from the support articles they belong to.

Wix has no Google reviews element

Wix's own page on adding customer testimonials offers two things: preset testimonial strips under Add Elements > Strip, and repeater lists under Add Elements > List > Repeaters. You type the content into both. Its closing tip is to "open the Wix App Market and type 'Testimonials' in the search". It does not mention Google, and the Wix Editor has nowhere to enter your business name and pull back your rating.

That is why the search results for this are almost all vendors. Your choice is an app or a snippet.

Route 1: an app from the Wix App Market

You install a Google reviews app, connect your profile inside it, and drop its element on the page. The install path in Wix's own instructions is Add Apps in the editor, search, open the app, + Add to Site, then Allow and Add to confirm.

Cost is not uniform. Wix's App Market page says "some apps have both a free and premium version while others require a premium upgrade". The free tier is usually where the review count cap and the vendor's badge live.

Support is not Wix's, and billing is separate. "Wix Customer Care can only assist with apps made by Wix"; for a third-party app the contact details sit in the App developed by section of its App Market page, the price is set by its developer, and the subscription is cancelled from Subscriptions in your Wix account. Wix is direct about the rest: "It is not possible to receive a refund for an app subscription."

This route is legitimate and keeps the settings in the editor you already use. The block only exists on Wix, so moving the site means setting up the connection again.

A widget service keeps the connection to your Google Business Profile, reads the reviews on a schedule and gives you one line of HTML. Wix's Embed HTML element accepts that line.

The snippet is usually a single script tag with an id in it:

<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>

That one is ours. Cloutly connects a Google location, gives you nine layouts and hands back a snippet for a Wix embed or any other site that accepts HTML. You can see the layouts on the review widgets page. New reviews appear in the block on their own.

Get the layout, theme and colour right here, before you go near the Wix canvas.

Keep the async attribute, whichever service you use. Without it, the browser stops building the page while it fetches the widget.

What Wix's Embed HTML element does to your widget

Most problems here come from Wix's embed element, not the widget.

It is an iframe, and it will not resize itself

Wix says it plainly in Embedding a site or a widget: "The HTML and URL elements in our editor are iFrames. Therefore, the code or site you are embedding won't be responsive, even if it is originally." Your widget sits inside the fixed box you drew on the canvas. It does not measure itself against the page.

Reviews do not all take up the same space. An element sized for a two-line review can crop a six-line one. Wix's fix, in the same article, is to "replace the px values with percentage units and set them to 100%" in the code you paste. A script-only snippet has no px values to change, so the element's height is your only control. Size it for your longest review, then check it again a month later.

HTTPS only

Wix is blunt: "Your code must contain HTTPS and not HTTP", and "only HTTPS codes and URLs are displayed". An http:// script src produces a blank box and no error message.

Wix draws the same support line around both routes: "we cannot provide support for external codes that were not created or tested by Wix". If the block is empty, contact the widget provider.

You do not need Velo, and you do not want a custom element

Wix's custom element is a different feature with a real condition attached: "For security reasons, to use the custom element, you must upgrade your site with a Premium Plan, connect a domain and have no ads on it." A review widget does not need it. Use an ordinary script tag in an ordinary embed. Dev Mode is unrelated.

Do you need a paid Wix plan to embed Google reviews?

Not for one Embed HTML element on one page. Wix's article for that element documents no plan requirement, and the element sits in the Add panel whatever you are paying.

The plan question usually comes from advice to install the widget site-wide through Settings > Custom Code in the dashboard. That advice fails for two reasons.

Custom Code cannot show a widget at all. Wix's own article says the snippets you add there are "always invisible to your site visitors", and its FAQ sends you straight back where you came from: to display visual content, add an iFrame with HTML code.

Custom Code is for analytics and verification tags. A review block is not that.

Custom Code is gated as well. It opens with "make sure that your site is published and has a connected domain", and Wix's domain article closes the loop: "to connect your domain, you must upgrade your site. If your site doesn't already have a Premium or Studio site plan, you can choose to either upgrade your site, or reassign an existing plan."

So a review block on a free wixsite.com address is fine. Adding one to every page without editing every page is not, and Custom Code cannot do it for you.

Wix added one recent caveat. "In December 2025, Wix introduced new frontend security measures for custom code on Wix sites. This means that some code snippets that previously worked may now be blocked until the provider updates them." Wix says it affects dashboard custom code, embedded code and Velo code alike. If a widget that worked last year is now a blank box, start with the provider.

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website, step by step

Build the widget first. Connect the Google location in your review service, choose a layout, set the theme and copy the snippet. It is faster to settle the look before you start publishing and previewing in Wix.
Open the page in the Wix Editor and click Add Elements on the left, then Embed Code, then Popular Embeds, then Embed HTML. Popular Embeds is an option in the middle column, not a heading. Choose Embed HTML from the column on the right. The element arrives on the canvas as an empty box.
Drag the box to where the reviews belong. On a service page, put it below the booking or enquiry button rather than at the bottom of the homepage. Reviews help where someone is deciding, not where the page happens to end.
Click the element, then Enter Code, and paste the snippet under Add your code here. The panel asks What do you want to add? and offers Website address and Code, so choose Code. Then click Apply.

Wix's article calls the button Enter Code; the panel calls the option Code. Same thing.

Write the alt text in the field labelled What's in the embed? A screen reader gets no other description, because the frame's contents are invisible to the page.
Size the box. Drag the handles until the longest review fits, then leave a little more room.
Preview, publish, and open the live site. An embed can look fine in the editor and be empty on the live page. The usual causes are the HTTPS rule, a script the preview never ran or the December 2025 change above.

Wix Studio puts it under a different menu

Studio is a separate editor with different panel names, so the Wix Editor path will send you looking for a menu that is not there. In Studio the path is Add Elements > Embed & Social > Embed Code, then Enter Code, paste, Apply (Studio Editor: Adding an HTML iFrame Element).

Studio documents one detail that the classic Editor's article leaves out: your code runs in a sandboxed iframe, with allow-scripts and allow-same-origin re-enabled among others. That lets a script-tag widget run there.

The mobile version is a second job

Do not assume the desktop block carries over. Wix's mobile embeds article says desktop embeds may display differently on a phone because "certain iFrames are designed for specific screen sizes, and may not fit or align correctly on mobile devices". Its advice is to hide the desktop version and add a mobile-friendly alternative in the mobile editor.

Anything you add in the mobile editor is mobile-only and never appears on desktop. Give it its own snippet, height and usually a narrower layout. A three-column wall that reads well at 1440 pixels becomes a column of slivers at 390. A single-column list or carousel holds up better. The mobile path is shorter: Add > Embed Code > Embed HTML, with no Popular Embeds step in between.

Keeping the block honest, and current

Check these before you publish. The parent guide on how to embed Google reviews has the full treatment. This is the short version.

Google will not give you stars in search for reviews you host about yourself, and it names widgets specifically. Its 2019 review rich results FAQ says: "Google Search won't display review snippets for those pages. Embedding a third-party widget is seen as controlling the process of linking reviews." Switching on your widget's review schema is still worth doing, because it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. It will not put stars under your own result. Your Business Profile is a separate surface and is unaffected.

Do not present a filtered block as everything you have. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials went into effect on 21 October 2024. Its review suppression provision covers misrepresenting the reviews in a part of your site dedicated to displaying reviews as most or all of what you received. The FTC's own questions and answers add an important limit: sorting five-star reviews to the top is not covered by the rule, "however, organizing reviews in a way that makes it difficult for consumers to know about or find negative reviews could be an unfair or deceptive act or practice in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act". None of this is legal advice. Use a filter you can explain in one sentence, put that sentence near the block and link to your Google profile. Ask every customer for a review, not a screened subset.

A review block can go stale where customers see it. Coastline Physio, a fictional two-clinic practice, could embed four good reviews under the Book now button on each clinic page and forget about it. A year later, the newest date still reads 2025 and the block makes the opposite case. An embed commits you to keep collecting. Send the Google review link after a job to keep the dates moving; how to get more Google reviews covers the rest.

FAQ

Can I add Google reviews to Wix for free? On one page, yes. The Embed HTML element carries no documented plan requirement, so the cost is whatever your widget service charges. Free tiers usually cap the reviews shown and keep the vendor's badge on the block.

Do I need a Wix Premium plan? Not for the embed. You need one for anything going through Settings > Custom Code, which requires a published site with a connected domain. Custom Code will not display a review block anyway, so it is rarely the reason to upgrade.

Why is my Wix embed a blank box? Check the protocol first: Wix only displays HTTPS code. Then check whether you are looking at the editor rather than the published page, and whether the element is tall enough to show anything. If a snippet worked before and stopped, ask the provider about Wix's December 2025 frontend security change.

Will the widget slow my Wix site down? It can. Third-party JavaScript loading in an iframe is often why a page that used to load quickly no longer does. Run a speed test after you add it, not before.

I use Squarespace as well. Is it the same? Close, but the surface differs. Squarespace takes the snippet in a code block rather than an iframe element, and JavaScript in a code block needs a Core plan or above. There is a separate walkthrough for adding Google reviews to Squarespace.

AI Overviews for local businesses: how to appear

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI Overviews are the AI-written answer Google puts at the top of some results pages, and for a business with an address the honest headline is that there is nothing new to install, submit or mark up. Google's guidance for site owners says it in one sentence: "The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode). There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." The profile, the reviews and the pages you already have are the whole lever.

For a local business, the practical question is when an AI Overview appears and what it reads when it does. Every claim below that belongs to Google is quoted from Google's own pages, checked on 6 September 2026. Where Google has not documented something, this post says so rather than guessing. This article sticks to Google's AI Overview; AI search optimization for local businesses covers all five surfaces together.

The AI Overview Google returned for "what should I look for when choosing a physio in bondi" on 6 September 2026. Source attributions have been cropped out so that no individual clinic is named.

What is an AI Overview?

An AI Overview is a summary Google writes at the top of a results page, with links to the pages it drew on. Google Search Help calls it "an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper". Search Central adds the purpose: they "help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more" (AI features and your website).

It is not an ad unit, so there is no placement to buy. And your customers cannot switch it off. Google's help page says AI Overviews are "a core Google Search feature, like knowledge panels. Features cannot be turned off", though a searcher can apply the Web filter after searching to see "only text-based links without features like AI Overviews" (AI Overviews in Google Search). Site owners can still control what Google takes from their own pages.

When does Google show an AI Overview for a local search?

Less often than the coverage suggests. Google's own wording is that AI Overviews "were designed to show up on queries where they can add additional benefits beyond what people might already get on Search", and, further down the same page, that they "are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don't trigger."

Here is what that looked like on 6 September 2026, from one Australian connection that Google placed at Carole Park in Queensland while I searched for a Sydney suburb.

"best physio in bondi" returned a Places block: three profiles, a map, a "Top rated" filter chip, and a quoted line from a customer review under each listing. No AI Overview.
"what should I look for when choosing a physio in bondi" returned an AI Overview with headed sections on credentials, treatment approach and local fit, a panel of three cited articles, and an "Ask anything" box underneath it. No Places block.

Two searches on one day from one location is an observation, not a rule. I ran the second one twice within a few minutes and the opening sentence came back differently each time: same shape, different wording, a different thing emphasised. One AI Overview is one sample, which is worth remembering before anyone reads a trend into a screenshot.

The pattern does line up with what Google documents. The shopping question already had a good answer in the form of three profiles, so a summary added nothing. The research question had no such answer, so it got one. The searches closest to a booking are still being answered by your Business Profile, and AI Overviews are turning up on the questions people ask before that. For the profile half, whether Google reviews affect your ranking covers the three factors Google publishes for local results.

What do AI Overviews use to answer a local question?

They run on ordinary Search. Google's guide to generative AI features describes the mechanism as retrieval-augmented generation, "a technique (also known as grounding)" that relies "on our core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date web pages from our Search index" (Optimizing your website for generative AI features). Alongside it sits query fan-out, "a set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information".

So the entry requirement is the ordinary one. Search Central: "To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements."

Your Business Profile is named, twice. The generative AI guide has a section headed "Optimize your local business and ecommerce details" saying that "generative AI responses can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses", and that Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results". The AI features guide repeats it as a checklist item: "Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date."

What sits behind that profile is not only what you typed into it. Google's Business Profile help says the information is compiled from publicly available sources "such as crawled web content", licensed third-party data, users who contribute facts and content, and Google's own interactions with the place (how Google sources business information).

Reviews: what is documented, and what is not. Google documents reviews as an input to local ranking. Its local ranking page puts them inside prominence and says "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Google also documents that generative AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems".

What Google has never published is a sentence saying AI Overviews read, weigh or quote your individual reviews. Not the count, not the rating, not the text. Anyone telling you how many reviews an AI Overview needs invented the number. The one Google product that does document reading review text is the Gemini API's Grounding with Google Maps tool, a developer product rather than the AI Overview on a search page. That, and the equivalent documentation from OpenAI and Perplexity, is covered in does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours.

Is there special markup or a file for AI Overviews?

No, and Google spends a section saying so. From the mythbusting part of the generative AI guide:

You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them.

The same section rules out special schema.org markup and says there is no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to understand it. It also warns against the tactic usually sold next to this one, which is spinning up a page for every question variation. Creating separate content for every possible search "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google Search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy". If an agency is quoting you for an llms.txt file, an AI-flavoured rewrite of your service pages or forty new suburb pages, that quote is for work Google says it does not use.

How to appear in AI Overviews as a local business

Start at the top of this list and work down. None of it is new.

Check you are indexed, snippet-eligible and not excluded. Indexing and snippet eligibility are the only technical requirements, and they are also how a business gets shut out by accident: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex all limit what Google can show from your pages. There is a second switch. Google's generative AI guide says a site "must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console to be eligible for display in generative AI features on Google Search". Inclusion is the default, so most businesses have nothing to do here. Check it anyway if an agency has been in there.
Finish the Business Profile. Google's local ranking page asks for the full address, the hours including special hours, the right category and attributes like parking and Wi-Fi, and says "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." Adding your business to Google Maps has the setup and verification steps.
Keep collecting reviews, and reply to them. Google's documented claim here is about local ranking rather than AI answers, and it is worth having on those terms: more reviews and positive ratings can help, and "Positive reviews and helpful replies can help your business stand out." Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be pleased. Google's contribution policies bar merchants from moves that "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". How to get more Google reviews covers the timing and the follow-up.
Make your details identical everywhere you are listed. Profiles are built partly from crawled web content and licensed third-party data, so an old phone number on a directory is a number Google has seen. Fixing the outliers is dull work and the highest-yield hour in this list.
Write the page that answers the question. In the AI Overview I looked at, the cited sources were articles from clinics and health providers about how to choose a physiotherapist. Not a directory, not an SEO agency's listicle. Google's guidance points the same way, asking for a "unique point of view" and contrasting commodity content, "something like '7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers'", with a piece that carries real experience. You know the questions your customers ask in the first appointment. Those are the pages.

What AI Overviews do to your clicks

Only Google has the aggregate data. In August 2025, Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, published the company's position: "Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year" (AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks, 6 August 2025).

The same post concedes the obvious. For quick-answer questions, "like 'when is the next full moon,'" people "may be satisfied with the initial response and not click further", and "user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others." Read it for what it is: Google's account of its own product, in aggregate, with no method published. The only number that describes your site is in your own Search Console.

AI Overviews and AI Mode are not the same thing

Google says the two features behave differently: "AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary."

	AI Overview	AI Mode
Where it is	At the top of an ordinary results page, when Google decides it adds something	Its own tab and its own page, entered deliberately
What it is for	Getting "to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly"	Queries "where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed"
Follow-ups	The AI Overview I saw offered a box to continue in	Built around them: "ask anything and get an AI-powered response, with the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web"
Your job	Identical. No additional requirements for either	Identical

The difference for a local business is who arrives. Someone who opens AI Mode and asks three questions in a row is further into a decision than someone who glanced at a summary. SEO for Google AI Mode: what a local business has to change covers that surface on its own.

How to check whether you appear in AI Overviews

Google now reports it. The generative AI performance report in Search Console "shows data about how your site performs in generative AI features on Google Search", and as of 31 August 2026 Google has "rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide". Four things to know before you read it.

It counts impressions, "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search". There is no position or ranking figure in it.
It covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together and does not split them.
You can group it by page, country, date or device, which is how you find out which of your pages is doing the work.
It reports on your website, drawing on the Web search type in the ordinary performance report. Your Business Profile is a separate surface with its own reporting, so a strong profile and a quiet report are not a contradiction.

If the report is empty, Google names two causes worth checking: your site has not had enough impressions in generative AI features yet, or it has been excluded from them.

Search Console covers Google and nothing else. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer local questions from different sources and cite different pages. For those, run the same searches your customers run, from the area they are in, and read the citation list as a work list. Cloutly's AI search visibility asks those three assistants discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named, and it does not sample AI Overviews, so Search Console stays the record for Google's own surfaces. How to monitor AI search visibility is the procedure for checking the assistants by hand.

Frequently asked questions

Can I stop my business appearing in AI Overviews?

For your website, yes. Search Console has a Search generative AI control under Settings, rolled out to all sites on 31 August 2026. Including your site is the default; excluding it covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, takes one to two days, and costs you the impressions and traffic those features send. Google says the control "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search", so it is narrower than nosnippet and noindex, which are Search-wide and take your ordinary snippet with them. None of it governs your Business Profile. That is a separate surface and this switch does not touch it.

