Insights from Turner: BREAKING NEWS: Google is Putting Your Reviews into Moderation Purgatory

For years, Google has been the de facto, go-to review site. But Google sat on its hands for years, implementing very few practices to protect the star rating average it displayed to its consumers.

Google has been inconsistent, at best, in actually removing reviews that are illegitimate. While there has been a way to dispute reviews that a business does not think is fair, until 2026, we saw very little activity of Google policing businesses inflating their star ratings through fake reviews and sketchy practices (outside of some minor IP address tracking).

That all changed this year. What started as a small effort with clear guidelines for policing review activity (that you can read about here) has turned into an apocalyptic level of review policing and removal. Google is increasingly placing reviews into a period of moderation before they appear publicly or, in some cases, after they have already appeared. This no-man’s land of missing reviews is why we call it “Moderation Purgatory.”

What we do know is that there have been bugs within Google’s algorithm, mass waves of review removal, and a substantial amount of posting reviews backdated to the past. Long story short, Google’s review sites are a complete mess.

This blog breaks down Google’s newest moderation process and details what that could mean for your properties.

The Big Takeaway: Google's review ecosystem is no longer a real-time representation of your reputation. Google is withholding reviews, placing them into a “Moderation Purgatory” for further evaluation. This includes new reviews coming in and reviews previously published on the GMB page.

Why It Matters: In many cases, the reviews do get published retroactively. J Turner Research has been monitoring this situation over the last month and found that about 28.6% of reviews going online have historic dates attached to them. On the positive side, we can be confident that the reviews being posted are more accurately reflecting sentiment. With that said, we still need practices for ensuring they are responded to and that we hold a clear picture of our online reputation, which requires a more dynamic approach than what you may have done in the past, e.g. AI visibility.

What is Happening When Reviews Disappear or Never Appear?

Reviews can disappear or be delayed in appearing for approximately three reasons.

1. Normal Moderation: They are entering moderation to be checked by Google in an effort to determine their legitimacy ahead of publishing for the first time. These reviews typically post within zero to seven days if deemed legitimate.

2. Mass Review Sweep Gone Wrong: On July 3^rd, Google did a massive sweep of their review landscape to try to remove illegitimate feedback. From what we can tell, they were accidentally overaggressive. 

3. Display Bug: There was a bug in Google’s system on July 9^th where reviews entered the Google ecosystem (available to you if you utilize an API with Google) but never appeared on the public-facing page.

While numbers 1 and 3 on this list seem to have a clear path for resolution, number 2 on this list is the most impactful. The overaggressive mass sweep caused reviews that should not have ever been removed from past and present to be temporarily taken down.

Google released a statement on this mass review sweep saying, “When our systems detect suspicious reviews, we take a range of actions including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews on the profile to prevent further abuse. We are investigating the issue and will restore any reviews that were incorrectly removed.”

This is the primary reason we continue, to this day, to see so many reviews coming in historic dates, including reviews that may have previously been visible. In essence, it is like they turned their moderation dial to high and hit the big red button, wiping out hundreds of thousands of reviews in multifamily in one go and forcing us to wait and see if they will come back. 

What is the Scale?

J Turner Research has been monitoring this issue since late July and noticed that 28.6% of reviews being fed through our Google API are appearing with historical dates attached to them. In fact, 25% of all reviews are backdated 30 days or more.

With this type of volume there is an unmistakable reality: the review feed you're looking at today is not necessarily telling you what is happening today.

Moreover, we are seeing this across reviews of all types. While we continue to analyze, there is no current indication that there is a pattern or type of review (including topics, content, language) that drives reviews into purgatory. We have noted that there is a 2:1 ratio of 5-star reviews to 1-stars with these historic dates.

Lastly, it affects companies and properties of all sizes. It is not isolated to specific properties and impacts a wide audience, especially if you are active in review push efforts. Some of the larger portfolios had 150+ properties or even 40+% of their portfolios with reviews stuck in moderation just in the last ten days of July alone.

1. The Non-Negotiable: monitor new reviews coming into your reputation management software. Whether or not you use J Turner, have a way to identify reviews that are coming in with historic dates and ensure they are being responded to. If you need help identifying the reviews with historic dates attached to them, please email me at tbatdorf@jturnerresearch.com. We recently developed reporting on backdated reviews.
2. Keep a More Dynamic Pulse on your Reputation: if Google and the data being shown is constantly changing, you have to be all the more nimble. Absolutely do NOT rely on just looking at Google stars or review push efforts during these chaotic times. As you may have seen in our latest research, there is further evidence that the star rating is the starting place, not the decision point, for prospects.
   
3. Take a 30,000 Foot Glance: for those of you that utilize ORA, you are covered, as we keep the score completely reflective of what is available online. But regardless of whether you use ORA, a great secondary source is any type of AI reporting or analysis. If the information available on Google is changing or temporarily incomplete, the story being told about your property can change, too. And increasingly, prospects aren't simply looking at your Google page anyway. They're asking AI to interpret their reviews.
   

I implore you to see what Gemini and ChatGPT are saying about your properties’ satisfaction data by asking questions like, “What is it like living at X?” This data is incredibly important, not only because it is more likely to change during this moderation era of Google, but because it increasingly represents the decision point for prospects. In our latest research we found:

• 62.3% of prospects say they are less likely to tour despite a strong 4.7-star average if the AI summary flags a key issue like Pests

• Only 20.2% of prospects trust a 4.8-star rating if the AI summary is negative

(Humble brag) We just released a new product called our “AI Visibility Report” that does this for you if you're interested, but you can do a version of this on your own, too. At the very least, I wholeheartedly believe you need to make sure you have some sense of what story AI is telling your prospects.

If you are looking for a place to start, I highly recommend section 2 of our newest research, The Internet Adventure, Part VI: Surviving the Rise of AI Search. 

Conclusion

The last eighteen months of online reputation have been tumultuous. Apartments.com has changed its pay-to-play policy and algorithm, three major review sites were sunset or completely eliminated their existing reviews (Rent.com, AptGuide, and Zillow), Facebook and Yelp continue to be messy and overly restrictive, respectively, and now ol’ reliable Google is in the mud.

It is understandably frustrating, to say the least, but it ultimately calls for a well-rounded online reputation strategy.

You can't control Google's algorithm, and you can't control when Google moderates a review. But you can control the resident experience that creates the underlying reputation. The properties that don't have to worry as much about these changes are the ones that perform so well operationally that they don't generate complaints online in the first place.

Additional Resources

If you are interested in reading more on this particular issue, here are some articles/blogs we found helpful:

• https://brandclickx.com/google-business-profile-reviews-not-showing/ 

• https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMyBusiness/comments/1upe9br/google_reviews_what_is_going_on/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/localseo/comments/1v57a3i/did_the_april_google_review_policy_actually_nuke/

• https://support.google.com/business/thread/453534301/why-my-google-business-profile-reviews-are-getting-disappeared-day-by-dropped-to-287-from-345?hl=en