Epic Insights

Edition 18  ·  May 5, 2026

The Big Story

On April 16, Google published its 2025 Trust and Safety Report. Buried in the announcement: 292 million reviews removed last year. Roughly 22% of every review submitted. The next day, April 17, Google quietly added two new clauses to its Maps Rating Manipulation policy. Most coverage missed the second update entirely. SEO researcher Amy Toman spotted it.

Here's the thing. The first event was Google announcing what it's building to protect you. The second was Google clarifying what you can no longer do yourself. Both matter, but the second one is the part that's burning client review counts right now.

The new rules: you cannot ask customers to mention a specific staff member by name. You cannot ask them to mention a service, a city, or a specific phrase. You cannot use on-site kiosks or tablets. You cannot offer anything of value, including loyalty points or a chance at a raffle. And you cannot send review requests only to your happy customers, which is called review gating, and it has been a violation since 2018 but is now being actively enforced by Gemini-powered detection.

Think of the review section like a court transcript. Google wants the words customers actually said, in the actual context they said them. The moment a business starts coaching the witness, the whole thing stops being trustworthy. The April update is Google saying it now has the tools to spot the coaching.

And here is the part most agencies aren't telling clients yet. Google's AI is now reading review content for ranking signals. Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky and Claudia Tomina recently talked through how Gemini analyzes language, sentiment, what services come up, what neighborhoods get named, and feeds that into local rankings and AI Overviews. A review that says "great service, would recommend" counts. A review that says "showed up in Millcreek by 9 AM, fixed the leak before lunch" does real ranking work for you.

It's not about getting more reviews. It's about earning more specific ones, the right way.

Quick Hits

Ask Epic

Maybe. But probably not the way you'd hope.

Here's what we tell clients when they call us about missing reviews. Google's sweep is largely a one-way door. The reviews that got pulled almost always violated something, even unintentionally. Maybe a previous staffer asked customers to "mention Mike" in their review three years ago. Maybe the dental office had an iPad in the lobby. Maybe a well-meaning email blast went out the same week to 80 customers and Google flagged the volume spike. The reviews didn't get worse. The rubric got stricter, and they retroactively didn't fit it.

You can contest individual removals through the Google Business Profile dashboard, but reinstatement is rare and the outcome usually depends on whichever Google rep picks up the ticket. Worth doing if you have receipts that the review was authentic, but don't budget hope on it.

The better play is forward-looking. Audit your current request process, kill anything that looks like coaching or gating, and start earning new reviews under the new rules. The good news? Customers who have a specific experience tend to write specifically about it. Your job is to give them something worth writing about, then get out of the way.

What Epic's doing for you this week

Behind the scenes this week, our team is auditing client review request workflows against the April policy update, flagging anything that looks like staff-name asks, sentiment branching, or on-premise pressure. We're also patching Yoast and a few other plugin updates across hosted sites, and pulling Local Falcon scans for clients who've seen review counts shift to figure out whether the dip is the sweep, a competitor's spike, or both.