Reputation management is a category that suffers from one specific problem. The people writing the statistics are not the people doing the work. The agencies that file the disputes do not publish their numbers, and the analysts that publish numbers do not file disputes. The result is a feedback loop where the same five stats from 2019 keep getting recycled with a new chart on top.
We are publishing the numbers because the market needs a dataset that is recent, real, and granular enough to plan against. If you are a marketing director deciding whether to spend on review management, the right question is not what the global average says. The right question is what your industry, your country, and your dispute path actually return.
Methodology, In One Paragraph
The dataset covers 120,318 review disputes filed between 1 January 2025 and 31 March 2026 across 15,247 client profiles. Channels: Google Maps in-product flag (n=78,402), Business Redressal Form (n=29,114), Legal Removal Request (n=4,819), Trustpilot flag (n=4,201), Yelp content review (n=2,108), Amazon report-abuse (n=1,674). Industries were assigned from the client's primary GBP category. Countries were assigned from the profile's listed address. Outcome was binary: removed within 90 days or not removed within 90 days. Cases still pending at the 90-day mark were counted as not removed.
120,318 disputes. 15,247 profiles. 42 countries. 4 platforms. 14.0% network-wide removal rate.
Removal Rates by Industry
The single biggest variable in whether a disputed review comes down is not the dispute path or the country. It is the industry. Categories with high reviewer-anonymity overlap (legal, medical, financial) saw lower removal rates because policy enforcement is stricter on speech that touches regulated services. Categories with high transactional volume (hospitality, ecommerce) saw higher rates because off-topic and competitor reviews are more common and easier to prove.
- Hospitality and restaurants: 19.4% removal across 24,108 disputes
- Ecommerce and retail: 17.8% across 18,902 disputes
- Home services (HVAC, plumbing, roofing): 16.1% across 15,341 disputes
- Automotive and dealerships: 14.7% across 9,108 disputes
- SaaS and technology: 13.9% across 6,201 disputes
- Legal and professional services: 9.8% across 11,447 disputes
- Medical and dental: 8.4% across 14,802 disputes
- Financial services: 7.1% across 4,209 disputes
Removal Rates by Dispute Channel
The path you choose matters as much as the case you have. The in-product flag has the highest volume and the lowest success rate. The Business Redressal Form has the best yield-per-effort ratio. The Legal Removal Request has the lowest volume but is the only path that succeeds for defamatory factual claims.
- Google Maps in-product flag: 9.8% removal, median 4.6 days to outcome
- Business Redressal Form (no evidence): 18.4% removal, median 11 days
- Business Redressal Form (one screenshot): 31.2% removal, median 11 days
- Business Redressal Form (two pieces of evidence): 51.0% removal, median 12 days
- Legal Removal Request: 24.1% removal, median 41 days
- Trustpilot identifiable-experience flag: 26.2% removal, median 6 days
- Yelp content review: 11.7% removal, median 9 days
- Amazon report-abuse (seller side): 14.0% removal, median 7 days
Removal Rates by Country
Jurisdiction matters less than people assume on standard policy violations and more than people assume on legal-channel cases. The in-product flag returns roughly the same outcomes across markets because the moderation pipeline is global. The Legal Removal Request varies wildly because it routes through local takedown frameworks.
- United States: 13.2% network removal across 41,209 disputes
- United Kingdom: 14.8% across 14,022 disputes
- Germany: 18.1% across 8,447 disputes (driven by NetzDG-adjacent legal removals)
- France: 17.4% across 6,108 disputes
- Australia: 14.1% across 7,902 disputes
- Canada: 13.9% across 6,302 disputes
- United Arab Emirates: 16.7% across 4,118 disputes
- India: 11.2% across 9,847 disputes
Most reputation statistics on the internet are recycled from a 2019 survey. These 47 come from 120,318 disputes filed in the last 15 months.
What Drives Removal: The Top Five Reasons
We tagged every successful removal in the dataset with the policy clause that carried it across the line. Five categories accounted for 87% of all removals. Anything outside those five sat under 3% removal regardless of dispute path or country.
- Off-topic content (review about a different place, event, or product): 31% of removals
- Conflict of interest (competitor or ex-employee identifiable from profile evidence): 24%
- Defamatory factual claims (a specific false statement of fact, escalated to legal channel): 14%
- Coordinated attacks (10+ reviews from new accounts inside 72 hours): 12%
- Policy-violating language (slurs, harassment, sexually explicit content): 6%
Consumer-Side Statistics
We also ran a 3,142-respondent panel between February and April 2026 covering buyers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia who had read at least one online review in the prior week. The panel was screened against fraud, weighted to census demographics, and asked behaviour questions, not opinion questions. The numbers below come from that panel.
- Average reviews read before a service-business decision: 11.2
- Share of buyers who read at least one negative review on purpose: 73%
- Share of buyers who would not consider a business with a star average below 3.7: 58%
- Share of buyers who skip the first review and read the second to fifth: 41%
- Share of buyers who say AI-generated reviews are easy to spot: 19% (down from 34% in 2024)
- Share of buyers who trust a star rating of exactly 5.0 less than a 4.7: 47%
- Median time spent reading reviews before a decision: 4 minutes 12 seconds
Cost and Effort Statistics
These come from invoice and time data across 612 client engagements. Cost per removed review is a derived number: total spend on disputes (analyst time at fully loaded cost) divided by removed reviews. It is the honest unit cost of removal, not the marketing price of the service.
- Median analyst time per Business Redressal Form filing: 38 minutes
- Median analyst time per Legal Removal Request filing: 4 hours 50 minutes
- Internal cost per removed review (BRF path): $48
- Internal cost per removed review (Legal Removal Request path): $612
- Average client portfolio size at first engagement: 9.4 problem reviews
- Share of client portfolios where at least one review was removable on the first review of the case: 78%
What These 47 Numbers Mean for Planning
If your industry sits in the bottom half of the removal table (legal, medical, financial), do not let an agency promise you a 30% removal rate on volume. The category will not support it. Focus money on the small number of clearly removable cases and route everything else into a public-response and review-acquisition plan.
If your industry sits in the top half (hospitality, ecommerce, home services), the right unit of work is a quarterly audit. Half of the removable inventory in our client base sits there for months because nobody filed the right form with the right two pieces of evidence. The 51% BRF-with-two-evidence number is the headline of the dataset and the cheapest result on the board.
If your team is sitting on the in-product flag because it is free, you are leaving 21 percentage points on the table. Move every reviewable case to the Business Redressal Form and tag the dispute with one screenshot at minimum. The yield change is immediate.
