Can you trust reviews if some are removed?

Yes. A business cannot delete a review on Google, Yelp or Trustpilot. It can only report one, and the platform checks the report against its own published policy. We file the reviews a client chooses with the platform under that policy, and the platform makes the decision on each one. A review that does not break the policy usually stays up, however harsh it is. Who decides what a fair review is explains how each platform judges a report.

Those rules protect the reader. Google’s Maps user-generated content policy bans content “not based on a real experience”, paid reviews and reviews from a conflict of interest, such as staff, competitors or family. A fake one-star from a competitor misleads a reader as much as a fake five-star from the owner’s brother. Both distort the rating you see.

Fake praise is a large part of what platforms remove. Tripadvisor reports that 54% of the 2.7 million fraudulent reviews it caught in 2024 were review boosting, posted by a business or people tied to it (Tripadvisor 2025 Transparency Report). Trustpilot removed 4.5 million fake reviews in 2024, 90% of them automatically, and says most of the fakes it removes are positive (Trustpilot Trust Report 2025). In 2025 Google began showing shoppers an alert when it had recently removed suspicious five-star reviews from a profile (Google, April 2025).

Google’s systems also remove reviews nobody reported, of every star rating. On the Google profiles we monitor, those losses fall on a small number of profiles and mostly on new reviews; why Google reviews disappear has our figures.

The same standard applies to a business’s own website. The FTC’s Consumer Review Rule, 16 CFR 465.7 lets a business hold back fake, defamatory, harassing or unrelated reviews only by criteria “applied equally to all reviews submitted without regard to sentiment”. It bans removing reviews by threats or intimidation. Our page on whether review removal is legal covers the rule in full. We do not buy or post reviews, contact reviewers, sell a rating, or ask a platform to restore removed five-star reviews.