A customer tells you they left you a review. You open your profile and it is not there.
Every page that ranks for this phrase answers the customer: wait a while, check you were signed in, try again. Fine if you are the person who wrote it. No help at all if you are the owner, because the owner is asking a different question.
Your question is whether that review is delayed, deleted, or sitting somewhere that is not the profile you are staring at. Those three have different fixes, and you can tell them apart yourself before you contact anyone.
Start by comparing two counts, not by refreshing
Open the review list inside your Business Profile, then look at your public profile in a private window or on a phone that is not signed in to your business account.
If your own dashboard shows a review that the public page does not, the review exists and something is holding it back. If neither shows it, it was either never published against this profile at all or it has been taken down. Those are the two branches, and almost everything else in this article hangs off which one you are in.
Do the second check signed out, properly. Looking at your own profile while signed in as the owner is the standard way to talk yourself out of a problem that is really there.
Case one: it is still being checked
Google's help page on missing and delayed reviews leads with this. "Reviews are checked to ensure they comply with our policies," it says, and "in some cases, this process might take a few days, which can delay a review's appearance."
So a gap of a day or two between a customer pressing post and you seeing it sits inside documented behaviour. There is no action to take, and no support ticket that will speed it up.
The same page adds two situations that look like faults and are not. If you recently merged Business Profiles, "it might take a few days for reviews from both profiles to display." And "customers who use older phones or software might have trouble when they try to leave reviews," which from your side is indistinguishable from a review that was filtered.
Case two: it landed on another profile of yours
This is the case nobody checks, and the one that keeps recurring. If your business has more than one Google profile, an old one left over from a move, one a franchise office created, one a previous agency verified, a review can land on the spare and never appear on the profile you look at.
Google is blunt about what happens to the spare: "You can have only one Business Profile for each business," and "if a profile is considered a duplicate, it won't show on Google Search or Maps." A profile Google has suppressed as a duplicate is invisible to you and to your customers, and any review sitting on it is invisible along with it. The same help page lists what gets a profile flagged that way, including two profiles at the same address and separate profiles created for different services at one business.
Go looking for it in a private window: search your business name, then search your old address, then your phone number. A duplicate rarely surfaces under the name you use today.
Case three: it landed on the business next door
Plaza, suburb and medical-building addresses sit close enough together that a customer tapping through Maps on a phone can review the wrong unit. You will not find that review on your profile, because it is not on your profile.
What tells you whether your own review link points at the right listing is your Place ID, the identifier Google uses for one specific listing rather than for a business name. Run your business through the Place ID finder and check that the listing which comes back is the one you expect, at the address you expect. Our walkthrough of finding your Place ID explains what the identifier is and where it comes from.
Then take this case off the table for good. A review link built on a verified Place ID opens the review box on that exact listing, so a customer who follows it cannot end up on a neighbour or on an unverified copy of you. That is what the review link generator builds, and it is the difference between hoping a customer navigates correctly and not asking them to navigate.
Case four: it was removed
If a review came down for a policy violation, Google states the outcome without hedging: "Reviews removed for policy violations won't be restored." Chasing that one is time spent on a decision already made.
The same page notes that "in certain situations, Google might temporarily disable user-created content, including reviews," and that "sometimes reviews might be removed after a Business Profile is reinstated." A profile that has been through a suspension can therefore lose reviews that were perfectly fine on their own merits, which is worth knowing before you conclude a specific customer was singled out.
A review that was removed is a different problem from a review you want removed. If it is the second one you are here for, our post on removing a Google review covers that process instead.
The short version
Delayed sorts itself out. Removed does not come back. Wrong listing is the one you can actually fix, and the fix is upstream of the problem: one verified profile, and every review request you send pointing at its Place ID instead of at a search box and a customer's best guess.