Do I need schema markup to appear in an AI Overview?

No. Google's wording is "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." It is still worth having for rich results in ordinary Search, which is the reason to keep it.

Does an AI Overview replace the map pack?

Google has published nothing saying one displaces the other. In the two searches above, on 6 September 2026, they did not appear together: the profile-shopping query returned the Places block and no AI Overview, and the question-shaped query returned an AI Overview and no Places block. One day, one location. Run your own searches, from the suburb you serve, and write down what you see.

How to edit your Google Business Profile, and what happens after you save

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To edit your Google Business Profile, search for your business while signed in to the account that manages it, select Edit profile, change the field and select Save. In the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Google does not publish the change straight away. "We review your changes before we update them live on your profile", and "Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days."

Hours, phone and website usually reappear within the hour. Name, address and category are the three that can send you back through verification, so plan those changes. The clicks are quick. The wait and whatever Google does with the change come afterwards.

If a guide tells you to sign in to a Google My Business dashboard, it is out of date. That is why so many walkthroughs point you to menus you cannot find.

Google's own timings for an edit, and the three states it can come back in. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

Where you edit a Google Business Profile now

There are two places to do it, and both work from your own listing. In Google Search, sign in with the account that manages the profile and search your business name. A panel opens above the results with Edit profile on it. In the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Either way you finish on Save (Edit your Business Profile).

Business Profile Manager at business.google.com is still live, but it manages a set of profiles rather than edits a single one.

Which fields you can edit, and which ones need verification

Everything below sits under Edit profile. The right-hand column tells you how carefully to approach each change.

Field	What Google says happens
Business name	"If you change your business name after it's verified, you might need to verify your business again"
Address and pin location	"If you move your business to a new address after it's verified, you must verify your business again"
Business category	"If you add or edit an existing category, you might be asked to verify your business again"
Regular and special hours	Reviewed, no verification step
Phone numbers	Reviewed. Two numbers on top of the primary one
Website, social links, description	Reviewed
Attributes, photos, opening date, service area	Reviewed

Name, address and category help Google decide that a business is real and matches its description, so changing one reopens that question. The rest is detail about a business Google has already accepted.

Names have another trap. Google wants the name that "reflect[s] your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers". It rules out taglines, store codes, trademark symbols, fully capitalised words, opening hours, phone numbers and location descriptors such as "Holiday Inn (I-93 at Exit 2)" (Guidelines for representing your business on Google). Adding your suburb or your main service to the name is the most common rejected edit, and it risks the whole profile: Google "reserves the right to suspend access to Business Profiles on Google or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines".

A real rebrand is narrower than most people expect. Google allows a name change on the same profile only where "the proper nouns and services described in the business name remain unchanged and the business category remains unchanged". Anything larger counts as a new business: you mark the existing profile closed and create a new one, and the reviews stay on the old profile. Removing a business from Google covers closing one properly.

How to change business hours on Google

Customers use your hours the same day, so this is the field to get right.

Open your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
Next to "Hours", select Edit, then Open with main hours.
Tick the box next to each day you are open. A day you leave unticked shows as closed.
Set the times with the dropdowns. For a day you trade around the clock, select Opens at, then 24 hours.
Select Save.

A third setting is easy to miss. Open with no main hours publishes the profile with no hours on it at all. That suits a business whose hours genuinely vary, but not one that has not filled them in yet (Edit your business hours).

While you are there, check whether the kitchen shuts before the venue or delivery runs later than the counter. Those details belong in More hours, not your main hours.

Special hours and holiday hours

Special hours are the tool for a one-off: hours that change "for a brief period of time, like for a special event", set "so that your regular hours don't change".

Select Edit profile, then Hours, then Edit next to "Special hours". Pick or add the date, mark the day closed or enter the times, and save. The ceiling is six days: "You can set special hours if your business temporarily adjusts its hours of operation or remains closed for up to 6 days in a row." Longer, or for a period you cannot put an end date on, and Google wants the profile marked Temporarily closed instead (How to set Special hours).

Public holidays are separate. On the holidays Google tracks for your country, "a warning may appear on your Business Profile that tells users your business hours might differ", whether or not anything about your day changes (About holidays on Google). Confirm the date to clear it. Do the next twelve months in one sitting.

How to update business information on Google without triggering a re-verification

Order matters when you have several things to change. Do the safe fields first and on their own: hours, phone, website, description, photos, attributes. They go into review and come back without moving anything else. Then take name, address and category one at a time, and only when you can prove the new detail from the public record. That is exactly what an appeal will ask you for.

Update the rest of the internet before you press Save. If the old number still sits on your website, you will have to make the edit twice.

How long does a Google Business Profile edit take to show?

Google reviews everything: "Edits that you make to your verified Business Profile are reviewed to ensure they follow our guidelines", and the published window is "Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days" (Understand what happens to your Business Profile edits). Most hours and phone changes land in minutes. Address changes, name changes and edits on a profile that has been suspended before are where the long tail lives.

Every edit ends in one of three states. Accepted means it is live. Not approved means "Google might not approve changes if it can't confirm its accuracy". Pending means it is still in review. Google's Check your edit status tool tells you which, so you do not have to refresh your own search result and guess. Sign in to the account that manages the profile first.

Google Business Profile edit not showing: what to check

Work down this list in order.

It is still pending. Anything under thirty days is inside Google's published window, however unreasonable that feels. Check the status. Resubmitting the same change speeds nothing up.
It was not approved. Google could not confirm the change was accurate. Most common on names, addresses and phone numbers, and appealable.
Google changed it back. A different thing from a rejection, and covered below.
You are editing a duplicate. Where two profiles exist for one site, your edit is live on the one nobody sees. Multiple locations with the same name, and how to fix a duplicate covers clearing them.
The profile is suspended. Nothing publishes from a suspended profile, and a keyword-stuffed name is a frequent cause.
You are looking at the wrong thing. Search your exact name and suburb, not a category term, and check on a device you did not edit from.

When an edit is rejected, and how to appeal

Rejected edits to your name, category, address, phone and website can be appealed, but the route depends on where the business trades. In the UK and the EEA it is Google's appeals tool. Everywhere else it is the contact form (Appeal rejected business information edits).

The route for a rejected edit is not the same everywhere. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

The evidence matters most. Google wants official business registration, a business licence, tax certificates or utility bills, and it wants "the business name and address match the profile you want to make an appeal for". A power bill in a director's name at a home address does not match a shopfront profile. That mismatch is why appeals fail.

A few details catch people out. You get sixty minutes from submitting the appeal to attach the evidence. "Appeal reviews and decisions can take up to 5 business days", and a second appeal for the same issue slows the queue rather than the reverse. Do not create a fresh profile for the same business while the appeal runs, however tempting that gets.

When Google changes your profile back

An edit can disappear without being rejected. Google updates profiles on its own: "Google gathers info from different sources, like user reports and licensed content", and "If sources report that your profile info is incorrect or outdated, Google may update your profile." Members of the public suggest edits on Maps. A data provider can supply hours you never entered.

You can see this in the editor. The text colour is the tell.

Blue is Google's version of a field, not yours. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

Change it back and save. The caveat is Google's own: "You can't manage all Google updates through your Business Profile." When a change keeps returning, correct the source instead. Usually it is your website footer, a directory with an old number, or a Facebook Page nobody has opened since the fit-out.

Editing several locations at once

At one site this is a ten-minute job. At twenty it is a different job, because every risky field multiplies and hours drift one location at a time.

Business Profile Manager is where that work happens, with business groups for access and a bulk upload spreadsheet for adding and updating profiles at volume. Managing several Google locations sets out the groups, the spreadsheet and the ownership roles, and adding a business to Google Maps covers any site not properly on Google yet.

The sequencing matters. Say Coastline Physio changes its phone number across nine clinics and Emma works through the profiles as she gets time. For that fortnight some clinics are right and some are not, and nobody can tell you which. Decide the new value once, hold it somewhere that is not a profile, and publish everywhere from that record.

Keeping the same facts on every other site

Customers check more than your Google profile, and Google does too. Hours on Yelp, a phone number on Facebook and an address in your website footer all affect how much Google trusts the version you just typed. Keeping them matching is listing consistency, sometimes called NAP consistency, and it is a subject of its own: what it actually does for your rankings, and the audit to run across all eight sources.

That single record is the practical answer. Cloutly's listings management works that way: one record per location carrying name, phone, website, description, address and hours, published to Google Business Profile and to the Facebook Page only after you approve a preview of the exact change, then checked weekly against Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor.

FAQ

Can I change my business name on Google without losing my reviews?

Only if the change is minor: the proper nouns and services in the name stay the same and the category does not change. Anything bigger counts as a new business, which means closing the existing profile and creating a new one. The reviews stay with the old profile.

Do I need to verify again if I only change my phone number?

No. Verification comes into it on the name, the address and the category. Phone, website, hours, description and photos are reviewed, but they do not reopen verification.

Why does Google keep changing my hours back?

Because something else is telling Google your hours are different. Google updates profiles from user reports and licensed data, and shows those changes in blue in the editor. Fix the source that disagrees with you, then set the hours again.

Can I still edit my profile in the old Google My Business dashboard?

No. That dashboard is gone. A single profile is edited in Google Search and the Google Maps app, and business.google.com now handles sets of profiles.

SEO for Google AI Mode: what a local business has to change

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SEO for Google AI Mode is the SEO you were already doing. Google puts it in one line in its guidance for site owners: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." No submission, no markup, no file to upload. What changes is the question your customer asks. AI Mode is built for the long comparative questions people used to break into four separate searches.

Everything below is quoted from Google's own help pages, developer documentation and announcements, checked on 6 September 2026. Where Google has published nothing, this post says so rather than filling the gap with a number somebody invented. The broader guide to how AI search decides which local businesses get named covers the other surfaces.

Google Search Help, captured 6 September 2026.

What is Google AI Mode, and where can people use it?

AI Mode is a separate search experience with its own page. Google Search Help calls it "Google's most powerful AI search experience", where "You can ask anything and get an AI-powered response, with the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web" (Get AI-powered responses with AI Mode in Google Search). People reach it three ways: at google.com/ai, by tapping AI Mode after typing a question on google.com, or from the home screen of the Google app.

The rollout, in Google's own announcements:

5 March 2025. AI Mode arrives as an opt-in experiment in Labs, offered first to Google One AI Premium subscribers (Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode).
20 May 2025. Google begins "rolling out AI Mode in the U.S.", with "no Labs sign-up required" and a new tab in Search and in the Google app (AI in Search: Going beyond information to intelligence).
21 August 2025. Google says it will "expand AI Mode to over 180 new countries and territories in English" (AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally).

The live country list sits on the help page rather than in the announcement. On 6 September 2026 it named Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Ireland. If you serve any of those markets, your customers can already ask AI Mode who to call. Google maintains that list and changes it, so read the page rather than this sentence. One caveat from the same page, before you treat any answer as authoritative: "AI Mode doesn't always get it right."

AI Mode and AI Overviews are not the same feature

They get talked about as one thing. Google says otherwise: "AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary" (AI features and your website).

	AI Overview	AI Mode
Where the customer meets it	Above the ordinary results, unasked. Google says they "are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don't trigger"	Its own page, entered on purpose, at google.com/ai or through the AI Mode button
What it is built for	Getting "to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly"	Queries "where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed"
The shape of the question	Usually one, typed as normal	"Nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches", then follow-ups in the same thread
When the AI is not confident	Not documented	"In some cases, AI Mode will provide a set of web links if there's not high enough confidence in the quality or helpfulness of an AI response"
What you have to do differently	Nothing. The eligibility rule covers both	Nothing

The difference that matters commercially is who arrives. Somebody who opens AI Mode, describes the problem and asks two follow-ups has done their shortlisting inside the answer. By the time they click, the comparison is over. A searcher who glanced at an AI Overview on the way to the map pack has not. AI Overviews for local businesses covers that other surface on its own terms.

What query fan-out means when someone asks for a local business

AI Mode does not run the question you typed, and that changes which of your pages can be pulled into an answer. Google's help page: "AI mode uses a 'query fan-out' technique, dividing your question into subtopics and searching for each one simultaneously across multiple data sources." The developer glossary defines the same thing as "a set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information and fetch additional relevant search results to address the user's query" (Optimizing your website for generative AI features). Google adds that both AI Mode and AI Overviews may use it, so fan-out is not an AI Mode exclusive.

Google's own example is a lawn. Ask "how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds" and the fan-out queries might include "best herbicides for lawns", "remove weeds without chemicals" and "how to prevent weeds in lawn". One question, several searches, one assembled answer.

Now put a local question through the same machine. Somebody types: my dog is limping after a run, who should I take her to in Newtown and what will it cost. Google has not published the fan-out for that query and nobody outside Google can see it, so treat what follows as the shape of the thing rather than a leaked list. It is not one search. It is a question about limping in dogs, one about which kind of clinic treats it, one about vets in that suburb, and one about price.

So your service page is no longer competing only for "vet Newtown". It is one of several documents that can satisfy a branch of a question nobody typed that way. A page explaining what a limp usually means and what an assessment costs answers two branches at once. A page headed "Newtown's most trusted vets" answers none of them.

That is not an invitation to spin up a page per fan-out query. Google bans it in the same guide: creating separate content for every possible variation of how people might search, "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google Search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy". Depth on the questions you get asked, not breadth across guessed ones.

The upside is Google's own claim. Its models "identify more supporting web pages" while the answer is written, so AI features "display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links associated with the response than with a classic web search". More links from more angles is an opening for a business too small to hold position three for its head term.

What AI Mode shows when the question is about a place

Business information is in scope. Search Central's generative AI guide says "Where appropriate, generative AI responses can include product listings, product information, and information about local businesses", and that Merchant Center and Google Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results". Its sibling page turns that into a checklist item: "Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date."

AI Mode also reaches Google's place data, not the open web alone. Announcing the agentic version on 21 August 2025, Google wrote that "AI Mode uses the live web browsing capabilities of Project Mariner, direct partner integrations on Search, and the power of our Knowledge Graph and Google Maps to help users take action on the web", starting with restaurant reservations and "expanding soon to local service appointments and event tickets". The fine print matters: that booking behaviour launched as a US Labs experiment, not as the general feature.

There is one published description of how a place answer looks. Writing about travel on 27 August 2026, Google said an AI Mode hotel search returns "a visual list of options, complete with guest reviews and key factors to compare" (3 new ways to plan and book travel in Search). Guest reviews inside the answer, in Google's own account of its own feature.

What Google has published nowhere: which fields of a Business Profile appear in an AI Mode answer, how a set of businesses is chosen, or any weighting given to reviews inside AI Mode. If a vendor tells you AI Mode reads your last thirty reviews, or that 4.6 stars is the threshold, they made it up. What Google does publish about ranking a local business sits on the local ranking page: results "are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity", and "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking". That page is about local results, not about AI Mode, and the honest position is that the two overlap without Google having said how much. Whether Google reviews affect your ranking works through the documented half.

SEO for Google AI Mode: the four things you can change

None of them is new. That is Google's point, not a rhetorical flourish.

Be indexed and snippet-eligible. That is the whole technical requirement: "To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements." Businesses fail it by accident, usually a noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet left behind after a redesign. Search Console also carries a setting that excludes a site from generative AI features outright. Check both before you buy anything.
Finish the Business Profile and keep it current. Google names it on both guidance pages, it costs an afternoon, and it is the input you control most directly. Our guide to adding your business to Google Maps has the setup and verification steps.
Make your details identical everywhere you are listed. AI Mode reaches Maps and the Knowledge Graph as well as the open web, so an old phone number on a directory is a number Google has seen. Dull work, and the highest-yield hour on this list.
Write the page that answers a branch of the question. The questions your customers ask in the first ten minutes of an appointment are the pages: what a symptom usually means, what the options cost, what you do that the place down the road does not.

There is nothing to install. Google's generative AI guide is blunt about it: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them." Any quote you are handed for an llms.txt file or an AI-flavoured rewrite of your service pages is a quote for work Google says it ignores.

Reviews sit underneath all of it, and the way to get them is to ask every customer rather than the ones you expect to be pleased. Google's contribution policies bar merchants from offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" in exchange for a review, and from moves that "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". A filtered profile describes a business that does not exist, which is a poor thing to hand a model. How to get more Google reviews covers the timing and the follow-up.

What AI Mode does to your clicks

Google is the only party with the aggregate data, so this section quotes Google and stops. On 6 August 2025, Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, published the company's line: "Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year", along with the concession underneath that average, that "user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others" (AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks). Google has published nothing about clicks from AI Mode specifically. Read the rest for what it is: a company describing its own product in aggregate with no method attached, not a finding about your website. The figures circulating elsewhere are not Google's and do not agree with each other.

How to check what AI Mode says about your business

Search Console covers the website. A manual check covers the business itself.

Your website. Search Console's generative AI performance report "shows data about how your site performs in generative AI features on Google Search", counting impressions, which Google defines as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search". As of 31 August 2026 Google has "rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide". Two limits to know before you open it: the report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together with no way to separate them, and it excludes anything a person saw inside a Search Labs experiment. An empty report usually means too few impressions, or a site excluded from generative AI features.

Your business. Search Console reports on your site, not on your Business Profile, and an impression count says nothing about whether the answer named you, described you correctly or sent the customer to a rival. For that you run the questions your customers run, from the area they are in, and write down what comes back. How to check whether AI assistants recommend your business has the prompts, the sign-out settings and the log, including how to run AI Mode cleanly.

