A new study has been released that looks at the review replies that have been rejected by Google. Business owners take the time to reply to customer reviews and then Google deletes them, and often, the business owner has no idea the reply was deleted because Google does not notify anyone - Google just removes the review.
The study is from GMBapi that says it looked at 12,752 rejected review replies and it showed this in summary:
- 92.6% were replies to 5-star reviews. Positive reviews are generating the most rejections, almost certainly because businesses (and AI tools) respond to them with templated, enthusiastic language.
- Rejections spiked sharply in 2024. From 354 rejections in all of 2022 and 398 in 2023, the number jumped to 9,393 in 2024 alone. Either Google’s filter clearly became significantly more aggressive, Google or the quality of the review changed.
- The average rejected reply was written 1,221 hours, roughly 50 days, after the original review was posted. Delayed, bulk-scheduled replies appear in the data at a disproportionate rate, and that average has grown since our first pull.
Michel van Luijtelaar, co-founder of GMBapi.com wrote on LinkedIn:
From April 2025 onwards, the rejection volumes changes significantly. Total volume drops and the AI boilerplate share of rejections falls from above 70% to single digits in some months. Two interpretations: either AI reply tools got smarter (it does not align with our launch of AI replies functionality) and businesses stopped submitting poor-quality templates. Or Google's filter is operating at a different stage of the pipeline entirely.
For a deeper look at this data, see the full analysis post.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn and Local Search Forum.
