Google denied my review removal request. What now?

Google does not explain rejections. You get a short note saying the review did not violate the policies, and nothing about which clause was considered or what was missing. That silence is why so many owners give up here, and it is also why the second attempt so often works: the first one usually failed on framing rather than on merit.

The first pass on a reported review is automated. It reads the review text against the category you selected. If you flagged a review as a conflict of interest but the text contains nothing that signals a competitor or an ex-employee, the automated pass has no way to agree with you, and it declines. Your knowledge that the reviewer runs the shop across the road never entered the decision, because you never put it anywhere the system could read it.

The most common response to a denial is to report the review again, sometimes from several accounts, sometimes daily. This does not help. The same text goes to the same evaluation and returns the same answer, and repeated identical reports on one review are the sort of pattern the platform is built to notice.

Asking staff, family or customers to mass-report the review is worse than useless. Volume is not evidence, coordinated reporting is itself against policy, and the risk lands on your listing rather than on the reviewer.

A refile is worth making when at least one of these is true. If none of them is, the honest read is that the review is a genuine customer complaint and no amount of filing will move it.

Write it for someone who has thirty seconds, no access to your records, and no reason to take your word for anything. State the clause, state the observable fact that proves it, and stop. Every extra sentence about how unfair the review is makes the case weaker, because it reads as a business owner who is upset rather than as a policy violation.

Concretely: 'This reviewer has no record in our booking system under any spelling of this name, and the review describes a service we do not offer' is a filing. 'This review is completely false and is destroying my business' is a complaint. The first one gets read as evidence.

If a review describes a real visit by a real customer, it stays up, and that is the policy working as intended. Two refiles with genuinely different framing is a reasonable ceiling. Past that you are spending time on a decision that will not change.

At that point the lever that does work is dilution: a steady flow of genuine new reviews moves the visible average far faster than a third appeal ever will, and it is the only approach that survives contact with Google's spam systems.