Do the other assistants while you are there, because they answer local questions from different sources and cite different pages. Does ChatGPT recommend businesses like yours covers where each one gets its local answer. Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and records whether each location was named and which rivals were. It does not sample AI Mode, so for Google's own surfaces the hand check and Search Console are what you have.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google AI Mode available in Australia and New Zealand?

Yes. On 6 September 2026, Google's AI Mode help page listed Australia and New Zealand, along with the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Ireland. Google announced the expansion to "over 180 new countries and territories in English" on 21 August 2025. It maintains the list and changes it, so check the page rather than this sentence.

Do I need schema markup or an llms.txt file for AI Mode?

No. Google says you don't need new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Google Search including its generative AI capabilities, "as Google Search itself doesn't use them", and that structured data "isn't required for generative AI search". Keep your structured data for rich results in ordinary Search. That is what earns its place.

Can I see AI Mode traffic on its own in Search Console?

No. The generative AI performance report combines AI Overviews and AI Mode and does not split them, and both are also counted inside the ordinary Performance report under the Web search type. There is no AI Mode filter.

How many reviews do I need to be named in AI Mode?

Google has never published a number, for AI Mode or for local results generally. It documents reviews as an input to local ranking, in the words "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking", and it has documented nothing about how reviews are used inside an AI Mode answer. Anyone quoting you a threshold invented it.

Google review link: how to get it, and where to put it

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Your Google review link is the URL that opens the review box on your Business Profile with the star selector already showing. You copy it from your own profile, on a computer: Read Reviews, then Get more reviews, then Copy. That part takes a minute.

Once you've copied it, the real work is deciding where the link lives and what a customer has to do after they tap it. Two things break it most often, and neither is the URL: the customer has no Google account, or the profile you copied it from is not the listing people find.

Google's own instructions, read 6 September 2026. Note the line about QR codes and computer browsers.

How to get your Google review link

These are Google's own instructions, as they stand in September 2026:

Go to your Business Profile. Signed in to the account that manages it, searching your own business name on Google is the quickest way there. If you cannot find the profile at all, how to see your Google reviews covers where it lives now.
Select Read Reviews, then Get more reviews.
To copy the review link, select Copy. To save the QR code, right-click it and select Save image as.

One catch trips people up. Google says reviews QR codes "can only be generated on a computer browser, not on mobile devices". Do this on a computer, not on a phone between appointments.

Then paste the link somewhere you will not lose it. A pinned message in the team chat works. So does the shared document where the rest of your marketing assets live. Most owners who come looking for this link have copied it before and cannot remember where it went.

Building the link from a Place ID

You can also build the URL yourself. Every place on Google Maps has a Place ID, which Google defines as "a textual identifier that uniquely identifies a place". Look yours up in Google's Place ID finder, put it after https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=, and you get the same review box.

It deserves an honest label, because most articles give it none. Google does not document that URL. The Place ID finder sits in the Maps Platform developer documentation, which is written for people building apps, and no Business Profile help page tells a business owner to construct a review link this way. It works today. It is not a supported feature, so it can change without a deprecation notice. Google also warns on that same page that "Place IDs may change over time".

Volume is the one case where it earns its keep. If you are building links for forty locations and the Place IDs are already sitting in a spreadsheet, generating the URLs beats clicking through forty profiles. For a single business, copy the link Google hands you.

Short links, QR codes and the g.page name you cannot get any more

The link Google gives you is fine in a text message, where nobody reads the URL. It is ugly on a printed docket, which is why businesses go looking for something shorter.

Custom short names used to be the answer. A business could claim a name and hand out g.page/yourbusinessname. Google's help page on short names now says you can no longer create or edit short names, and that the ones that already exist "will still work but will no longer be shown on the Business Profile to customers". A short name already painted on a window keeps working. You cannot get a new one.

Third-party shorteners are the usual substitute. They work, with two things worth knowing before you print five thousand of anything. A shortened link hides where it goes, which costs you some trust in an SMS. And a free shortener account can lapse and take the link with it. If you shorten, use a domain a customer will recognise as yours.

For anything physical, a QR code sidesteps the problem. Google's panel gives you one, and there is a Google review QR code generator here if you want a printable poster in the next five minutes. Either way, test the code at the size it will be printed, from where a customer will be standing, before you order the run.

If you would rather not touch Business Profile, a generator will build the code off your listing and lay out the poster for you.

Where to put your Google review link

Google names four places on the same help page: on your receipts, in your thank you emails, at the end of a chat interaction, and printed and displayed in your store. That is a fair start, and it leaves out the one that does the most work. Trades put it on the van and the invoice, which getting reviews for home services goes through, and a site can carry the reviews themselves, as in adding Google reviews to Wix.

Where	Why it works	What to watch
A text message after the job	It arrives on the device the review gets written on	One message, one link, no preamble
Your email signature	Costs nothing and runs on every thread you already have	It is passive, so treat it as a bonus rather than the ask
The invoice or the receipt	The customer is already looking at it, and it dates the ask to the job	Print the QR code, not the URL
A card at the counter or on the desk	Catches the customer who never opens a message	Somebody has to actually hand it over
Your website's thank-you or confirmation page	Reaches people mid-transaction with no extra send	Only meaningful if the job is genuinely done at that point

The text message and the QR code cover for each other. The message reaches the customer who has already left; the code catches the one who never opens anything from a business.

Timing beats placement anyway. The same link sent an hour after a haircut and a fortnight after a haircut are two different messages. If sending them by hand is the bottleneck, that is what review campaigns do: a repeat customer is one contact asked once, a second booking moves the ask rather than adding one, and anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days is skipped. For the wording that goes around the link, there are copyable review request templates for SMS and email.

The link is an invitation, not a gate

Send the link to everyone you served. Not the happy ones. Not the customers you have a good feeling about.

Google's Maps user generated content policy files the alternative under rating manipulation. Merchants must not "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". Filtering who gets the link is exactly that, whether you do the filtering by hand or with software that asks for a star rating first.

The same list bans paying for the outcome. Merchants must not "Offer incentives ... in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review". In the United States that is law as well as policy: the Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, announced 14 August 2024) bans compensation or incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, and lets the FTC seek civil penalties against violators.

One more line in that list governs both the counter card and the staff leaderboard. Google says that when soliciting reviews, "merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included", and it spells out that this covers asking staff to bring in a set number of reviews, or asking staff to solicit reviews that name them. So leave the card on the counter. Do not stand over anybody while they write, do not tell them what to say, and do not set your team a monthly review target.

What Google does allow it puts plainly: merchants may "Solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review". Asking is fine. Asking selectively is not. How to get 5-star Google reviews without breaking the rules has more on where that line sits.

The merchant rules under Rating Manipulation, read 6 September 2026. The two staff bullets sit under the on-premises rule.

What your customer has to do on their side

A Google review needs a Google account. Google is explicit: "Customers must be signed into a Google Account to leave a review. They can set one up with a non-Gmail email address." There is no anonymous review on Google. A willing customer who has never had an account faces a sign-up before they can help you, and a fair share of them stop there. That accounts for more silent failures than any broken link.

When someone taps your link they get the review box on your listing: a star selector, a text field and a Post button. Nothing is filled in for them, and nothing is filtered on the way through. A review with a sentence or two of text tells the next reader more than a bare five stars does, so it is fine to say what you would find useful, as long as you are not dictating it.

If a customer tells you they have no account and will not make one, take the answer. Point them somewhere else to leave feedback and move on. The review that never gets written costs you nothing. The customer you badger costs you more.

If you have more than one location

One Business Profile, one review link. There is no single link for a business with several sites, because the link points at a listing and every location has its own.

Open each profile in turn and repeat the copy step, then label them somewhere your team can read: location name, link, QR code file. The common failure is one link copied out of head office and pasted into every location's messages, which quietly parks every review on one listing and leaves the other profiles looking dead. If your sites are already asking in different ways with different links, how to get more Google reviews covers making the ask consistent across all of them.

When the Google review link does not work

It opens the wrong business

Almost always a duplicate or an unclaimed listing, which means you copied the link from a profile that is not the one customers find. Search your business name in an incognito window and see which listing Google shows. If two exist, that is a merge job before it is a link job.

The customer says they reviewed you and you cannot see it

The link is rarely the culprit. Reviews take time to appear, spam filters hold some back, and a recent profile merge or address change can hide a batch. Why a Google review is not showing up works through the causes in order.

The QR code will not scan

Usually size or contrast. As a rule of thumb, print it at least 2 cm square for something held in the hand, and considerably larger for a window or a counter where people stand back. Keep it dark on light, and leave the quiet border around it alone.

Nothing arrives at all

Before you blame the link, check that anyone is sending it. Tap your own link out of a real text message, on a real phone, and count the steps to a posted review. If the link is fine and the volume is still zero, the problem is the ask rather than the URL.

FAQ

Is there a Google review link generator? Google generates the link for you, inside your own Business Profile, at Read Reviews then Get more reviews. Third-party generators almost all build the Place ID URL described above, which Google does not document, so they can break without warning.

How do I share my Google review link? Copy it and paste it wherever you already talk to customers. Google's own panel will also send a review request for you by email, WhatsApp message or Facebook post.

Can a customer leave a Google review without a Google account? No. Google requires an account, though it does not have to be a Gmail address. A customer can create one against an email address they already use.

Can I offer a discount to customers who use the link? No. Google prohibits incentives in exchange for a review, and in the United States the FTC's 2024 rule makes incentives conditioned on a particular sentiment unlawful. Ask everyone, offer nothing.

Google reviews widget for WordPress: plugin or no plugin

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Google reviews widget on WordPress comes in one of two forms: a plugin from the plugin directory, or one line of HTML pasted into a Custom HTML block. Both end in the same block on the same page, pulling the same reviews from the same profile. The plugin buys you a settings screen in wp-admin and costs you a dependency. The snippet costs one paste and leaves nothing to maintain. Which is right depends less on the reviews than on who edits your site, and on whether that site sits in a network.

Everything below was read against a primary source on 6 September 2026: WordPress's own documentation, three plugin directory listings, Elementor's help centre, Google's Places API reference and the FTC's consumer reviews rule. Install counts drift, so the ones quoted carry their date.

Plugin or snippet: the actual difference

	A plugin	One snippet
How it goes on	Plugins > Add New, activate, connect your profile	Paste into a Custom HTML block
Where the block can appear	Block, shortcode, widget area, page builder	Anywhere on the site that takes HTML
Who can put it there	An Administrator, on a single site	Anyone with the `unfiltered_html` capability
What you maintain	The plugin, plus whatever it depends on	Nothing on your side
Usual failure	Abandoned, or breaks on a WordPress release	The provider's script stops loading
If you leave WordPress	Rebuild the block	Same line, new site

The rule of thumb: if the reviews have to appear in eight places and the person adding them thinks in shortcodes, take the plugin. If one service page needs one block, take the snippet.

What a WordPress Google reviews plugin gives you

A plugin earns its keep three ways, and they are real ways. It fetches on a schedule, so new reviews turn up without you touching the page. It caches them in your database, so the page is not calling an external service on every visit. And it hands you a shortcode that drops the same block into a page, a widget area or a page builder.

The directory is where to look, not a vendor's landing page. These are the listings that own the search today. Widgets for Google Reviews by Trustindex has about 900,000 active installations, as of September 2026, and 4.9 stars from 2,631 reviews. Rich Showcase for Google Reviews by richplugins has about 100,000, at 4.9 from 1,617. Reviews Feed has about 100,000 too, and covers Yelp as well as Google.

Read the free tier before you assume it does the first of those three. Rich Showcase's own FAQ is unusually straight about it: "you can connect and display up to 10 Google reviews without any API key", but without one "the initial 10 reviews are loaded once and remain static until you manually reconnect the place". A free plugin is often a snapshot with a settings screen, not a feed.

Site Kit is not a reviews plugin

Site Kit by Google is the official Google plugin and sits on more than five million sites, which is why people assume it handles reviews. It connects Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager, Google Ads and a couple of newer modules. Not one of them is Google Business Profile, and not one displays a review.

What a Google reviews plugin for WordPress costs you

The plugins that refresh on their own do it with a Google Cloud project and a Places API key, which means a billing account in your name and a key you now own. Rich Showcase is explicit: "an API key is only needed if you want reviews to update automatically". A vendor account instead of a key is the same dependency with someone else's billing attached.

The number of reviews is another catch. Google's Places API reference states it plainly for the reviews field: "A maximum of 5 reviews can be returned." The older Place Details endpoint said the same thing in different words. So a plugin promising ten reviews or a hundred is not reading them all out of that field, and it is worth asking where the rest come from, because the Google Maps Platform terms restrict copying and storing user reviews. The parent guide on embedding Google reviews covers that ground in full.

Abandonment is the other risk. The directory prints Last updated and Tested up to on every listing for exactly this reason. A reviews plugin nobody has touched in two years is not a stable choice, it is a security liability sitting on your site so a layout looks tidy. Check those two fields on the day you install, not the star rating. And remember what you are installing: PHP that runs on every request, plus a stylesheet and a script.

How to add a Google reviews widget to WordPress without a plugin

Build the widget first. In your review service, connect the Google location, choose a layout, set the theme, copy the snippet.
Open the page in the block editor and click the Block Inserter. WordPress documents a shortcut worth learning: "You can also type /html and hit enter in a new paragraph block to add one quickly."
Click Edit HTML on the empty block and paste the snippet. It is normally one script tag with an id in it:
```
<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>
```
That one is ours. Cloutly connects a Google location, gives you nine layouts to choose from, and hands back one snippet that works on WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace or any site that accepts an HTML snippet; the layouts are on the review widgets page. Whatever service you use, keep the async attribute, or the browser stops building your page while it fetches the widget.
Press Update, then open the published page in a private window. The editor preview is not proof.

WordPress's own demo of the block since 7.0. The CSS and JavaScript tabs are the tell: if you cannot see them, read the next section before you paste anything.

Get the layout and the colours right before you go near wp-admin.

The `unfiltered_html` trap, and why it bites franchises

This is where people lose an afternoon, and WordPress never tells you it has happened.

The Custom HTML block documentation sets it out: "Starting in WordPress 7.0, the Custom HTML block introduces separate editing panels for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The CSS and JavaScript panels are only available to users with the unfiltered_html capability." Without it, "WordPress will sanitize the block's content using the function wp_kses(), stripping disallowed tags such as <script> and <iframe>". You paste, you press Update, the snippet is gone, and no message appears.

Who has the capability, per the roles and capabilities documentation:

Role	Can paste a working script tag
Super Admin (Multisite)	Yes
Administrator	Yes on a single site. No on Multisite
Editor	Yes on a single site. No on Multisite
Author, Contributor, Subscriber	No

The Multisite row catches multi-location businesses, in WordPress's own words: "In WordPress Multisite, only Super Admins have the unfiltered_html capability." If your locations run as sites on one network, a manager who is an Administrator of their own site cannot paste a review snippet into it.

The plugin route does not rescue them either. The same capability table marks install_plugins as "yes (single site)" for an Administrator and "yes" only for a Super Admin, so on a network a location manager can neither install the plugin nor paste the snippet. Whoever runs the network does both, for everyone. Sort that out before you send fifteen managers a snippet and a click path.

Block editor, classic editor and page builders

The block is not called the same thing everywhere, and on one of these the permission rule is different again.

Block editor. The Custom HTML block, as above.

Widget areas. Since WordPress 5.8 the block-based widgets editor has brought blocks to Appearance > Widgets, so a footer or sidebar takes the same Custom HTML block. If the Classic Widgets plugin is installed to turn that off, you are back to the Text widget, which WordPress describes as "used to enter HTML, JavaScript, or just plain text".

Elementor. Use the HTML widget, the one with the </> icon. Elementor's documentation says "Inside the HTML Widget you can embed HTML, CSS, Shortcodes, and also include JS scripts", then adds a gate of its own: "access to the widget is restricted to admins. This can be changed in the Role Manager." That is Elementor's rule, sitting on top of WordPress's.

WPBakery. Its built-in element list carries Raw HTML and, beside it, a separate Raw JS. A script-tag snippet belongs in Raw HTML.

Why your Google reviews widget is blank in WordPress

Check these in order.

Start with the block. Open it again, and if the code is gone rather than broken, it is the capability rule above.

Next, a caching plugin holding the JavaScript. This is the common one, and it looks exactly like a broken widget. WP Rocket's Delay JavaScript Execution setting delays "the loading of all JavaScript files and inline scripts until there is a user interaction". LiteSpeed Cache's Delayed mode says the same in its own words: it "doesn't run the JS until it detects user activity, like a key click or mouse pointer movement". So the block stays empty until the visitor moves the mouse, and empty in every screenshot and speed test. Both plugins let you exclude one script. Exclude the widget's rather than turning the setting off site-wide.

The third check is simpler: you are looking at a cached page, or at the editor. Purge after you paste, then open the live URL in a private window. Preview proves nothing about a third-party script.

Where the block goes on a WordPress site

Nobody hesitates in a homepage footer, so proof there is decoration. Put the block under the booking button on a service page, and on each location page show that location's reviews rather than a feed blended across every site.

Then keep it current, because a review block ages in public in a way a paragraph of copy does not. Coastline Physio, a fictional two-clinic practice, could paste four good reviews under the Book now button on each clinic page and never touch it again. A year later that block argues for the other side, because the newest date on it still reads 2025. Sending the Google review link after each appointment keeps the dates moving.

