Google Review Issue – New Reviews Not Posting

Update 11/15/2020 11 AM: I spoke too soon proclaiming that Google was back to normal (whatever Google normal is). Our system is now seeing 302 reviews for our sample cohort for 11/11 and 316 reviews for 11/12. Who knows if we shall see even more but it is illustrative that it has taken 4 days AFTER Google said that it had been fixed for the reviews to actually show up.

Update 11/15/2020 3 pm Eastern: Review counts for 11/11 and 11/12 seemed to be returning to normal. Our system now shows 292 reviews were posted for our sample on the 11th, up from the 66 we saw yesterday for that date and 194 reviews were found for the 12th. Both of these tallies fall with the expected range for those dates and indicates that the reviews that went missing during the bug, are finally back home where they belong. It took 3 days from when Google indicated that they had fixed the review problem for them all to show back up.

Review counts for November 11th and 12th appear to have returned to normal ranges for our sample set

Update 11/14/2020 9 am Eastern: Review counts counts for 11/13 and 11/14 appear to be normal but counts for 11/11 and 11/12, while looking better today than during the outage, our test account still seems to be short by several hundred reviews.

Yesterday we saw 202 reviews for the location set and today’s count saw 325 reviews for the cohort. The median daily review count prior to the disruption was 345 reviews per day with the mode being 299. These new daily counts fall in a likely range.

That being said the review counts for 11/11 and 11/12 continue to come back towards normal. While looking better today than during the outage, they still seem to be short quite a few reviews… improving but still not back to full health.

For example you can see that our system retrieved 66 reviews today for November 11th compared to the 29 seen yesterday and the 4 reviews it saw the previous day for November 11th. Similar results were found for the other day of the outage, November 12th. Neither day’s reviews have yet gotten back to normal for this company. We anticipate that the 100 or 200 hundred missing reviews will show up over the next few days.

Our system has found increasing reviews for the days of the outage but the numbers still are low compared to typical days

Update 11/13/2020 8 AM Eastern: Reviews have started to return and we are seeing a few from each of the past three days. The daily averages are still lower than normal so we assume that the “fix” is rolling out somewhat unevenly across users not locations.

Updated chart for the retail chain analyzed below to include new totals for 11/11 though 11/13

Original post 11/12/20:

Since Tuesday (11/11/20), when a customer left a new Google review it was not being published. Users who left new reviews would see them in their profile but these reviews are not visible to the public or the business.

Google indicates that they have identified the issue and that it should be resolved over the next day or so.

A review showing in the review contribution area for an individual but not showing for the business.
A review showing in the review contribution area for an individual but not showing for the business.
New review, left yesterday afternoon, is not showing as of this AM

First reported in the Google My Business forums (and in several private forums where I spend my time), the problem seems to have started early on Wednesday (November 11th) and continues today.

Google Review Data To Highlight The Issue

We pulled Google reviews for several large local brands for each of the past nine days. This data shows the lack of reviews posted for most of yesterday and now today.

For this restaurant chain, the daily average prior to Wednesday (11/10/20) was roughly 1,200 reviews per day. With the current Google review issue, we found just 75 reviews posted Wednesday and zero as of this post today. This confirms the likelihood that the problems started early yesterday.

Google review issue

In charting the same time period for a retail chain, we saw a daily average of new reviews coming in at an average rate of 345 per day for the days leading up to the problem with just four yesterday and zero so far today.

Google retail reviews issue

Google is in the process of fixing the situation and it should be resolved over the next day or so with all hidden reviews once again publishing.

We will continue to monitor the issue as well and update this post if we see any significant changes.

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