Google policy citation
Conflict of interest
Former employees, competitors, and people with a financial stake in disparaging a business cannot leave reviews about it.
What Google says
“Don't post content that misrepresents your identity or affiliations with the people or businesses about which you're contributing. We don't want anyone to be misled by content on Google.”See Google's full content policy hub
Qualifies for removal
- →Review explicitly states reviewer is a former employee with grievance
- →Review is from a competing business owner
- →Review is from someone clearly paid to disparage the business
Does NOT qualify
- →Customer mentioning they're 'never coming back' (real customer leaving)
Evidence that clears this clause
Whoever reads your report can see the review, the reviewer's public profile and your listing. Nothing else. Anything that lives only in your own systems has to be described, not assumed.
- The same account has left a positive review for a direct competitor, usually nearby and often within days
- Employment records showing the reviewer left your business, and when
- The review uses trade vocabulary or internal process detail an ordinary customer would not know
- A cluster of similar reviews arriving in one window from accounts of similar age
The mistake that gets this rejected
Naming who you think wrote it. Identity is almost never provable from the outside, and an accusation you cannot support makes the whole filing read as a grudge. Point instead at what anyone can verify by opening the reviewer's public profile.
Questions about this clause
Does a former employee's review always qualify?
Not automatically. It qualifies when the review is about the business as a competitor or an aggrieved insider rather than as a customer. An ex-employee who genuinely bought from you afterwards is in a different position.
What about a review from a competitor's spouse or relative?
The policy covers people with a competing interest, and Google reads that beyond the person who signs the review. The connection still has to be shown with something checkable rather than asserted.
Want this policy applied to your reviews?
Run the free audit and we'll score every review on your listing against this policy and the others. No card, no signup to see the report. You're billed only when Google actually removes a review.
The other policy categories
Full breakdown: Google review policy violations explained · remove fake Google reviews · straight answers · by industry
The other content-policy categories
A review often breaks more than one clause at once, and the strongest filing names the clause with the cleanest evidence rather than all of them.
How this plays out in your trade
The same policy clause gets abused differently depending on the business. These pages cover the attack patterns we see most often per trade.