If a second site runs on another platform, the block and the limits change: there are separate walkthroughs for Wix and for Squarespace, where a code block needs a Core plan before JavaScript runs at all.

FAQ

Can I embed Google reviews in WordPress without a plugin? Yes. A Custom HTML block takes the snippet, and that is the whole install. You need a service that holds the connection to your Google profile, and a role with the unfiltered_html capability.

Is there a free Google reviews widget for WordPress? Several, on the free tiers of directory plugins. Read what free means on each: it usually caps the reviews shown, keeps the vendor's badge on the block, and in at least one case stops updating until you reconnect the profile by hand.

Will a reviews plugin give me star ratings in Google? No. Google's review snippet documentation says that where the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages "are ineligible for star review feature", and the example it gives is an embedded third-party widget. Switching on your widget's review schema is still worth doing, because it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. More on that in review schema markup.

Can I show only my five-star reviews? You can sort, and the FTC's questions and answers on its consumer reviews rule take the question directly: if your site orders reviews by rating with all the five-star ones on top, "the rule does not cover that situation". The same answer carries the sting: "organizing reviews in a way that makes it difficult for consumers to know about or find negative reviews could be an unfair or deceptive act or practice in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act". None of this is legal advice. Filter by a rule you can say in one sentence, put that sentence near the block, and ask every customer rather than a screened few.

How many Google reviews do I need? The maths, worked through

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

How many Google reviews do I need? Google publishes no minimum, so there is no official number to hit. The closest thing to an answer is consumer research: BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 found that 47% of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and 68% will only use a business rated four stars or higher. Twenty reviews at four stars is the floor. Everything past that is arithmetic: what it costs to move a rating, what one bad review costs, and how many months the climb takes at the rate you can actually collect.

The only thing Google publishes about review counts and local ranking, from Tips to improve your local ranking on Google. Screenshot taken 6 September 2026.

What is a good number of Google reviews?

There is no published minimum, from Google or anyone else. What exists is survey evidence about where consumers stop looking. These figures come from BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published 11 February 2026 from a sample of 1,002 US consumers.

47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. That is the closest thing to a floor anyone has measured.
68% will only use a business rated four stars or higher, up from 55% a year earlier.
31% now require 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17% a year earlier.

Twenty reviews gets you past the first filter. Four stars gets you past the second. The bar that is moving is the third: the group demanding 4.5 nearly doubled in a year.

Two cautions before you write a number on the whiteboard. That sample is US consumers, so read it as a direction rather than a local benchmark. And a count means little on its own. Twenty reviews is plenty in a category where your competitors hold 25, and nowhere near enough in one where they hold 300.

How many 5-star reviews do you need to raise your rating?

One line of algebra.

five-star reviews needed = current count x (target rating - current rating) / (5 - target rating)

Ridgeway Plumbing sits at 4.2 stars from 90 reviews and wants 4.5.

90 x (4.5 - 4.2) / (5 - 4.5)
= 90 x 0.3 / 0.5
= 54 five-star reviews

Check it. Ninety reviews at 4.2 is 378 stars. Add 54 fives and you have 648 stars across 144 reviews, which is 4.5 exactly.

The Google review calculator runs that sum, and the two below it, on your own numbers.

Now Ridgeway wants 4.7, starting from the 4.5 it has just reached, with 144 reviews on the board.

144 x (4.7 - 4.5) / (5 - 4.7)
= 144 x 0.2 / 0.3
= 96 five-star reviews

Fifty-four reviews bought the first three tenths of a star. The next two tenths cost 96. That is the shape of the whole thing: every tenth costs more than the one before it, because the target sits closer to 5.0 and each new review has less room to pull the average up. Going straight from 4.2 to 4.7 takes 150, which is the same answer by a shorter route.

Here is the table at a round 100 reviews, so you can scale it to your own count.

Your rating now, from 100 reviews	Five-star reviews to reach 4.5	To reach 4.7
3.8	140	300
4.0	100	234
4.2	60	167
4.4	20	100
4.5	already there	67
4.6	already there	34

The number scales with what you already hold. Double your review count and you double the reviews needed for the same climb, because the existing average has twice the weight to it. A young profile is cheap to move and cheap to wreck. One sitting on 800 reviews barely notices a bad month, and barely notices a good one either.

The catch: not every review you get will be five stars

The formula above assumes every new review is a five. Almost no business runs at a perfect five on new reviews, and planning on it will put you months past your date.

The honest version divides by the average of the reviews you are actually collecting, not by 5.

reviews needed = current count x (target - current) / (new-review average - target)

Ridgeway again, at 4.2 from 90 reviews, aiming for 4.5, but with recent reviews averaging 4.8 rather than 5.0.

90 x 0.3 / (4.8 - 4.5)
= 90 x 0.3 / 0.3
= 90 reviews

Ninety, not fifty-four. Assuming every review is a five made the job look 40% smaller than it is. Work out your own new-review average from the last three months before you use either formula, and note the hard limit inside the arithmetic: if the reviews you collect average below your target, no volume gets you there. A business collecting 4.4s cannot reach 4.5 by collecting more of them.

What one bad review costs, in five-star reviews

To hold an average of T after a one-star review, you need enough fives to cover the gap it opened.

five-star reviews to recover = (T - 1) / (5 - T)

Your average	Fives to absorb one 1-star review	To absorb one 2-star review
4.0	3	2
4.5	7	5
4.7	13	9
4.8	19	14

Look at what is missing from that table: your review count. It is not in the formula at all. One one-star review costs a business with 40 reviews the same 13 fives as a business with 4,000, if both are holding 4.7. The difference is that the business collecting steadily earns those 13 back in a fortnight, and the one that stopped asking in 2023 never earns them back.

That is the real argument for a steady rate. It does not prevent the bad review. It repairs the average without anyone having to do anything special.

How many reviews it takes to get to 5 stars

Once a single review below five lands, a true 5.0 average is gone for good. What you can hold is a displayed 5.0. Google shows a rating to one decimal place, so a true average of 4.95 or higher shows as 5.0 if Google rounds rather than truncates, which is what it appears to do on live profiles. Google documents neither behaviour, so treat the exact cutover as an observation rather than a policy.

Run it. With one one-star review on the profile and every other review a five, you need 79 fives to bring the true average back to 4.95. At 78 you are on 4.949.

That does not make a perfect score a target. Northwestern University's Medill Spiegel Research Center found that purchase likelihood peaks in the 4.0 to 4.7 range and falls above it, because a perfect score reads as unlikely (How Online Reviews Influence Sales, 2017; dated, and still the only published product-level data on the point). A 5.0 from 22 reviews invites a question that a 4.7 from 300 never gets asked.

How many Google reviews do I need to beat the businesses beside me?

There is no absolute number here either, and there cannot be, because the map pack is a comparison and not a test you pass.

Google's own wording is the place to start. Its help page on local ranking says local results are "mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity". The third factor is headed Prominence, and under it: "This factor's also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." That is the whole of what Google publishes on the subject.

Reviews are named there, so the count is doing something. But they sit alongside relevance and distance, neither of which a review can touch. You cannot review your way into a pack you are five kilometres too far from.

So the number worth knowing is not a national average. It is the review counts of the three businesses Google is showing today for the search that matters to you. Search your main service and your suburb from a phone that is actually in the area, write down each result's rating and count, and put your own beside them. That tells you whether you are 30 reviews behind or 300, and those are different plans. Whether Google reviews affect your ranking works through what reviews can and cannot move.

Does it matter how recent the reviews are?

Yes, and this is where a large count quietly stops working.

BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 found that 74% of consumers want reviews written in the last three months, and 44% name "posted within the last month" among the things that make a review count. On the ranking side, recency of reviews was scored 11th out of 187 factors by the local search experts surveyed for Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, published 6 November 2025 from 47 contributors. That is practitioner opinion rather than anything Google has confirmed, and it sits high enough on the list to act on.

A review count is a stock. Recency is a flow, and only the flow tells a customer what you are like now. Two profiles both showing 4.6 from 200 reviews are not the same profile if one has eight reviews from the last month and the other has nothing since 2023. The second reads as a business that used to be good, and nothing in a total fixes that.

How many reviews a month can you expect?

Your monthly review rate turns a target into a date. It is the part calculators on this topic leave out.

reviews per month = asks sent per month x the share of asks that end in a review

Asks sent per month is capped by customers served. Finish 120 jobs a month, ask every one of them once, and your ceiling is 120 asks. Asking the same customer twice does not raise the ceiling, it just annoys them. Raising it means asking the people you currently miss: the walk-ins whose details nobody took, the second location that never got set up, the jobs that finished on a weekend.

The share that ends in a review is yours to find out, not to borrow. Count the reviews that arrived last month, divide by the asks you sent last month, and repeat for three months before you trust the answer. Do not take a benchmark off a vendor's page, this one included. Any percentage published without your channel and your timing behind it will be wrong for you, usually in the flattering direction.

Multiply the two and you have the number that sets your date, and the fastest gains are almost always on the first half. How to get more Google reviews covers the asks themselves, review request templates has the wording for text and email, and your Google review link decides how many people who meant to review you actually finish.

Consistency across a whole customer list depends on the process. Cloutly's review campaigns handle it this way: a repeat customer is one contact, asked once, rather than one ask per transaction; anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days is skipped; opted-out contacts are never enrolled; and follow-ups run on the day spacing you set and stop when the review lands.

How long the climb takes

Ridgeway needs 54 five-star reviews to get from 4.2 to 4.5, and 150 to get to 4.7. Divide by the monthly rate.

Reviews a month	Months to 4.5 (54 needed)	Months to 4.7 (150 needed)
5	11	30
10	6	15
20	3	8
40	2	4

The rate matters more than the target. Going from 5 reviews a month to 20 does more for Ridgeway than dropping its ambition from 4.7 to 4.5 does. Every row here is a multi-month project, so a week of hard asking will not get you there, and a burst is worth less than a habit on the ranking side too: the same Whitespark contributors put "sustained influx of reviews over time (rather than bursts)" 14th of the 187.

Use both figures: the count that gets you to the rating and the monthly rate that holds it. A business that hits 4.5 and stops asking drifts back down, because the reviews that arrive unprompted skew towards people with something to complain about.

What you cannot do to get there faster

The arithmetic makes the shortcuts look tempting. The two obvious ones are against the rules.

Asking only the customers you expect to be happy. Google's prohibited and restricted content policy says merchants may not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". That covers the survey-first pattern, where a customer rates you privately and only the satisfied ones are shown the review link. It is called review gating, several vendors still sell it, and it is a breach. Cloutly has not gated since 2021 and does not offer it. More on review gating and what to do instead.

Paying for reviews, in money or in kind. Google's page on getting more reviews is blunt: "Offering incentives, like free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for customers to post reviews, change reviews, or remove negative reviews is considered fake & misleading content and is strictly prohibited." In the United States it is also law. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials went into effect on 21 October 2024 and authorises courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations. Bought reviews also get removed in volume, so you pay for a number that then disappears.

What is left is asking everyone, once, at the right moment. What a five-star review request may and may not say covers where the line sits in the wording.

Frequently asked questions

How many Google reviews do I need?

Google publishes no minimum. Consumer research puts the practical floor at about 20: BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, from 1,002 US consumers, found 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews and 68% will only use one rated four stars or higher. Past that, what matters is how you compare with the businesses shown beside you in the map pack.

How many 5-star reviews do I need to raise my rating?

Multiply your current review count by the gap you want to close, then divide by the distance from your target to 5. From 4.2 with 90 reviews, reaching 4.5 takes 54 five-star reviews and reaching 4.7 takes 150. If the reviews you collect average below 5, divide by the gap from that average to your target instead. On the worked example above, an average of 4.8 rather than 5.0 turns 54 into 90.

How many reviews does it take to recover from a one-star review?

At a 4.5 average it takes 7 five-star reviews, at 4.7 it takes 13, and at 4.8 it takes 19. Your total review count does not change that figure. What it changes is how quickly you collect them.

Is a 5.0 rating the goal?

No. Once one review below five lands, a true 5.0 is gone, and a displayed 5.0 only needs 4.95, which after a single one-star review takes 79 five-star reviews to restore. Northwestern's Medill Spiegel Research Center found purchase likelihood peaks between 4.0 and 4.7 and falls above it, because a perfect score reads as unlikely. Somewhere between 4.5 and 4.8, with recent reviews and replies under them, is the profile that actually converts.

NAP consistency in 2026: a straight answer and a working audit

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

NAP consistency means your business name, address and phone number read the same everywhere they are published: your Google Business Profile, your own website, your Facebook Page, Apple Maps, Bing and whatever directories hold a record of you. It is worth doing and worth doing early. It is not the ranking lever a decade of local SEO writing made it out to be, and knowing which of those two things you are buying decides how much of your week it deserves.

Whitespark ranks website-to-Google profile matching 15th, behind 14 other factors. None of those 14 is a directory. Source: Whitespark, 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, September 2026.

What is NAP consistency?

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. Add the website and you get NAP+W, which is the version most people mean now. A citation is any place online that publishes some or all of that set, whether or not it links to you.

NAP consistency is those values matching across all of them. Values, not characters. "Suite 4, 12 Marine Parade" and "12 Marine Parade, Ste 4" are the same address. "(07) 3040 1188" and "07 3040 1188" are the same phone number. What Google's own guidelines ask for is that you "Represent your business as it's consistently represented and recognized in the real world across signage, stationery, and other branding" and "Make sure your address and/or service area is accurate and precise" (Guidelines for representing your business on Google). That is a rule about the facts, not about punctuation. Chasing commas is not the job. Finding the records that are genuinely wrong is.

What NAP consistency does for local rankings in 2026

Whitespark publishes the Local Search Ranking Factors study, and the 2026 edition came out on 6 November 2025. Forty-seven local search practitioners are invited to score 187 factors in a two-hour survey, across four axes: local pack and Maps, local organic, conversion, and AI search visibility, which is new this year. Here is where the consistency factors landed, out of 187.

Factor	Local pack and Maps	Local organic
Your website's NAP matching your Google profile's NAP	15	55
Consistency on Google, Bing and Apple Maps	28	71
Consistency on key sites (Yellow Pages, Yelp, D&B, CityGrid)	63	79
Consistency on the data aggregators	85	90
Consistency on other citation sources	123	102

The site names in brackets are Whitespark's own factor labels, not a shopping list.

Read it as weighted opinion rather than a controlled test, because that is what it is. The shape is still clear. One consistency factor sits in the top twenty and the rest sit in the back half, below the primary category, the searcher's proximity, whether the address is in the city searched, whether you are open at the moment of the search, and your Google rating. The one that ranks is the one you own outright: your own website agreeing with your own Google profile.

Google has not published a ranking factor called NAP. Its account of local ranking is relevance, distance and prominence, and the guidelines are a rule against lying, not an instruction to standardise 200 directory records.

Consistency is hygiene. Being consistent will not push you up the map pack. Being inconsistent can hold you back, and it costs you customers either way. A wrong number is a lost call, and somebody who rings a disconnected line does not ring back and try the other listing.

It also decides who gets the last word on your profile. Google "gathers info from different sources, like user reports and licensed content", shows what it has changed in blue in the profile editor, and states plainly that "You can't manage all Google updates through your Business Profile" (Understand Google updates on your Business Profile). When an old directory keeps publishing your 2019 number, that directory is what keeps correcting you. Assistants behave the same way, a repair job covered in when AI gets your business details wrong.

What are NAP citations?

Citations come in two shapes, and they are no longer equally useful.

A structured citation is a directory record with fields: Yelp, Yellow Pages, an industry association's member list, an aggregator's database. An unstructured citation is a mention in prose, such as a local news story, a supplier's stockist page or a sponsor list on a sports club site.

The same study scores AI search visibility separately, and three of its top five are citation factors: presence on expert-curated best-of lists at number one, prominence on key industry-relevant domains at three, and the quality and authority of unstructured citations at four. Note which citations those are. Mentions on domains that matter in your industry, not another row in a directory nobody opens.

Three of the top five AI search visibility factors are citation factors, and two of the three are unstructured. Source: Whitespark, 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, September 2026.

Whitespark's own reading of it: "Citations as a local search strategy have been decreasing in importance for the past decade, but AI SEO is breathing new life into them."

That matters because people now ask assistants for recommendations. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey on AI and trust, published on 10 March 2026 from 1,002 US adults, found 45% had used an AI assistant to get a local business recommendation, up from 6% the year before.

The old game was 300 directory submissions. The current one is correcting the records you already have.

Where NAP inconsistencies come from

Nobody sets out to publish two phone numbers. Inconsistency arrives as a side effect of something else.

A rebrand. The new name goes on the signage, the website and the Google profile. It does not go on the seventeen directory records an agency created in 2019, and nobody has the logins. Google also treats a name change differently depending on how big it is, so read how to edit your Google Business Profile before you type the new one in.

A move. The address changes on the profile in five minutes and stays in the website footer, the contact page, the booking confirmation email, the schema block and every directory. A move invalidates every published record at once, which makes it the largest single source of drift there is.

Suite and unit numbers. Google's instruction is conditional and specific: if you must give a mailbox or suite number, the physical address goes in "Address Line 1" and the mailbox or suite number in "Address Line 2". Most directories have one address field, so the suite number gets appended, prefixed or dropped. That is formatting rather than fact, and usually harmless. A virtual office is neither. Google says that if you rent a mailing address but do not operate out of it, "that location isn't eligible for a Business Profile", and a desk in a co-working space only qualifies with signage and staffed hours.

