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A recent study from Digital Phablet reveals that Google has been rejecting a significant number of review replies submitted by business owners. These replies, often crafted to engage with customer feedback, are frequently deleted by Google without any notification to the business owner, leaving them unaware of the removal.
The analysis examined 12,752 rejected replies to reviews and uncovered the following key points:
– The majority of rejected responses—about 92.6%—were replies to 5-star reviews. This trend suggests that positive feedback prompts more automatic rejections, likely because businesses or AI tools tend to respond with templated, enthusiastic language that flags as spam or policy violations.
– There was a sharp increase in rejections starting in 2024. In total, 354 rejections occurred in 2022, 398 in 2023, but the count skyrocketed to 9,393 in just the first part of 2024. This indicates that Google’s filtering system has become far more aggressive, or perhaps the nature or quality of reviews has shifted.
– On average, rejected replies were posted approximately 1,221 hours—about 50 days—after the original review went live. Notably, replies scheduled in bulk or posted with delay appear more frequently in the rejection data, and this trend has grown over time.
Michel van Luijtelaar, co-founder of Digital Phablet, discussed on LinkedIn that starting from April 2025, the volume of rejections shifted notably. The total rejection count decreased, and the proportion of rejections identified as generic AI templates dropped from over 70% to single digits in some months. This change suggests two possibilities: either AI reply tools have improved significantly (though this conflicts with the timing of the AI reply feature launch), or Google’s filtering process has evolved into a different stage within its moderation pipeline, affecting how and when replies are rejected.
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