This has got worse overnight. What started yesterday as an annoying dashboard glitch has escalated into something bigger. In most cases we are now seeing every single review reply missing from a Google Business Profile, and unlike yesterday, they are not coming back when you log out either.
If you have opened your profile this morning and found that years of replies have apparently evaporated, here is what is going on and what you should do about it.
What's Changed in the Last 12 Hours
When this bug first surfaced on Wednesday 22 July, it looked relatively contained. Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz reported that replies were not showing up while you were logged in, but that you could still see them by viewing the listing logged out. Business owners confirmed as much, with one noting their replies were all visible again the moment they opened an incognito window.
That was the reassuring part, and it is the part that no longer holds.
The scope has widened considerably. Rather than a handful of replies failing to load for signed in users, profiles are now showing no owner replies at all, and the incognito trick that worked yesterday is failing for most people. In practice that means the replies are missing from the customer facing listing too, not just from your dashboard.
There were already cracks in the original diagnosis. When Schwartz left a test reply to see whether he could reproduce the bug, it was still not appearing twenty minutes later, either logged in or logged out, even though his older replies were visible when signed out. That mismatch was the early sign that this was more than a signed in rendering quirk.
Have My Replies Been Deleted?
Almost certainly not, and this is the important bit.
Nothing about this looks like a deletion. Deletions do not arrive all at once, across every profile, for every reply, worldwide, with no policy notice attached to any of them. What it looks like is a serving fault, where the replies still sit in Google's system but the part responsible for displaying them has fallen over. That is exactly what happened during the earlier wobbles this month, and in each of those cases the missing content came back once Google fixed the underlying fault.
Two Google Product Experts confirmed on the official forums within hours of the first reports that this is a bug and that Google is aware of it. Schwartz also notified Google directly. So this is on their radar, and it is not something you have caused or can fix from your end.
The Dashboard Is Scrambled
Alongside the missing replies, the review dashboard itself is behaving erratically.
Owners are reporting a review panel that will not settle. Refresh the page and reviews surface, vanish, then reappear a moment later, flickering in and out with each reload. Things do not sit where they should, counts do not match, and the panel contradicts itself between one refresh and the next.
If you try to post a new reply while this is happening, you will likely see "Sorry, we are having some issues at the moment. Please try again later." That message is part of the same fault. It does not mean you have been blocked from replying, your account is in trouble, or you have done something wrong.
The Phantom "New Reviews" Notification
Here is the symptom catching the most people out, and the one most likely to cause real damage if you act on it.
Some owners are being told they have a stack of new, unreplied reviews, along the lines of "50 new reviews: read the latest feedback from your customers". You open it braced for a pile of fresh feedback, and find reviews you replied to weeks or months ago.
This is a false alarm, not a backlog. Because the system has temporarily lost track of which reviews carry a reply, it is counting answered reviews as unanswered and prompting you to respond all over again.
Do not reply a second time. Those reviews already have your response sitting behind the fault. If you reply again now, you risk ending up with duplicate replies to unpick once the display recovers, and on a profile with a few hundred reviews that is a genuinely miserable afternoon's work. Treat the notification as noise until this is resolved.
What Your Customers Are Seeing
Worth being straight about this, because it is the part that stings. If the replies are missing from the public listing, then a customer looking you up today sees reviews with no response from you, including any negative ones you carefully answered months ago.
That is not ideal. It is also not the disaster it feels like at 7am with a coffee in your hand.
This is affecting businesses everywhere, not just yours, so you are not being singled out and your competitors' profiles are in the same state. There is no evidence that a display fault of this kind affects your local rankings. And it is temporary. The replies are the thing that is hidden, not the thing that is gone.
What You Should Do
The instinct is to fix it. Resist that, because almost everything you could do right now makes things worse rather than better. Here is the sensible approach.
1. Document what you can, today. This is now the most useful thing on the list. Take screenshots of your reviews as they currently appear, and if you have any record of replies you have written, keep it somewhere safe. If anything genuinely has not returned once Google fixes this, you will have a clear before and after rather than a vague sense that something used to be there.
2. Do not re-reply to anything. Your replies exist. Rewriting them all creates duplicates, wastes hours, and leaves you with a mess to clean up later. The same goes for the phantom notification.
3. Do not delete, re-verify, or start changing settings. Do not delete replies to repost them, do not re-verify your profile, and do not go rearranging your listing to shake the fault loose. There is nothing on your end to fix, and drastic changes to a live profile during a Google-side fault is how a temporary problem turns into a permanent one.
4. Draft any genuinely new replies offline. If a real new review lands while this is going on, write your response in a notes app and post it once things are working. Some owners have had luck replying directly from the review notification email when the dashboard will not cooperate, so that is worth a try. Just make sure it is actually a new review and not the phantom notification.
5. Hold off on contacting support for now. When a fault is this widespread and already acknowledged, a support ticket will not move you up the queue. Give it a day or two. If your replies have not returned once the bug is marked resolved, that is the moment to contact Google Support with your screenshots.
6. Do not launch a review request campaign this week. Google's review systems are clearly under strain. Pushing a burst of new review activity through a system that is already misfiring is not the moment to do it. Keep asking happy customers in the normal course of business, just do not run a campaign.
This Is Google's Third Review Wobble This Month
If you have been following along with us, none of this will be a shock.
July has been a rough run for Google's review system. Around 3 July, review counts started vanishing from public listings, with one business reporting roughly 4,651 reviews dropping to 63 inside a day. Google confirmed it was investigating and would restore anything removed in error. Around 9 July, a separate bug had dashboards announcing "You have no reviews yet" while the public listing still showed the full count. Both were display and system faults rather than mass deletions, and both were worked through.
Go back further and the pattern is the same. In February 2025 we covered Google Business Profiles showing lower review counts than they should have, and Google confirmed at the time that no reviews had been unpublished and that counts would recover. They did. You can read our February 2025 update on missing Google reviews for how that one played out.
We keep pointing this out because it is genuinely reassuring. Google Business Profile, like any piece of technology, breaks from time to time. These faults surface, they get reported loudly, and Google generally resolves the major ones within days, sometimes hours. This one is bigger than yesterday's version of it, but it is the same species of problem.
The Bottom Line
Your replies are hidden, not deleted. The fault is Google's, not yours. The worst thing you can do today is start rebuilding work that is already there.
Keep doing what you would do in a normal week. Deliver good work, ask happy customers for reviews, keep your profile accurate, and let Google sort out its end. We will update this article as soon as there is an official fix.
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