Tracking phone numbers. Dynamic number insertion usually rewrites the number in the visitor's browser after the page loads, leaving your served HTML alone. Confirm that with your vendor rather than assume it. Typing a tracking number into a directory listing is the version that definitely breaks things, and Google's guidelines rule it out: "Use a local phone number instead of a central call center helpline number whenever possible", and do not "provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or 'refer' users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites." The primary number has to ring at that location. Extras are allowed: "Additional phone numbers can be used on Google Business Profile websites and other local surfaces."

The phone rules sit inside a collapsed section, which is why so few guides quote them. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

Franchise and multi-site websites. Tallowwood Dental has six practices and one website template whose footer carries head office's number, so five location pages publish a number that does not ring at that practice while all six Google profiles carry the right one. The website is the highest-weighted consistency factor in the table above, and a template is how it goes wrong at scale. Franchisees ordering their own signage and answering service produce the same result from the other direction.

How to audit NAP consistency in an afternoon

Write the master record. One row per location: trading name exactly as it appears on the signage, address line 1, address line 2, suburb, state and postcode, the phone number that rings there, and the page on your site that represents it. This spreadsheet, not any profile, is what you correct back to. If you cannot fill it in without asking someone, that is the first finding.
Search the way a machine sees you. In Google, search your phone number in quotation marks, then your old phone number in quotation marks, then your business name plus the suburb. The old-number search finds the problems, because it surfaces every record still publishing a value you retired.
Open the eight places below and compare each field to the record. Do not fix anything yet. Fixing while auditing is how you lose track of what you have covered.
Sort the findings into what you control and what you have to ask for. The second list takes weeks, so start it first.

Compare name, address, phone and website on every row, plus hours wherever the source carries them.

Where to check	Who can change it
Google Business Profile	You, and Google
Your own website: footer, contact page, every location page, the schema block	You
Facebook Page	You
Apple Maps, through Apple Business at business.apple.com	You, and Apple
Bing, through bing.com/forbusiness	You
Yelp	You, once you have claimed it
Your industry's main directory and any association listing	Usually you
The data aggregators your country runs on	Slowest to change

That last row is vague on purpose. The aggregators Whitespark names, Infogroup, Localeze and Foursquare, are the US set; the Australian, New Zealand and UK equivalents are different, and the old-number search in step 2 is the reliable way to find yours.

Anything beyond those eight is optional. A directory with no traffic and no authority in your industry is not worth an afternoon, and a paid tool reporting 47 "inconsistencies" is mostly reporting punctuation.

How to fix each source

Order matters, because directories and assistants read the first two.

Google Business Profile first. Change the field and save. Hours, phone and website usually reappear within the hour. Name, address and category can put you back through verification, so change them one at a time and only when the public record supports the new value. The sequence is in how to edit your Google Business Profile.

Your own website second. The footer is the easy part. The rest is the contact page, every location page, the LocalBusiness schema, the booking widget, any PDF you still link to and the email signature template. Search your own site for the old number instead of trusting your memory of it.

Facebook, Apple, Bing and Yelp third. Facebook is edited on the Page itself, in its own settings. Apple is where most guides are now wrong: Apple Business Connect became Apple Business in April 2026 and businessconnect.apple.com redirects to business.apple.com, so a 2024 walkthrough describes screens that are gone. Adding your business to Apple Maps has the current path. Bing's old bingplaces.com redirects to bing.com/forbusiness, and Yelp needs claiming before you can edit it.

A directory you cannot log into. Most have a "suggest an edit" control that needs no account. The rest have a support address. Keep a list of the ones that never respond, because that list is where a resurfacing wrong number comes from.

A location that has closed. Do not delete the profile. Deleting it takes the reviews and leaves the listing on Maps. Mark it closed, as set out in how to remove a business from Google.

What changes at ten locations

At one site this is an afternoon and then fifteen minutes a quarter. At ten it is a different job, because the failure is not one wrong record. It is one wrong record per site, each appearing at a different time.

The rule that holds at any size: decide the value once, hold it somewhere that is not a profile, and publish from there. Editing profiles by hand makes the profile the record, and a record you cannot read in one place is a record nobody checks. If two sites share a name, multiple Google locations with the same name covers keeping them distinct.

Cloutly's listings management is built on that shape: one record per location covering name, phone, website, description, address and hours, published to Google Business Profile and to the Facebook Page only after you approve a preview of the exact change, then checked weekly, read-only, against Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor. The wider picture for a network is on the multi-location page.

Cloutly shows one editable record per site, which can be published outward instead of editing ten profiles by hand.

How often to check

Quarterly suits a single site and monthly suits a network, but a schedule is the weaker instinct. Check on events instead: a move, a rebrand, a new phone system or answering service, a website rebuild, a franchisee joining or leaving, a location closing. Those causes account for nearly all of it, and every one is a date you know about in advance.

For the layer above this one, landing in the Google map pack has the factors that do move you, and adding your business to Google Maps covers getting the profile right in the first place.

FAQ

What does NAP stand for in SEO?

Name, address and phone number. NAP+W adds the website. Both terms come from local SEO rather than from Google, whose own account of local ranking uses relevance, distance and prominence.

What is a NAP citation?

Any online mention of your business name, address or phone number. A structured citation is a directory record with fields. An unstructured citation is a mention in prose, like a news article or a sponsor page. Neither has to link to you to count.

How do I check my NAP consistency?

Write down the correct details for each location, then compare them against your Google Business Profile, your own website, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, your main industry directory and the data aggregators. Searching your old phone number in quotation marks finds forgotten records faster than any tool.

Does NAP consistency still matter in 2026?

As hygiene, yes. In the 2026 Whitespark study one consistency factor ranks 15th of 187 for the local pack and the rest sit in the back half, so it is not what moves you up. It is what stops a customer ringing a dead number, stops Google correcting your profile from an old source, and stops an assistant repeating a detail you retired two years ago.

How to merge Google Business Profiles, and what happens to your reviews

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To merge Google Business Profiles, open the duplicate in Google Maps, select Suggest an edit, then Place is closed or not here, then Duplicate of another place, then Submit. Google assesses the request and, if it agrees, one profile stops showing while the other survives.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no merge button and no screen where you pick which profile wins. Google's own line is that "all merge requests are subject to review", and that when two profiles do merge, "their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost" (Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues). So the question worth answering is which of the three routes below fits the duplicate in front of you, and what each one costs.

Google's help page says merge requests are reviewed, reviews are combined and replies may be lost. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

What Google does with a duplicate Business Profile

Google does not fold two records into one. It decides one of them should not be there and takes it out of circulation: "If a profile is considered a duplicate, it won't show on Google Search or Maps."

Google flags a profile for three reasons, in its own words: a verified profile already exists for the same business, multiple profiles share the same address, or multiple profiles exist for the same business offering different services. The last one catches people out. A clinic with one profile for physio and another for podiatry at a single address has two duplicates, not two services, and Google's instruction is to list the services on one profile instead of splitting them.

Is it a duplicate, or two listings Google allows?

Google permits more than one profile at one address in specific cases. Filing a merge on one of those wastes a week and can cost you reviews.

What you are looking at	Google's view
Two profiles, same name, same address	Duplicate
The old address still listed after a move	Duplicate
One profile per service sold at one address	Duplicate
Two businesses at one address with different names and different signage	Allowed
A department with its own name, category and entrance	Allowed
A named practitioner alongside the practice they work in	Allowed

Google's test for two businesses at one address is that they are "distinct businesses with different names and clearly visible differences in signage", and it names what counts: "locations with multiple brands, rebranded businesses, departments within other businesses, or individual practitioners at a shared location." Departments have to earn it. The name has to differ from the main business, the category has to differ from the main business and from every other department, and there is usually a separate customer entrance. "Walmart Vision Center" qualifies. The Apple products section of a Best Buy does not (Guidelines for representing your business on Google).

Practitioners are the rule that dental, legal and allied health groups get wrong. Where several public-facing practitioners work at one location, the organisation holds a profile for the location and each practitioner holds their own, titled with the practitioner's name and not the organisation's. Where one practitioner is the only public-facing one at a branded site, Google wants a single shared profile named [brand/company]: [practitioner name]. Nobody gets a second profile for a second specialisation: "A practitioner shouldn't have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations."

This is the section that decides whether a merge request can succeed at all. Source: Google Business Profile Help, September 2026.

How to merge Google Business Profiles, step by step

Which route you take depends on who can sign in to the duplicate.

Route 1: both profiles are in your account

If you created the second profile and nothing on it is worth keeping, do not send a merge request. Remove it.

Go to the duplicate profile, signed in to the Google account that owns it.
Select More, then Business Profile settings.
Select Remove Business Profile, then Remove profile content and managers.
Select Continue, then Remove, then Done.

Google's line on doing this to a duplicate you created yourself is that you "can remove it without affecting your verified listing", with a warning in the next sentence: "When you remove a duplicate profile, all content and linked managers will be removed, so make sure to remove the correct profile" (Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues). Only a primary owner can do it, and "new owners and managers must wait 7 days before they can remove profile content or managers" (Remove a Business Profile from your Google Account).

Removal is not a merge, and the reviews are where the difference shows. What disappears is your side of the profile: "any posts, photos, videos, and review replies by owners and managers are permanently removed." What stays is everything customers wrote, because "user-generated content and review remains." So the reviews sit on a place record you can no longer answer on, and the place itself may well stay up: removing all ownership and content "doesn't guarantee that the business won't show up on Maps and Search." If the duplicate carries reviews, take the next route instead.

Route 2: the duplicate is on Maps and nobody manages it

Google builds place records from its own sources, and any signed-in person can add one, so the second listing often has no owner at all.

Open Google Maps and find the duplicate.
Select Suggest an edit, then Place is closed or not here.
Under Operating status, select Duplicate of another place.
Select Submit.

The merge request as it appears on desktop Maps today. Screenshot taken on a public landmark listing, September 2026.

Anyone can file this, which is why it works on a listing left behind by a previous owner. Google's help pages write the second step as "Place closed or not here"; the desktop dialog says "Place is closed or not here" and puts the duplicate option under Operating status, so you are in the right place either way.

Check two things before you file. The form is not available everywhere, since "you can only edit business attributes in select countries and regions" (Mark a place reopened or closed on Google Maps). And it gives you nowhere to name the survivor, so make sure the profile you are keeping is the fuller and better reviewed of the two.

Route 3: someone else has verified the duplicate

An old agency, a franchisee or a manager who left still holds it. You cannot merge a profile you cannot reach.

Go to business.google.com/add, enter the business name and address, pick it from the list, then select Request access and submit the form (Request ownership of a Business Profile). After that, "the current profile owner has 3 days to respond." Approved, you get an email and can manage the profile. Denied, you get an email and "can appeal the denial", and you can still suggest an edit in Maps. No response, and "you have the option to claim the profile", with the caveat Google attaches to it: "the option to claim a profile isn't always available" (Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues).

Start this one early. Three days is only three days once somebody is actually reading the email.

What happens to your reviews when profiles merge

This is what decides which route you should have taken.

A merge combines the reviews, and the catch sits in the same sentence: "replies to reviews may be lost." Your written responses are what is at risk, not the reviews themselves.

Removing a profile does not do that. Take a duplicate out of your account and its reviews stay exactly where they are, on a place record you have just given up the ability to answer on.

You also do not get to choose which rating survives. If the duplicate carries eleven one-star reviews, they arrive with everything else, and the combined average is the combined average.

So copy your replies out of the profile that is about to disappear, then request the merge rather than removing the duplicate, because the merge is the only route that carries the reviews across. If reviews look missing once it is done, why a Google review is not showing up covers what Google filters and how long it holds one.

How long a merge takes

Google publishes timings for some of this and none for the merge itself. Any page quoting a firm number of business days is quoting an average somebody measured.

Step	What Google publishes
An edit to a profile you own	"Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days"
A suggestion filed on Google Maps	No timeline. "Changes may take time to appear on the map"
A request for ownership	The current owner gets 3 days to respond
An appeal through the appeals tool	"Appeal reviews and decisions can take up to 5 business days"

Those four come from, in order, Understand what happens to your Business Profile edits, Edit place information in Google Maps, Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues and Appeal Business Profile content and profile restrictions.

While something is under review, leave it alone. Google asks you not to submit multiple appeals for the same issue before a decision, and not to "create a new Business Profile for the same business while your appeal is under review".

When Google refuses to merge

Google's condition is that "the profiles must represent the same business and should have the same info", so a request filed while the two listings show different names, addresses or phone numbers fails. Fix the survivor first, then file.

The opposite failure is worse. Google merges two profiles that should have stayed apart, and a practice and a practitioner, or two tenants sharing a suite, collapse into one listing. The way back is an appeal, not a new profile: contact Google Business Profile support and appeal the duplicate status. Expect to prove it. "If both businesses serve customers at the same location, you'll be asked to provide evidence of permanent signage that clearly shows both businesses." Photograph the signage while you are standing in front of it, not six weeks later from memory.

Duplicates across twenty locations

One duplicate is an afternoon. Twenty locations is a queue, because duplicates appear faster than anyone files suggestions against them. Almost all of them come from two habits.

Relocation is the first. Google is blunt about it: "If your business relocates, do not create a new Business Profile for the new location. Instead, update the existing profile with the new address." Open a replacement profile when a site moves and you have stranded a listing that kept the reviews.

Access is the second. Somebody at a site claims their own location because nobody ever gave them a login, and now the brand has a profile it does not control.

Audit before you file anything. Search each location by name and suburb, then by street address, and write down every place record that comes back, the unowned ones included. Rank each pair on review count, review recency, photos and verification. The profile with 180 reviews wins even when the other one has the better description, because a description can be rewritten and 180 reviews cannot.

Then work in one direction. Fix the survivor so the two records match, file the duplicate suggestions second, and go back and check rather than assuming. Multiple Google locations with the same name covers the naming half of the same problem.

How to stop the duplicate coming back

A merged duplicate stays merged. A new one takes a minute to create, and almost nobody creates one on purpose.

Hand a location over instead of deleting it: transfer primary ownership and the reviews and the history stay with the site. Own every location from an account the business will still control in five years, which rules out a personal Gmail and the agency's login. And look at each location's public listing on a schedule, because a duplicate created by a customer or a data aggregator turns up in the wild long before it turns up in a dashboard.

Under all of that is one record per location that everything publishes from. Cloutly's listings management works that way: name, phone, website, address and hours go to Google Business Profile and the Facebook Page only after you approve a preview of the exact change, and Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor are re-checked against that record weekly.

When you tidy up the survivor afterwards, editing a Google Business Profile covers which fields send you back through verification. Adding a business to Google Maps is the one to read for a site that is not properly on Google yet, and removing a business from Google for one that has closed.

FAQ

Can you merge two Google Business Profiles yourself?

No. You can ask. The request goes through Suggest an edit, then Place is closed or not here, then Duplicate of another place on Google Maps, and Google decides. There is no merge control in Business Profile Manager.

Will I lose my reviews if I merge?

The reviews are combined. Your replies may not survive, so copy anything worth keeping before you file. Removing a duplicate instead of merging it leaves that profile's reviews where they are, on a place record you no longer manage.

How long does a Google Business Profile merge take?

Google does not publish a timeline for merges. It publishes the neighbouring ones: an edit to a profile you own is reviewed in "up to 10 minutes" and sometimes "up to 30 days", the owner of a profile you have asked to take over gets 3 days, and an appeal takes "up to 5 business days". A specific number of business days for a merge is somebody's average, not a Google figure.

Google merged two businesses that are not the same. How do I undo it?

Contact Google Business Profile support and appeal the duplicate status. Both businesses have to be eligible and distinct from one another, and if they serve customers at the same location you will be asked for photographs of permanent signage showing both names.

When AI gets your business details wrong (and how to fix it)

Lachlan Fea — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If ChatGPT hands out a phone number you gave up two years ago, or Gemini says you close at 4pm when you close at 6, or an AI Overview has you permanently closed, the assistant did not invent any of it. It retrieved a wrong detail from somewhere that still publishes it: your Google Business Profile, an old page on your own site, or a directory nobody has logged into since 2021. You cannot edit the answer. You fix the source and wait for the next retrieval to pick it up.

Fix wrong details before any other work in how AI search decides which local businesses get named. Visibility you have earned is worth nothing if the answer sends the customer to a disconnected line.

Why AI assistants get your business details wrong

Assistants build a local answer at the moment you ask, out of whatever they can retrieve about you. OpenAI says so in its own help centre: "Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect", and its advice is to open a cited source and "review when it was published or updated" (Searching the web with ChatGPT). Google documents the same shape from the other end: Gemini's Maps grounding step "queries Google Maps for relevant information (e.g., places, reviews, photos, addresses, opening hours)" (Grounding with Google Maps).

So the mistake has an address. It is nearly always your Google Business Profile, which feeds Google's own surfaces and gets copied into half the directories that feed everyone else's; your own website, usually a contact page that was right when the site was built; a listing you have never logged into; or a page about you that you do not control at all, like a booking aggregator or an old press release.

Stale data outlives corrections because those sources copy each other. Fix the profile, leave the aggregator, and the aggregator keeps republishing the old number for the assistant to find.

Is it an AI hallucination, or stale data?

