Google’s review policies prohibit fake reviews, incentivised reviews, conflicts of interest, off-topic content, harassment and personal information. Reviews breaking them can be removed; businesses repeatedly breaking them can have their profile penalised.
Asking customers for reviews is allowed. Paying for them, in any form, is not.
Spam and clearly fabricated content. Reviews from competitors, employees or anyone with a stake. Content about a different business. Abuse, slurs, or personal information about a named individual. The same text posted across several listings.
Not grounds for removal: being harsh, being wrong about a detail, or describing an experience you dispute.
Patterns rather than single reviews. A sudden implausible spike, reviews from accounts with no other activity, or repeated reports of solicited content. Enforcement is usually quiet — reviews disappear and the count drops without notification.
That paying for reviews means cash. Discounts, free products, prize-draw entries and loyalty points all count as incentives. Businesses do this openly, often with a sign on the counter, unaware that it breaches both Google policy and, in the US, the FTC rule.
The second misunderstanding is expecting notification. There is no message when reviews are removed, which is why a profile can quietly lose twenty reviews and nobody notices for a month.
Ask everyone, offer nothing, reply to what arrives, and report only reviews that break a named policy. That is the whole compliance story for the overwhelming majority of businesses.
