• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 14, 2022

Business reviews have become very important -- especially during the holidays -- to help people make decisions on the products and services to purchase. Recently, the reviews in Google Business Profile listings have disappeared.

Mike Blumenthal, co-founder of Near Media, believes the issue is related to Google automatically applying suggested edits from the web to the business profile listings.

In turn, the change creates a new commercial item description (CID) for the business listing. The reviews then get disassociated from that business listing.

The reviews no longer exist in Google Search or Google Maps. “With some digging, I discovered in each case Google had changed the CID, the identifier Google uses to tie all relevant information to a business, including reviews,” he wrote in a post. “Usually, the CID only changes when two listings merge or [when] Google has hard-suspended a listing for guidelines violations and then reinstated it.”

The change leads the reviews to stay with the old CID and are not transfer to the new one, making it seem as if all the reviews have disappeared.

Several people shared their experiences in the forum. One person had more than 18 reviews and another had 95 reviews, while yet another had 105 reviews.

Blumenthal suggests the way to avoid disasters like this in the future is to “capture and store your Google CID and Place ID somewhere safe.” Store the content and user name for every review in the listing.

• Google at times cannot restore a review to a listing without knowing either the user name and/or the content.
• Save the details with an occasional manual copy and paste of the Google reviews or using one of the many monitoring tools that store reviews and allow you to download them for safe keeping.
• Google may send email notifications of reviews received, so hang on to those emails and store in a folder.
• Carefully track and reject, if appropriate, Google's Suggested Edits.
• Turn on notifications in GBP for Google to send an email of the edits they have made.