Almost always stale data. "AI hallucination" means a model generating something it never retrieved, and that does happen. Opening hours are the wrong place to go looking for it. Ask the assistant where the hours came from, then open that page. Nine times out of ten the page says exactly what the assistant said, and has done since your last renovation.

The distinction matters because the two fixes point in opposite directions. A fabrication is a vendor problem you can report and cannot repair. Stale data is a listings problem you can repair this afternoon.

When AI says your business is permanently closed

This one is not the assistant's doing at all. Anyone signed in to a Google account can propose that your shop has shut, and Google publishes the route: open Google Maps, search for the place, select Suggest an edit and then Place closed or not here, select Permanently closed and Submit (Mark a place reopened or closed on Google Maps). A competitor can do it. So can a customer who turned up on a public holiday.

Once Google carries the status, the assistants inherit it, because it travels with the profile into every surface that reads the profile, including the AI Overview above your own category search.

To undo it as the owner: go to your Business Profile, select Edit profile and then Hours, select Edit and then Open with main hours, tick the days you trade, set the times and Save. For several sites at once, sign in to Business Profile Manager, select the locations, then Actions, Open and Mark as open (Mark your business as reopened). Google's caveat on public edits applies to yours too: "We review your edits, so it can take some time for your changes to show on the map."

How to find where the wrong detail came from

Use these three checks.

Read the citation the answer already gave you. ChatGPT shows them inline ("Responses that use web search may include citations. Select a citation to open its source") and has a Sources control. Perplexity numbers every answer. AI Overviews carry supporting links, under Google's own instruction to searchers to "Always check important info in more than one place" (AI Overviews in Google Search). The culprit is usually sitting there in plain sight.
Ask the assistant where the detail came from. "Where did you get that phone number for Coastline Physio?" often names a page. Treat it as a lead rather than proof, because a re-ask can produce a different explanation. OpenAI's own documented move is more useful: when a result looks wrong, ask ChatGPT "to search again using a specific source, date, or location".
Search for the wrong value itself. Put the old phone number in quotation marks into Google and look at everywhere it still lives. Do the same with the old suite number. That result list is your work list, and it beats anything an assistant tells you about its own reasoning.

Write down what was wrong, which assistant said it, what it cited and the date. You need that record to tell whether the fix worked.

The fix order: how to correct business information in AI search

Work outward from the source with the most reach, so the later fixes have less left to correct.

1. Google Business Profile first

Google says plainly that the profile feeds its AI answers: "Using products like Merchant Center (such as Merchant Center feeds) and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results" (Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features). It also feeds Gemini through Maps grounding, and it is the record most directories copy.

Go to your Business Profile, select Edit profile, change the field and Save. On mobile, open the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Then make the same change everywhere else it is published, which is NAP consistency.

Nothing goes live the moment you save it. "We review your changes before we update them live on your profile", and some businesses have to verify the profile before they can change anything on it at all (Edit your Business Profile).

If the profile itself is a mess, or there are two of them, start at how to add your business to Google Maps rather than editing around the problem.

2. Your own website second

This is the page an assistant can read without a login, and the one you can change in five minutes. Contact page, footer, every location page, the structured data. Put the phone number, address and hours in text, not in an image or a script that only paints after the page loads.

Then go hunting for the old value on your own domain: old landing pages, a PDF price list, the "our new premises" post from the move. If it is on your site it is fair game for retrieval, and no assistant knows which of your pages you consider current.

One caveat. ChatGPT will not use a page it cannot crawl: OpenAI's eligibility rule is to "allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site and confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses". Blocking the crawler does not take the wrong answer away. It takes away the page that would have corrected it.

3. Then the directories the answer cited

Do the ones the citation named first: those are demonstrably being read. Then do these two anyway, because they sit under map apps and assistants plenty of people use and almost nobody in a service business logs into.

Apple Business (formerly Apple Business Connect). Sign in at business.apple.com, choose Brands and then Locations, and select the location to edit it. Apple is blunt about why: "It's important to keep your location data up to date in Apple Business to ensure customers discover your business on Maps and know when to visit your business" (Maintain location information accuracy). The walk-through is in how to add your business to Apple Maps.

Bing Places for Business. The old bingplaces.com address now redirects to bing.com/forbusiness, where the offer is still "Claim your business listing on Bing Places for Business" behind Get started and Sign in. Bing's index sits under Copilot, so a wrong record here is a wrong answer there.

How long a correction takes to reach an AI answer

Nobody publishes it, and anyone who gives you a number is guessing.

The vendors document the first leg only. Google reviews Business Profile changes before they go live and puts no clock on it. Google reviews suggested Maps edits and says only that "it can take some time for your changes to show on the map". Apple says a contested location name change takes "up to five working days". That is the whole of the published record.

No vendor documents the second leg, from a corrected listing to a corrected answer, and it is not really one lag either: the answer is rebuilt from a fresh retrieval every time somebody asks, with caches, crawl schedules and the assistant's choice of source in between.

So fix the source, re-ask a week later, re-ask a month later, and read the trend rather than the single run. Signed out, fresh chat, so you are measuring what a stranger sees.

How to report a wrong answer in each assistant

Every assistant has a feedback control. None of them is a correction channel, and no vendor promises that a report changes a future answer. Use them anyway, because they cost nothing, and because in ChatGPT's case there is a documented consequence.

Assistant	Where the control is	What the vendor documents
ChatGPT	Thumbs down under the message, then Select an issue	The in-product path is documented for a "Safety or Legal concern"; anything else goes to the content reporting form. Reported domains and content "may be reviewed by OpenAI's Model Quality team, which may apply filters or other mitigations to help prevent ChatGPT from relying on unreliable sources in future responses"
Google AI Overviews	"At the bottom of each overview, find Thumbs up and Thumbs down icons", then Report a problem	Google says "AI Overviews can and will make mistakes" and that feedback helps improve them. No correction is promised, and the report carries your search query and its results
Gemini	Good response or Bad response under the reply, signed in; More and then Report legal issue for legal matters; Settings & help and then Send feedback for anything else	The conversation travels with the feedback: "your prompts and the Gemini app's responses" are added to it (Send feedback in Gemini Apps)
Perplexity	"Use the flag icon below the answer to report issues", or email support	Perplexity asks for the "URL to the query" and a "Description of the error and expected result", and lists "Outdated information" among the issues it looks for (Report incorrect answers)

OpenAI's is the one lever with a mechanism behind it (Reporting content in ChatGPT and OpenAI platforms), and it points at the source domain rather than at the answer. If an aggregator with a dead phone number keeps getting cited about you, reporting that domain is a better move than thumbing down the reply.

One wrong location poisons the brand answer

With several sites, the failure is rarely spread evenly. Say Coastline Physio has four clinics and the Marrickville site moved in 2024, but an old aggregator page still carries the previous address. Ask "where is Coastline Physio" and a customer can be handed that address for a brand whose other three are perfectly correct.

Check per location and check the brand: one prompt naming each suburb, one naming only the business. They fail differently, and the brand-level prompt is the one that catches a single bad record contaminating everything. Clear duplicate profiles before you audit anything else, though, because two profiles for one shop give the assistant two versions of you and it is not obliged to pick the right one. Google Business Profile: multiple locations with the same name covers merging one.

Do you need an AI search visibility checker?

A checker identifies a wrong answer. You still repair it on Google, on your website and on the directories, not inside a dashboard.

Use a checker to keep the record: the same prompts at the same interval, with what each assistant said and what it cited, so you can tell a fix from a fluke. Judge one on whether it stores the answer text and the citation and keeps each location separate. A score on its own cannot be audited. You can also do the whole thing by hand, for nothing: how to monitor AI search visibility has the prompt set and the seven-column log.

A monthly fact-check that takes fifteen minutes

Open a fresh, signed-out chat in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Signed in, you are measuring your own account, not what a customer sees.
Ask one question per location that a customer would actually ask: "what time does Coastline Physio in Marrickville close", "what is the phone number for Coastline Physio Marrickville".
Ask one brand-level question with no suburb in it.
Check every phone number, address and set of hours against your own record, not against your memory.
For each mistake, open the citation and note the domain.
Fix Google first, your site second, the cited directory third. Log the date, the assistant, the wrong value and the source, so next month you are comparing rather than starting over.

Cloutly's AI search visibility sweep asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month and flags a wrong phone number in an assistant's answer ("{Assistant} gives out the wrong phone number for {venue}"), reported as a point-in-time sample of a non-deterministic system: one sample each, and a re-ask can differ. It checks the phone number and nothing else; website, address and hours drift is listings management, which watches Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor against the record you set.

FAQ

ChatGPT has the wrong information about my business. Can I edit it directly?

No. There is no business account inside ChatGPT and no field to correct. You can report the answer, and OpenAI says a reported domain may draw filters or other mitigations that stop ChatGPT relying on it in future. The repair itself happens on the source the answer cited.

Will fixing my Google Business Profile fix every assistant?

It fixes the Google surfaces and, over time, most of what copies from Google. It does not reach a directory that holds its own record, or a page about you on somebody else's site. Those get corrected where they live.

A competitor marked us permanently closed. Can I stop it happening again?

Not preventatively. Google accepts closure suggestions from the public and reviews them. What you can do is notice quickly, which is the argument for a monthly check rather than an annual one, then reopen the profile through Edit profile and Hours.

Should I block AI crawlers to stop the wrong information spreading?

No. Blocking a crawler removes your corrected page from the pool the assistant draws on, and leaves the third-party listing with the old number as the only thing it can find. OpenAI's own eligibility requirement is that OAI-Searchbot can crawl the site.

How to embed Google reviews on your website (4 ways, 2026)

Lachlan Fea — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 05:18:00 GMT

There is no button that embeds Google reviews on your website. Nothing in Google Business Profile copies review text onto a page you own, and Google's own embed tool produces a map. To show real Google reviews you need one of four routes: a widget, a code block in your CMS, the Places API, or a screenshot.

The options differ in cost and upkeep, and each has its own rules. Some of those rules are in Google's own terms, and most guides leave them out.

Checked on 6 September 2026 against Google Maps itself, the Places API policies, the Google Maps Platform terms, Google's review snippet documentation, the FTC's consumer reviews rule, and the WordPress and Squarespace help centres.

Can you embed Google reviews for free?

Yes, but not with a tool from Google. Every free option is a third-party widget on a free tier, a screenshot, or Google's map embed, which shows a map card and none of your review text.

I opened the Share panel on a live Google Maps business listing to check. It has two tabs. One is Send a link. The other is Embed a map, and that is the whole of what Google offers. Google's help page for it takes you through the same two clicks: Embed a map, then Copy HTML.

That gap is why the results for this search are almost entirely widget vendors. It is not a conspiracy. It is a product Google never built.

Method	Cost	Updates on its own	Links back to Google	Best for
Review widget	Free tier to a monthly fee	Yes	Usually	Most businesses
CMS code block	Free	Yes, the widget behind it does the work	Depends on the widget	Anyone already comfortable in their editor
Places API	Per request, plus developer time	Only if you build it	You have to add it	Custom front ends with a developer
Screenshot	Free	No	No	A case study, a slide, a flyer

What a good embed shows

Before you choose a method, decide what the finished block needs to show and how a visitor will check it.

The review as written. Not the flattering half of it.
The reviewer's name and the date. A wall of undated praise reads as invented, because a lot of it is.
A link back to the review on Google, so a sceptic can verify it in two clicks.
A filter rule you are willing to say out loud. "Four and five stars" is a rule. Picking reviews one by one is not.

That last one is more than taste if you sell in the US, though none of what follows is legal advice. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, came into force on 21 October 2024. Section 465.7 makes it unlawful to misrepresent that the reviews shown in a part of your site dedicated to receiving and displaying reviews are most or all of what you have received, while you are holding reviews back for being negative.

The FTC's own questions and answers then narrow that in a way most summaries skip. Selective use of positive reviews in marketing sits outside the provision, and sorting so the five-star reviews come first is not covered either. Section 5 of the FTC Act still applies, and the FTC says non-representative reviews in marketing can be deceptive. A filtered widget is not automatically a problem. The problem comes when you present that filtered widget as the full picture. Filter by a rule, put the rule near the block, and link out to your Google profile.

A widget service holds the connection to your Google Business Profile, pulls the reviews, and gives you one line of HTML. It handles the refresh, layout and mobile behaviour. The setup usually looks like this.

Connect the Google location you want to show. On most tools this is a search for your business name, not an API key.
Pick a layout. A wall suits a dedicated reviews page, a carousel suits a section inside a longer page, a strip of reviewer avatars suits the space under a button.
Set the filter, the theme and the accent colour so the block does not look bolted on.
Copy the snippet. It is normally one <script> tag with an id in it.
Paste it where the reviews should appear, and publish.

The snippet you end up with looks like this, with a placeholder id:

<script src="https://app.cloutly.com/add-widget-v2.js" data-widget="YOUR-WIDGET-ID" async></script>

The async attribute earns its place. Without it the browser stops building your page while it fetches the widget.

Cloutly (our product) handles this part: you connect a Google location in one click, choose from nine layouts, and paste one snippet that works with Webflow, WordPress, Squarespace or any site that accepts an HTML snippet. The review widgets page shows the layouts.

Whichever tool you pick, check that the script loads asynchronously, that each review links back to Google, that dates are shown, and that you can describe the filter in one sentence. If a tool lets you hand-pick which individual reviews appear, that is the feature that gets you into trouble.

Method 2: add Google reviews to your website in WordPress or Squarespace

Both platforms accept a raw snippet. That means fewer moving parts than a plugin you might forget to update. A reviews plugin is usually the same widget with a settings screen around it.

On WordPress, use the Custom HTML block. Open the page, click the Block Inserter, or type /html in an empty paragraph and press enter. Click Edit HTML, paste the snippet, and press Update.

There is a trap in that block worth knowing about before it costs you an afternoon. The WordPress documentation says that from WordPress 7.0 the block's CSS and JavaScript panels only appear for users with the unfiltered_html capability. Without it, and a Contributor is the usual case, WordPress sanitises the block with wp_kses() on save and strips <script> and <iframe> out. The snippet vanishes and nothing tells you why. Have an Administrator or an Editor paste it. On a Multisite network, only a Super Admin can. The plugin route and the page builders are in the WordPress Google reviews widget guide.

On Squarespace, use a Code Block. Edit the page, click Add block or +, choose Code, click the pencil icon, and paste the snippet in. Two details from Squarespace's own page catch people out. A code block set to JavaScript renders your code as text, so leave the Type menu on HTML and let the <script> tags do their work. And JavaScript in code blocks is a paid feature: it is available on Core, Plus, Advanced, Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced. Plain HTML runs on any plan, but a review widget is JavaScript. For a badge you want on every page, Code Injection puts the snippet in the site header or footer, on Core, Plus, Advanced and some legacy plans. Adding Google reviews to Squarespace walks the plan gates in full.

If you would still rather have a plugin, check when it was last updated and which version of the platform it has been tested against. An abandoned reviews plugin is a security liability sitting on your site for the sake of a layout a snippet would have given you.

On Wix, the same snippet goes into the Embed HTML element rather than a Custom HTML block; there is no Wix app or plugin involved, just Wix's own iframe embed. Adding Google reviews to a Wix website covers the click path, including where Wix's Custom Code screen looks like the site-wide answer and is not.

Method 3: the Google Places API (what it can and cannot do)

This is the route older guides send you down, including the 2023 version of this post. It is legitimate, but more constrained than those guides suggest. The Places API returns place details, including reviews, for a place you identify by its place ID. You pay per request, and reviews are not a cheap field: in Google's data fields table, reviews sits in Place Details Enterprise + Atmosphere, the top tier.

Before you build this, read the Places API policies. They require you to:

Credit the author. Every review arrives with an avatar, a name and a profile link, and you must use them. Where space is tight the avatar is the minimum, so a design that strips the reviewer out is not an option.
Let the reader reach the original. Users must always be able to open the individual review on Google Maps, through the googleMapsUri returned with it.
Say how you ordered and filtered. The policy asks for a clear notice covering the order, the filtering and any search criteria applied. The default order is relevance, not newest.

Caching is where the folklore is. You will read that Google allows 30 days of caching. The 30 days is real, it is in the Maps Platform Service Specific Terms, and it covers latitude and longitude values from the Places API. Not reviews. The main terms are blunter: no caching of Google Maps Content beyond what the Service Specific Terms allow, and under the No Scraping clause the list of things you must not do includes copying and saving business names, addresses or user reviews. Place IDs are the exception you can store indefinitely.

So the API makes sense in one situation: you have a developer, you want reviews inside your own components, and you will meet the attribution and disclosure requirements yourself. Scraping the pages instead is worse on every count. It breaks the terms, and it breaks again whenever Google changes its markup.

Method 4: a screenshot (honest, and when it is fine)

Screenshotting a review and dropping the image on a page is the method every guide sneers at. It works for a case study, a pitch deck, a printed flyer or a social post. Those are moments rather than pages, and nobody expects them to update.

As the review block on a live page it fails. It never updates, so it ages in public. There is no link back, so nobody can verify it. The text sits inside an image, so search engines and screen readers get nothing. If you use one anyway, put the review text in the alt attribute, link to the review on Google underneath it, and leave the rating in shot.

Where to put Google reviews on your site so they convert

The default is a wall of reviews on the homepage and nothing anywhere else. Put the block beside the action it should support, such as the booking, quote or checkout button.

