Reviews

Google’s 2026 Review Policy Update: What Your Business Needs to Know Before It Costs You

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT Google’s 2026 policy update explicitly bans asking customers to mention staff names in reviews, conducting reviews on shared or on-premises devices, and any form of review gating or incentivization. Enforcement is now automated and aggressive. We know this not from reading the policy update, but because we watched it happen in real time with our own clients. We have been doing this for 15 years. In that time, we have helped hundreds of businesses build their Google presence from the ground up, and we have watched the review landscape shift from something businesses barely thought about to one of the most consequential signals in both local search and AI recommendations. So when Google updated its review policies in early 2026, we did not just read the announcement. We lived it. Reviews that had been sitting on client profiles for months disappeared without warning, which is why […]