People who type this are rarely asking the same thing. Three different situations send somebody here, and the paths out of them are different, permanent, and easy to confuse because Google uses the word "remove" for more than one of them.
Sort yourself first. It takes a minute and it is the part the step-by-step guides skip.
- You want the listing off your own Google account, because you sold the business, you manage it for a client who left, or you no longer want it in your dashboard.
- The business has stopped trading at that address, or has moved, and you want Google to stop sending people there.
- A listing exists for a business that never existed, or that is not eligible to be listed, and you do not own it.
Those are three separate actions. Picking the wrong one is how a business that was only moving ends up with the review history gone.
Case one: take the profile off your account
Google's own term for this is removing the profile from your Google Account, and what it does is narrower than "delete" suggests. According to Google's help page on this, you sign in with the managing account, open Business Profile settings, and choose to remove profile content and managers.
Two things about the outcome are worth reading twice.
The first is that it is permanent. Google states that removal of content and managers is permanent, it applies to every owner and manager, and that posts, photos, videos and the review replies written by owners and managers are permanently deleted. To manage the business again later you have to re-verify it, which means going back through the verification process from the start.
The second is the part that the third-party guides get wrong. Reviews left by other people stay up. Your replies go, the reviews themselves do not, because they were never your content to delete. Taking the profile off your account also does not guarantee the listing disappears from Search and Maps: Google says it may still appear unless the business is ineligible.
So this action loses you control and loses you your replies. It does not clean the slate, and it does not get the business out of Maps.
Case two: the business has closed or moved
If the business is not operating at that address any more, the honest signal is closure, not deletion. Google's instructions are to open your profile, select Edit profile, then Hours, and set the business to permanently closed (Google Business Profile Help).
A permanently closed profile still shows up for people searching by name, labelled as closed. That reads like a drawback and is usually the opposite. Somebody looking for a business that has gone gets an answer instead of silence, and a customer who finds the closed label does not spend the afternoon driving to your old unit.
For a move, this is the path that protects what matters. The old profile is marked closed and a new profile is created and verified for the new address. Google is explicit that a profile closed as part of a name or location change should not simply be reopened, and that a new profile is added and verified instead. Creating the profile is the same job you did the first time.
Deleting the old listing instead of closing it is the expensive mistake in this case. You would be destroying the thing a relocating business most needs to carry forward.
Case three: a listing you do not own
This is the case where the word delete is closest to accurate, and it is also the slowest. Google accepts removal requests from people who do not own a profile, but it grants them in narrow circumstances: the page says a business can be removed if it never existed or is not eligible to be on Google (Google Business Profile Help).
The route runs through Maps rather than through any dashboard. Signed in, open the listing, choose Suggest an edit, then the option that the place is closed or not here, then the reason that fits, such as that it does not exist there. Google may email you with follow-up questions, and if the request is approved the listing comes off Search and Maps.
Note what this is not for. A competitor you dislike, a listing with details you disagree with, or a profile you believe should be yours are all different problems with different routes, and filing them as "does not exist" is both untrue and unlikely to work.
If what you actually want is one review gone
Some people arrive at this search because of a single review and start looking for a way to switch the whole thing off. Deleting the profile is a very large lever for that, and as the first case shows, it would not even remove the review.
Removing a Google review covers what can and cannot be reported, which is a much narrower set than people expect. The part that does work over time is ordinary and unglamorous: keep asking every customer, so the recent reviews outnumber the old ones. That is what our review link generator is for, and it costs nothing to use.
Before you confirm anything
Write down which of the three cases you are in, and check that the action in front of you matches it. The removal flow offers to mark the business closed on the way out, which is convenient and also the point where the two cases get mixed up by accident.
If the business is moving, close and rebuild. If you are handing a client back, remove your access and accept that your replies go with it. If the listing should never have existed, use Maps and expect to wait.