Under the booking, quote or checkout button, as a short strip of proof at the moment someone decides whether to trust you with their money.
On each location page, showing that location's reviews. A customer choosing your Newcastle clinic does not care about the Brisbane one, and a feed blended across every site throws away the local detail that made the reviews persuasive.

Recency does the rest. Coastline Physio, a fictional two-clinic practice, could put four good reviews under the Book now button on each clinic page and have that block working against them a year later, because the newest one still says 2025. An embed is a commitment to keep collecting. If you stop asking, the page says so, in public, with dates. That is what getting more Google reviews is for, and a Google review QR code at the counter is the cheapest way to keep the feed moving.

Before you embed anything, check how to see all your Google reviews in Google Business Profile. What is on your profile is often not what you think it is.

Do embedded Google reviews help SEO?

Not in the way most pages on this topic imply. The claim usually being made is that you embed reviews and get stars in Google, and you will not get star ratings under your own listing from reviews you host about yourself.

Google's review snippet documentation says so directly. If the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or any other Organization structured data are ineligible for the star review feature. The example Google gives is an embedded third-party widget, naming Google Business reviews and Facebook reviews widgets. Google dropped self-serving review rich results in September 2019 and has not brought them back.

An embed can still help in smaller, practical ways. It adds text to the page in the words your customers use about your service, and it gives visitors a reason to stay instead of leaving to check you out on Google. Structured data is still worth switching on if your widget offers it, because it puts the rating on the page in a form search engines can read. Keep that markup consistent with what a human sees, and keep undisclosed incentivised reviews out of it.

One practical warning. A review widget is third-party JavaScript, and third-party JavaScript is the usual reason a page that used to load fast no longer does. Run a speed test after you add it, not before.

FAQ

Can I show only my five-star reviews? You can filter, and sorting by rating is not suppression under the FTC rule. What you cannot do is present a filtered selection as though it were everything you have received. Set a filter you can describe in a sentence, put that sentence near the block, and link to your Google profile.

Do I need a Google Places API key to embed reviews? No, not if you use a widget or a plugin. Those services hold the connection to Google. You need a key only if you are building the display yourself.

Can I embed Google reviews on Squarespace or WordPress? Yes to both, without a plugin. WordPress takes a Custom HTML block, Squarespace takes a Code Block, though Squarespace needs a Core plan or above before JavaScript will run inside one.

What should I do about a bad review that shows up in the widget? Reply to it on Google first. A one-star review with a good answer under it does less damage than a filtered wall of praise, and there are worked examples of review responses to start from.

Can you buy Google reviews? The 2026 answer, and the bill

Lachlan Fea — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 07:45:00 GMT

Can you buy Google reviews? Somebody will sell them to you, and in the United States buying them is now unlawful. The Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, 16 CFR Part 465, has been in force since 21 October 2024, and buying a fake review breaks it. Courts can impose civil penalties for a knowing violation, up to $53,088 each on the FTC's most recent figure. Google bans the practice everywhere under its own policy, and enforces against your profile rather than the seller's.

Verified 6 September 2026 against the rule text on eCFR, the FTC's questions and answers for business and December 2025 warning-letter post, Google's content policy and April 2026 Maps announcement, the ACCC and the CMA. None of it is legal advice.

I have not named a seller here and I am not explaining a method. What follows is the rule, and which of the things your business already runs are now on the wrong side of it.

From the FTC's December 2025 post on warning letters to ten businesses. Screenshot taken 6 September 2026.

Can you buy Google reviews, and is it illegal?

You can find a seller in about a minute, and in the United States the purchase itself is now unlawful. That is the change. Regulators have called fake reviews deceptive for two decades, but until October 2024 the FTC had to win a general deception case before it could ask a court for money. A specific rule exists now, so the conduct carries a price.

Outside court, the answer is simpler. The reviews do not stay. Google blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025. Whatever you paid for is on borrowed time, and the exposure it leaves behind outlives it.

What the FTC rule actually says

The rule sits at 16 CFR Part 465. It was published at 89 FR 68077 on 22 August 2024 and took effect on 21 October 2024. Four provisions reach a business that buys rather than sells.

Section 465.2 covers both ends of the transaction. It is a violation for a business to "write, create, or sell a consumer review" that materially misrepresents that the reviewer exists, that the reviewer used or had experience with the business, or what that experience was. The same section makes it a violation to "purchase a consumer review" of your own business that you "knew or should have known" misrepresented any of those three things. Not looking too closely is not a defence, because the test is what you should have known. Paying an anonymous seller for fifty reviews from people who have never walked into your premises is a transaction where the misrepresentation is the product.

Section 465.2(c) covers your own team. A business may not procure a review from "its officers, managers, employees, or agents, or any of their immediate relatives" for posting on a third-party platform when it knew or should have known the review misrepresented the reviewer. Section 465.5 then requires an officer or manager who writes one anyway to disclose the relationship clearly and conspicuously, which nobody does voluntarily.

Section 465.2(d) is the carve-out that protects an ordinary review programme. The purchase and insider prohibitions do not apply to "generalized solicitations to purchasers to post reviews or testimonials about their experiences". Asking every customer sits outside the rule. It bites when you single people out.

Section 465.4 covers paying for sentiment. It is a violation to provide "compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment". Implied counts, and compensation does not have to be cash.

Our guide to the Google review policy sets both rulebooks side by side in one table, including the rows where Google is stricter than the law.

What counts as a fake review under the rule

The test is not whether a review is flattering. It is whether the review misrepresents the reviewer or the experience, and that catches more than the obvious purchase.

A bought review, written by somebody paid to write it about a business they have never used.
An incentivised review where the incentive is tied to sentiment: a discount, a free item, a prize entry or loyalty credit offered for a positive review. Google goes further and bans incentives whether or not sentiment is attached.
An AI-written review posted under a name that never used the business. The rule turns on whether the reviewer exists and had the experience, not on what typed the words. A customer using a language model to tidy up a review of a service they did receive is a different case.
A review from an officer, manager, employee, agent or close relative, procured for a third-party platform or written without disclosing the relationship.
A review revised for a payment. Paying a customer to rewrite a bad review into a good one is compensation conditioned on sentiment. Paying them to delete it is not squarely section 465.4, but Google's policy names the "revision or removal of a negative review" in its incentive ban, and an unfounded legal threat used to get one taken down is prohibited by section 465.7.

For the tells that identify one on your own profile, and for what to do when the profile buying them is a competitor's, see how to spot a fake review.

What is the penalty for buying Google reviews?

The FTC's guidance says the rule "authorizes courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations". The number attached to that in the Commission's most recent public statement on reviews is $53,088.

In December 2025 the FTC sent warning letters to ten companies over fake reviews and over incentives offered specifically for five-star reviews. The post describing it says penalties "at up to $53,088 per violation, can quickly add up". That matters. The unit being counted is a review rather than a campaign, and a batch bought from a seller arrives as dozens of them.

Two qualifications. The figure is a statutory maximum adjusted for inflation, not a tariff. And a warning letter is not a penalty: the FTC's pattern with a young rule is to write first and litigate later, so the ten businesses that got letters got a warning the next operator will not.

Does Google detect fake reviews?

Yes, at a scale that makes the question academic. Google published its 2025 figures in an April 2026 report on protecting businesses on Maps: over 292 million policy-violating reviews blocked or removed, posting restrictions on more than 782,000 accounts, and over 13 million fake Business Profiles taken down.

Google's 2025 enforcement figures, from its April 2026 post on protecting businesses on Maps. Screenshot taken 6 September 2026.

What catches a purchase is not language analysis. It is the account. Bought reviews come from a small pool of accounts that review unrelated businesses in unrelated cities, in bursts, for money. When Google restricts one of those accounts it takes down everything it ever posted, which is how a rating built over months drops back in an afternoon.

What happens to your profile when you are caught

The sequence is predictable, and only the last step is loud.

The reviews vanish, without notice. Google rarely says which ones it removed or why. A rating that drops overnight with no new reviews is the usual first sign.
The account gets restricted. Restrictions attach to the account, not to the individual review, so they follow every profile that account touches.
The profile is suspended. Google reserves the right "to suspend access to Business Profiles on Google or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines, and may work with law enforcement in the event that the violation is unlawful". For a multi-location operator this is the expensive step, because one account usually manages every profile.
You appeal, and you wait. A restricted account has to be reinstated before you can appeal anything else, and Google says an appeal decision can take up to five business days.

While a profile is suspended you are invisible in Maps for the terms you used to win, and the removal and appeals process is a longer road than the one you were trying to shortcut.

The seller is liable too, and that does not help you

Section 465.2(a) names selling in the same sentence as writing and creating, and the FTC has gone after the tooling as well. In September 2024 it acted against Rytr over an AI service that "generated detailed reviews that contained specific, often material details that had no relation to the user's input", charging it with giving subscribers "the means to generate false and deceptive written content for consumer reviews". FTC staff say advertising agencies, PR firms, review brokers and reputation management companies are not immune either.

From the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule questions and answers, read 6 September 2026.

None of that protects the buyer. Sellers are offshore, anonymous and trivially replaced. You are a registered business with an address, a profile and a payment record, so the paper trail sits on your side and the asset at risk is yours. The same runs in reverse for anyone offering to take a bad review down for a fee: if they are not your lawyer and not the platform, the offer is either a scam or a violation you are paying to commit. Read up on Removify and services like it first.

The practices you already run that are now exposure

Most businesses that get caught never bought a review. They ran something ordinary and the rules caught up with it. If you operate more than a handful of sites, one of these is probably live somewhere in your network today.

What you may be running	Why it is exposure	What to change
A staff bonus paid per review collected	Google's policy names "merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews", and a bonus is a quota with a price on it	Pay on the work, not the review count. Recognising the person a customer named in a review is not a quota. Paying per review is
A monthly prize draw for anyone who reviews you	Google bans incentives outright, with no exception for an unconditional one. An entry offered only for five-star reviews is section 465.4 conduct as well	Stop the draw
A "leave us five stars" card, sticker or counter script	Google allows a merchant to solicit reviews "without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review". A number on the card is the rating	Print the review link with no number on it. "Tell us how we did" reads better anyway
An agency paid a fee per review delivered	The FTC says review brokers and reputation management firms are not immune, and a per-review fee buys the outcome	Pay for the campaign, not the yield, and ask in writing where the reviews come from
Asking your team to seed a new location	Section 465.2(c) reaches officers, managers, employees, agents and their immediate relatives	Open at zero and ask real customers. A new profile recovers in weeks
Paying a customer to take a bad review down	Google's incentive ban covers the "revision or removal of a negative review" as well as the posting of one	Reply publicly, fix the problem privately, let the review stand

Choosing who gets asked belongs on that list too, and it has its own name. Review gating covers why asking only the customers you expect to be pleased sits in the same family, and why Cloutly stopped doing it in 2021.

Where Australia and the United Kingdom stand

The direction outside the United States is the same and the enforcement is further along. Australian law treats fake reviews as misleading and deceptive conduct, and the ACCC says plainly that "it's against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews or to arrange for others to do so". Its penalties here have run to millions of dollars. In the United Kingdom, obtaining fake reviews and publishing paid-for reviews without marking them became banned practices under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 in April 2025. The CMA can fine up to 10% of global turnover, and in March 2026 it opened five investigations across car sales, funerals and food delivery.

What to do instead

The honest route feels slow at the start. It compounds, which a bought batch never does, and nobody can take it away.

Ask every customer, once, soon after the job. Not the ones you expect to be pleased. A rating is an average and averages move on volume, and asking everyone is exactly what section 465.2(d) protects. How to get more Google reviews has the timing and the follow-up.
Make the ask one tap and take nothing in return. A review link or QR code the customer keeps, with no rating question in front of it and no discount behind it.
Reply to what arrives, including the bad ones. A considered reply to a one-star does more for the next reader than the five-star you were going to buy.

Doing that across a real customer list is where it falls apart by hand. Cloutly's review campaigns fire the ask off your own booking or payment system, count a repeat customer as one contact asked once instead of one ask per transaction, skip anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days, and stop the follow-ups when a review lands. There is no rating step in front of the review sites, and there has not been one since 2021.

Frequently asked questions

Is it illegal to buy Google reviews?

In the United States, yes. Since 21 October 2024 the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, 16 CFR Part 465, has made it a violation to purchase a consumer review you knew or should have known misrepresented the reviewer or their experience. In Australia it is misleading and deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law; in the United Kingdom obtaining fake reviews is a banned practice under the DMCC Act 2024.

How much is the fine for fake Google reviews?

The rule authorises courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations. The FTC's December 2025 warning-letter post put the maximum at $53,088 per violation and noted that penalties at that level "can quickly add up". It is a statutory maximum rather than a set fine.

Can Google tell if you bought reviews?

Usually. Google blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025 and put posting restrictions on more than 782,000 accounts. The signal is the reviewing account's behaviour across other businesses, not the wording of any single review.

What happens if you get caught buying Google reviews?

The reviews are removed without notice, the accounts behind them are restricted, and a pattern of violations can suspend the Business Profile along with the others the same account manages. Reinstatement runs through an appeal that Google says can take up to five business days.

How to get 5-star Google reviews (without breaking Google's rules)

Lachlan Fea — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 13:16:00 GMT

You get 5-star Google reviews by doing work worth five stars, then asking every customer soon after the job through a link that opens the review box in one tap. What you can't do is filter for happy customers, pay for reviews, or offer anything in return. Google removes those, and in the US they now carry civil penalties.

That last sentence is the part most guides skip. A 5-star rating is an average, and the only way to move an average up is to add reviews from people who had a good time, at a steady rate, in a way that survives Google's spam filters and, if you sell in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission. If you want the number for your own profile, run your current rating through the calculator.

Customers read the reviews before they ever meet you. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, of 1,002 US consumers, found 97% read reviews for local businesses and 71% used Google for them.

Google Business Profile Help, "Prohibited & restricted content", rating manipulation section.

Ask customers to leave a review

Most businesses with a rating problem understand that they should ask. The problem is how it happens: when somebody remembers, on a quiet Tuesday, whoever is fresh in mind. A business serving four hundred people a month collects six reviews.

Make the ask part of the job, not a task on a list. Every completed job gets one, on the same rule, whether it went well or not.

Asking everyone is the version Google allows, and it produces the better rating anyway. A business that asks only its favourites collects a small pile that reads as curated, and a rating built on twelve reviews falls apart the first time somebody has a bad day.

Timing matters more than wording. Ask while the customer can still picture the job: after the appointment, after the invoice is settled, after the install is signed off. Wait a fortnight and they are trying to recall a Tuesday.

Be straightforward

Say what you want, say how long it takes, and give them the link. That's the whole message.

Hi Emma, it's Sam from Coastline Physio. Thanks for coming in today. If you've got a minute, would you leave us a Google review? It takes about 30 seconds: [link]

That message leaves out two things, and yours should too.

It doesn't ask for five stars. Search "give us 5 star rating" and you'll find plenty of templates that do. Google's policy for merchants bars requesting that specific content be included in a review, and a demand for a particular rating is the clearest form of that. Ask for a review. The rating is the customer's to give.

It doesn't tell the customer what to write. The advice to prompt people to "mention the treatment you had", or to name the person who looked after them, is everywhere, and it breaks the same rule. Google's policy names that one twice: merchants may not request that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, "including content that identifies a staff member".

Keep it short enough to read on a lock screen. The longer versions, including the follow-up and the email variants, are in our review request email and SMS templates.

Remove the friction

Most people don't refuse to review you. They open your message on a train, mean to get to it, and don't. Every step between the message and the review box loses a few more of them.

Google gives you a direct link for exactly this. On your Business Profile, choose Read Reviews, then Get more reviews, then select Copy to take the link. The same screen carries a QR code you can save by right clicking it, though Google notes that review QR codes can only be generated on a computer browser, not on mobile devices.

If you set this up a few years ago you'll remember it as an "Ask for reviews" button inside Google My Business. That button is gone and the product is now called Google Business Profile, but the link does the same job.

Put the link where the moment already happens: the bottom of your invoice, the booking confirmation, your email signature, or the thank-you page after a payment.

How you ask	What it takes to set up	When it fits	Watch out for
SMS	A review link and a way to send it after the job	Trades, clinics, salons, anywhere you already hold a mobile number	Keep it to one send and one follow-up, and honour opt-outs the first time
Email	The same link in a short message	Longer jobs, anything with an invoice or a paper trail	It sits unread for hours, so judge it over a week, not a day
In person	A card or a printed code to hand over	High-touch work where you're face to face at the end	Hand it over and let them go. Standing there while they type breaches Google's policy
QR code	A code on a card, receipt, counter or window	Cafes, retail, waiting rooms, anywhere there's a queue	A code somebody chooses to scan is fine. A tablet you push at them is not

The follow-up is where most of the reviews come from, and it's also where most businesses come unstuck, because a second message to somebody who has already reviewed you reads as spam. At any volume you want software that refuses to send as much as it sends. Cloutly treats a repeat customer as one contact asked once. A second booking moves the ask rather than adding one. Anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days is skipped, a contact who opted out is never re-enrolled, and the follow-ups stop the moment the review lands.

What you must never do to get 5-star reviews

Most ranking guides wave at this part and move on. The rules changed in 2024 and they now carry a number.

Don't offer anything in return. Google prints the warning on the same help page that hands you your review link: offering incentives, "like free or discounted goods or services, to customers in exchange for reviews is considered fake engagement and is strictly prohibited", and that covers posting a review, changing one, or removing a negative one. The prize draw counts. So do the free coffee, the 10% off next visit, and the staff bonus paid per review.

