Why Trustpilot reviews disappear

The six causes

1. Automated detection

Trustpilot says its automated detection technology checks every review before it appears and keeps watching reviews that are already live. It looks at review content, IP addresses, device characteristics and location data, among other data points.

If it sees an unusual pattern, the review is kept offline or moved offline. The reviewer gets an email with the reason and a way to challenge it. There is one exception: clear advertising or promotional content, where no email is sent. Our guide on how Trustpilot checks that a review is real sets out the full process.

This is the usual cause when many positive reviews vanish together. Reviews written in your shop on one tablet share a device and a location. So do reviews written by staff on the office network. Our guide to invitation rules covers the in-person setups Trustpilot allows.

2. An upheld flag

Anyone can flag a review: the business, another consumer, or Trustpilot's own people. A business can flag for five reasons. If the Content Integrity Team agrees that the review breaks the guidelines, it goes offline.

In 2024 businesses flagged 601 thousand reviews and consumers flagged 92 thousand, according to the Trust Report 2025.

3. No reply to a request

Some flags start with a request to the author. Trustpilot may ask for an edit, for example to remove a staff member's name. It may ask for information or documents that show a real experience. The author has 3 days to respond to a business's request.

Trustpilot says reviews that were "flagged but not updated by their authors" may be taken offline. A reviewer who misses the email has not responded, and the review can go offline for that reason alone.

4. Deleted by the author

Trustpilot treats reviews as content owned by their authors. It says only the reviewer can permanently delete a review, through their own account. When a customer deletes a review after you fix their problem, this is what happened.

A business must never pay or pressure for this. Trustpilot's guidelines ban incentives for editing or deleting a review. The FTC said NextMed offered gift cards and made refunds depend on removing reviews, and it brought a case.

5. Replaced by a newer review

A customer can review the same business again after a new experience. All the reviews stay visible. Only the latest one counts toward the TrustScore. The older review has not gone, but its effect on the score has.

6. Moved to another profile

If a review clearly belongs to another of your domains, Trustpilot can move it there. If it clearly describes a different company, Trustpilot can remove it from your profile under the "about a different business" reason.

How to find out which cause applies

If you wrote the review. Check your email, including spam, for a message from Trustpilot. It states the reason and how to challenge the decision. You can also reply to that email or use Trustpilot's contact form, and the Content Integrity Team will look at the case.

If you run the business. Start with your own flags. Trustpilot tells you the outcome of every flag you send. Your public Company activity page shows 12 months of flagging, with how many flagged reviews went offline.

If you did not flag the review, the cause is detection, another person's flag, or the author. Trustpilot does not tell a business which. You can ask the customer whether they had an email from Trustpilot.

If the missing review was on Google, the causes differ. Our guide on why Google reviews go missing covers that side.

When positive reviews disappear

This is the case that worries founders most, because the score drops.

1. Look for a shared pattern. Same day, same device, same network, same wording. One shared pattern explains most batches.
2. Tell the customers, once and neutrally. They may have an email from Trustpilot with steps to challenge the decision. Do not offer anything for doing so.
3. Fix the collection method. Move to automatic invitations sent to every customer after a real order. Reviews from Trustpilot's invitation tools carry the Verified label.
4. Do not replace them with bought reviews. That turns a detection problem into a misuse problem. See buying Trustpilot reviews.

When a negative review disappears

If you flagged it and Trustpilot agreed, the review is offline, not deleted. It can come back if the author later edits it or sends documents. That is why our weekly proof report keeps a screenshot taken before removal and the review's link, which shows an error page once the review is offline.

If you did not flag it, the author may have deleted it, or detection may have caught it. Either way there is nothing to do.

What this means for a removal project

Reviews move in both directions. A project that removes nine rule-breaking reviews can see one return. A profile can also lose real positive reviews to detection in the same month. We report both, because the score depends on both.

The main Trustpilot review removal page explains how flags are prepared and decided. The free audit shows which of your current reviews can be flagged within Trustpilot's rules.

If you would rather hand the work over, see our Trustpilot review removal service and what each removal costs.