Don't buy reviews. Since 21 October 2024 the FTC's rule on the use of consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) has banned writing, buying, selling or distributing reviews from people who never had the experience, AI-generated ones included. It also bans compensation "conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative", and undisclosed reviews from your own managers, employees or their immediate family. More on whether you can buy Google reviews and how to spot the fake ones.

Don't put a rating step in front of the review. Some tools ask the customer to pick a star rating first, pass the high ratings on to Google and route the low ones into a private form. It gets sold as catching problems before they go public. Google's policy names it: merchants must not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". The FTC rule reaches the related version of it, where a business presents the reviews on its own site as if they were all of them while excluding the ones with low ratings. Cloutly doesn't do it, and hasn't since 2021. Ask everyone and take the result. The full argument is in our piece on review gating.

Don't pressure anyone on the premises. The same Google policy bars requiring or pressuring users to leave ratings or write reviews while they're on your premises, and bars asking staff to bring in a set number of reviews.

What it costs. The FTC can seek civil penalties for knowing violations. On 22 December 2025 it sent warning letters to ten companies over fake reviews and incentives paid for positive ratings, and put the figure plainly: civil penalties "at up to $53,088 per violation" that "can quickly add up". That maximum took effect in January 2025 and was not adjusted for 2026, so it is the number today. Google's own sanction is quieter and faster: it removes the reviews, and a profile that has had a batch removed tends to get closer attention on the next one.

Remain compliant with Google reviews best practices

Knowing the rules is one thing. Dealing with enforcement is another. It is automated, and it never tells you what happened.

Reviews disappear. Sometimes it's a policy call on the reviewer's account, sometimes the review never posted because the customer wasn't signed in to a Google account, sometimes a filter reacted to a spike. If a batch vanishes, start with our post on Google reviews not showing up rather than assuming a competitor reported you.

A steady rate protects you. Twenty reviews arriving on one afternoon, at a business that collected two in the previous year, is the pattern the spam systems exist to catch. The same twenty over three months is invisible to the filter and more convincing to a reader, who can see the dates.

You can report a review that breaks the rules, and you should when it does, but "this customer is wrong about us" isn't a policy violation. What Google will and won't act on is set out in our guide to the Google review policy.

Maintain a positive brand image

No amount of asking can make up for service that doesn't deserve five stars. The gap between four stars and five is usually not the work itself. It's the last five minutes.

Five-star reviews often mention the same small set of things. Somebody answered the phone. Somebody explained the price before starting. Somebody spotted a problem and fixed it before the customer had to raise it. None of that is a marketing programme.

For an honest diagnosis, read your existing one and two-star reviews. They'll tell you which five minutes you're losing.

Respond to every review

Replying is the only part of your review profile you control outright, and Google recommends it. A reply is public and permanent, and the next customer reads it far more often than the reviewer does.

Keep replies short and specific to what the person actually said. Google's own tips say to skip sending the same thank you to everyone and to spend the time on reviews where you can share a useful update or answer a question, and to keep deals and promotions out of the reply. There are worked examples in positive review response examples.

Address negative reviews

A profile of nothing but five stars looks bought. Google's guidance says a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy, and readers behave that way: they go looking for the low ratings to see what happens when something goes wrong.

Reply to the bad ones the same day if you can. Acknowledge the specific thing, say what you're doing about it, and give one route to a human. Don't argue the facts in public, and don't hint at legal consequences: the FTC rule bans using unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats or intimidation to prevent or remove a negative review. Our 1-star review response guide has wording for the harder cases.

Ask in person, and with a QR code

The in-person ask lands better than any message, because the customer is standing in front of somebody they just had a good experience with. It also carries the tightest rules. Hand over a card with the code on it and let them leave. Put the code on the receipt, on the counter, on the window by the door. What you can't do is hold the phone, watch them type, or set up a tablet by the till for people to review you on. That's pressuring a review on the premises, and it's the thing Google names.

Print is cheap and it keeps working: a code on a card sits in a wallet, and somebody scans it that night. Our free Google review QR code generator makes one from your Business Profile.

What a good 5-star review actually says

A five-star review with no words is worth a fraction of one with them. "Great service, thanks" moves your average and does nothing else. "Booked Thursday, they came Friday morning, quoted before they started and the price didn't change" answers the question the reader actually has.

Here's the catch. You can't ask for that, because asking a customer to include specific content is against Google's policy. What you can do is ask at a point where the specifics are still in their head, which is the same argument for asking on the day rather than a fortnight later. Detail comes from recency, not from instructions.

Then put the good ones where people who aren't on Google will see them, which means embedding them on your own site rather than leaving them to be found.

FAQ

Can I offer a discount in exchange for a 5-star Google review? No. Google's policy bars offering payment, discounts or free goods and services in exchange for a review, a change to a review, or the removal of a negative one. In the US, compensation conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment is also covered by the FTC's 2024 rule.

Can I ask only the customers I know are happy? No. Google's policy for merchants bars selectively soliciting positive reviews and bars discouraging negative ones. Ask everybody on the same rule and take the result. Any tool that offers to screen customers by rating first is offering to break that rule for you.

Why did my new 5-star reviews disappear? The usual causes are a customer who wasn't signed in to a Google account, a spam filter reacting to an unusual spike, or a policy call on the reviewer's account. It's rarely a competitor. Start with our post on Google reviews not showing up.

Can I ask a customer to change their review to five stars? You can reply, fix the problem, and let them decide. You can't offer them anything to do it. Asking for a revision or a removal in exchange for a benefit is named in Google's policy, and inducing a review of a particular sentiment is covered by the FTC rule.

How often can I ask the same customer for a review? Once per job, with one follow-up, and not at all if they've reviewed you recently. Somebody who left you five stars in March doesn't need a request in April. If you're doing this by hand, keep a list of who has reviewed you and check it before every send.

Should I ask customers to mention the service or the person who served them? No. Google's policy bars requesting that specific content be included in a review, including naming a staff member. Ask on the day instead. The detail comes with the memory.

Nothing here works as a one-off push. The average moves on the rate you ask at, week after week. For the wider set of tactics, start with how to get more Google reviews.

How to see your Google reviews as a business or customer

Lachlan Fea — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 02:50:00 GMT

To see your Google reviews as a business, sign in to the Google account that has access to the profile, then search your business name and city on Google, or search "my business". Your Business Profile opens in the results, and Read reviews takes you to the full list, where you can also reply. To see reviews you wrote as a customer, open Google Maps, go to Your contributions and select Reviews.

There is no separate dashboard to sign in to. Google's own instructions say to "go to your Business Profile", meaning the profile as it appears on Search and Maps. Google keeps the Business Profile Manager for owners handling several profiles at once. Search for a control panel and you end up back at the listing.

If what you actually want is more of them rather than a look at the ones you have, how to get more Google reviews is the guide for that.

Google's own instructions for reading and replying to reviews. Checked 6 September 2026.

Reviews you wrote: how to see Google reviews by me

On a computer:

Open Google Maps and sign in to the account you used when you left the reviews.
At the top left, click Menu.
Click Your contributions, then Reviews.

Every review you have written is in that list, and you can edit or delete any of them (Google Maps Help). If the list looks short, you are signed in to a different Google account from the one you reviewed with.

The consumer path, in Google's own words. Checked 6 September 2026.

Where your business's Google reviews live now

Your reviews sit on your Business Profile, which is what Google My Business reviews are now called. You can reach it three ways, and all three show the same list. The route matters less than the account: "To find your profile, you must sign in to the Google Account associated with it" (Find your business on Google). Most "where are my Google reviews" moments come from a signed-out browser or a second Google account, not a missing profile.

On Google Search

Search your business name and city, or search "my business". Your profile appears with the star rating and review count. Select Read reviews to open the list, and select the reply icon next to any review to respond (Manage customer reviews). Reading works either way, but you have to verify the business before you can reply to anything.

On Google Maps

Search your business name and city on Maps while signed in. Anyone can read the reviews here, you included.

In the Google Maps app

Tap Business at the bottom right. If you look after more than one business, tap the down arrow at the top and select the one you want (Find your business on Google). The profile that opens is the same one you get on Search, so the reviews and the reply box are the same too.

How to see all Google reviews for a business (including one you don't own)

Anyone can read them. Search the business on Google or Maps, find the rating under the name, and select the review count next to it. That opens every published review on the profile, with no sign-in and no ownership. Use this to check a competitor, or a location your organisation runs that your login does not cover.

What you cannot do from the outside is reply, report a review, or get told when a new one arrives. Those need owner or manager access on the profile. Claiming it is further down.

Why the count you see is not the count your customers see

A customer swears they left a review and it is not there. Or your profile said 214 reviews last week and says 211 today. Google lists the reasons.

Moderation takes time. "Reviews are checked to ensure they comply with our policies. In some cases, this process might take a few days, which can delay a review's appearance on your profile" (About missing or delayed reviews). A recent merge does the same thing: reviews from both profiles can take a few days to display on Search and Maps.

The score lags behind the reviews. "After someone leaves a new review, it may take up to 2 weeks to get an updated review score" (Understand review scores). A review can be sitting on your profile while the average has not caught up to it.

Ratings without text still count. The review score is the average of all ratings published on Google for the place, so a customer who tapped four stars and wrote nothing has moved your average with nothing for you to read.

And some reviews are gone for good. Google's prohibited and restricted content policy covers fake engagement, reviews written in exchange for payment or a discount, off-topic and promotional content, and conflict of interest, which includes reviews from current and former staff. "Reviews removed for policy violations won't be restored." Google also turns reviews off temporarily for some profiles and business categories.

Google's list of reasons a review is missing. Checked 6 September 2026.

If a review has vanished and none of that fits, Google's Manage your Google Business reviews tool reports removals and checks a review's status. The rest of the causes are in why your Google review is not showing up.

Someone else has claimed my business

If you can find your business on Google but cannot manage it, someone else holds the profile. Usually a former marketing agency, or whoever set the listing up years ago. The fix is a request, not a phone call.

Go to business.google.com/add and enter the name and address of your business.
Choose your business from the list. You get a message saying "Someone else may manage this Business Profile".
Select Request Access, fill out the form and submit it.
The current owner is notified by email and has 3 days to respond.

If nobody responds inside those three days, open your confirmation email, select View request, then Verify, and follow the steps on screen (Request ownership of a Business Profile).

The request flow, including the exception for businesses with no public address. Checked 6 September 2026.

Two things to plan around. A service-area business with no shop or office cannot use the form and has to contact Google support, entering "Transfer ownership of listing" as the issue. And new access is not full access straight away: "When you become a profile owner or manager, you have to wait 7 days before you can manage some profile features", which covers deleting a profile, removing other owners or managers, and transferring primary ownership (Owners and managers).

If the request stalls, work the verification path above rather than creating a second profile. A duplicate splits your reviews across two listings and takes longer to merge than the wait would have. No profile at all? Start with adding your business to Google Maps.

How to get notified when someone leaves a new review

Checking your profile when you remember to is not monitoring. Turn the alerts on once:

Go to your Business Profile.
Select More, then Notifications.
Find the notification you want and turn it on or off.

The one to look for is customer activity, which alerts you when customers leave new reviews or add photos. Notifications arrive by email, or in Search or Maps (Manage your notifications).

One trap: notifications follow the Google account that holds access. If the person who answers your reviews works from a shared login rather than their own access, they get nothing. Add them as a manager under their own email address.

What to do with the reviews once you can see them

Ask customers for reviews

Reviews arrive when you ask, and the timing does more work than the wording. Ask once the job is finished, while the customer still remembers who did it. Ask everyone, not only the customers you expect to be happy: filtering who gets asked is review gating, and it produces a rating nobody believes. Google's policy already treats incentives and reviews from staff as violations.

Respond to every Google review

Reply from Read reviews, using the reply icon beside the review. Replies are moderated, and they "usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes a review can take up to 30 days". The reviewer is notified and can change their review afterwards, which is the practical argument for keeping a calm reply on an angry one. Wording you can adapt is in our positive review response examples.

Monitor your reviews

Report reviews that break the content policy through the review tool linked above, and be realistic about what qualifies. Off-topic and promotional content is a violation, and so is a review from someone who was never your customer. A review that is merely unfair, or wrong about the facts, is not.

Ensure your listing details are correct

"Only verified businesses can show their business info on Maps and Search", and once you edit something, Google says changes can take up to 3 days to appear in search results. Check the hours, the phone number and the category every quarter. Wrong hours cost you the visit and then earn you the one-star review about being closed.

Seeing reviews across more than one location

Everything above assumes one profile. At two locations that is mildly annoying. At fourteen it is somebody's Monday.

Google's answer is the Business Profile Manager, which lets larger businesses "manage your profiles in bulk" (Manage your Business Profile on Google Maps), and business groups, which "make it easier for multiple administrators to manage a set of profiles". Owners and managers of a group can add, edit and delete the profiles in it; only the group owner can add or remove the people in the group (Business groups). In the Maps app, the down arrow at the top switches between the businesses you have access to.

What none of that gives you is one list of every review across every location, in date order, showing which have been answered. You still open each profile and try to remember where you got to. It also stops at Google, so anything arriving on Facebook, Yelp or a booking site is a separate round of tabs.

Cloutly puts that in one place: reviews from 39 review sites land in one inbox that spans every location under your login and filters down to any one of them.

Two more traps at this size. Locations sharing a name are easy to duplicate, which is how one branch's reviews end up on another branch's profile: see managing multiple locations with the same business name. And access is granted per profile, so the manager you added last year cannot see the four locations you have opened since.

FAQ

Where are my Google reviews if my profile shows none? Check which Google account you are signed in to, then check the profile is verified. Only verified businesses show their business info on Maps and Search.

How long does a Google review take to appear? Usually minutes. Google says policy checks can take a few days, and the review score itself can take up to two weeks to update.

Can I see all Google reviews for a business I do not own? Yes. Search it on Google or Maps and select the review count under the rating. Reading needs no account; replying and reporting need owner or manager access.

Can a manager see and answer reviews, or only the owner? Managers have almost the same access as owners, responding to reviews included. What they cannot do is add or remove users, or delete the profile.

Why did my Google review count go down? Most often Google removed one or more of them for a policy violation, and removals like that are not reversed. A recent profile merge can also move the count for a few days.

Do I need a separate app to see my reviews? No. Google Search, Google Maps and the Business tab in the Maps app are the three paths Google documents.

Google - Blog | Cloutly | Reviews, Reputation and Digital Marketing Insights

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace (code block)

Which Squarespace plan do you need to add Google reviews?

Squarespace has no Google reviews feature

Code block, embed block or code injection

Fluid Engine or the classic editor: where the block can go

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace, step by step

Why your review block is blank

Stars, filtering, and keeping the block current

FAQ

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website (no app needed)

Wix has no Google reviews element

Route 1: an app from the Wix App Market

Route 2: a Google reviews widget for Wix, as one HTML snippet

What Wix's Embed HTML element does to your widget

It is an iframe, and it will not resize itself

HTTPS only

You do not need Velo, and you do not want a custom element

Do you need a paid Wix plan to embed Google reviews?

How to add Google reviews to a Wix website, step by step

Wix Studio puts it under a different menu

The mobile version is a second job

Keeping the block honest, and current

FAQ

AI Overviews for local businesses: how to appear

What is an AI Overview?

When does Google show an AI Overview for a local search?

What do AI Overviews use to answer a local question?

Is there special markup or a file for AI Overviews?

How to appear in AI Overviews as a local business

What AI Overviews do to your clicks

AI Overviews and AI Mode are not the same thing

How to check whether you appear in AI Overviews

Frequently asked questions

Can I stop my business appearing in AI Overviews?

Do I need schema markup to appear in an AI Overview?

Does an AI Overview replace the map pack?

How to edit your Google Business Profile, and what happens after you save

Where you edit a Google Business Profile now

Which fields you can edit, and which ones need verification

How to change business hours on Google

Special hours and holiday hours

How to update business information on Google without triggering a re-verification

How long does a Google Business Profile edit take to show?

Google Business Profile edit not showing: what to check

When an edit is rejected, and how to appeal

When Google changes your profile back

Editing several locations at once

Keeping the same facts on every other site

FAQ

Can I change my business name on Google without losing my reviews?

Do I need to verify again if I only change my phone number?

Why does Google keep changing my hours back?

Can I still edit my profile in the old Google My Business dashboard?

SEO for Google AI Mode: what a local business has to change

What is Google AI Mode, and where can people use it?

AI Mode and AI Overviews are not the same feature

What query fan-out means when someone asks for a local business

What AI Mode shows when the question is about a place

SEO for Google AI Mode: the four things you can change

What AI Mode does to your clicks

How to check what AI Mode says about your business

Frequently asked questions

Is Google AI Mode available in Australia and New Zealand?

Do I need schema markup or an llms.txt file for AI Mode?

Can I see AI Mode traffic on its own in Search Console?

How many reviews do I need to be named in AI Mode?

Google review link: how to get it, and where to put it

How to get your Google review link

Building the link from a Place ID

Short links, QR codes and the g.page name you cannot get any more

Where to put your Google review link

The link is an invitation, not a gate

What your customer has to do on their side

If you have more than one location

When the Google review link does not work

It opens the wrong business

The customer says they reviewed you and you cannot see it

The QR code will not scan

Nothing arrives at all

The `unfiltered_html` trap, and why it bites franchises