Two different people search this. One is a customer who wrote something in a bad hour, or in a good one, and now wants it to say something else. The other is a business owner who fixed the problem, got a gracious "happy to update that" in reply, and has no idea what to tell the customer next.
Editing and updating are the same action here. Google Maps has one control for both, there is no separate update button, and neither person finds it where they go looking.
Where the control actually lives
It is not on the business's page. That is the whole reason this is a search query: people go back to the listing, scroll the reviews looking for their own among everyone else's, and conclude Google removed it.
Your reviews live under your contributions, not under the business.
On a phone, in the Google Maps app, signed in to the account that wrote the review:
- Tap Contribute, then tap View your profile.
- Scroll and tap See all reviews.
- Next to the review, tap More.
- Select Edit review, then follow the on-screen steps.
On a computer:
- Open Google Maps and make sure you are signed in to the account you reviewed from.
- Click Menu at the top left.
- Click Your contributions, then Reviews.
- Find the review, click More next to it.
- Choose Edit review, and follow the steps on screen.
Google publishes that app path identically for Android and for iPhone and iPad, so there is nothing device-specific to hunt for. Delete review sits in the same menu on every one of them, one option away. Worth knowing before you go looking for it separately.
If you are not sure you are in the right account, that is usually the real problem. A review written from a personal account will not appear under a work account, and the review looks deleted from the wrong side of that fence.
The part nobody mentions
Google's help page adds one line about editing that changes how a business should think about it: "If you edit your review, the date of when the last edit was made will show up as the review's post date." The same page confirms the plain reading, that the date on a review is the date it was published.
An edited review is therefore dated the day it was edited. For the person writing it, that is trivia. For the business, it means a customer who goes back and updates a review from two years ago does not hand you an amended old review. They hand you a review dated today, sitting at the top of the pile where a stranger will read it first.
That cuts both ways, and it is worth being straight about which way. It is a genuine reason to close the loop with an unhappy customer properly, because the repaired review arrives with today's date on it. It is not a licence to go mining your review history for people to nudge. A batch of years-old reviews that all suddenly redate themselves is a pattern, and patterns are what moderation systems are built to notice.
Three things editing will not do
It will not bring back a review Google removed. Google states that reviews taken down for policy violations are not reinstated, so there is nothing to edit. That is a different problem with a different path, covered in how to delete a Google review, which is also the page to read if it is somebody else's review you want gone.
It will not make the review anonymous. Google is blunt here: all reviews are public, anyone can find what you add, and you cannot add an anonymous review. What is visible alongside it is the name on your About me page, the other photos and videos you have added to Maps with their attached location information, and the other reviews you have written. If the goal is to stop being findable, editing does not get you there and deleting does.
It will not let a business edit a customer's review. There is no owner-side control for this and there is not going to be one. What an owner gets is a reply. That sounds like the consolation prize and it is not quite one, which is the next section. Owners who want to choose which reviews a visitor sees usually end up pricing a reviews widget for their own site instead, which curates a strip on pages you control and leaves the rating in the map pack exactly as it was.
What an owner can edit: the reply
You cannot touch the review. You can rewrite what sits underneath it, and that permission does not expire.
Google's instruction for a reply you have already posted is to select Edit under the reply you want to change, or Delete if you would rather it were gone. Posting a reply at all requires a verified business, which is its own piece of work covered in Google Business Profile verification.
Two lines on that same help page are why the reply is the lever here. The first: "The person who wrote the review is notified when you reply." The second: "Customers can still change their review after reading your reply."
Read together they describe a sequence that ends in an updated review without anybody being asked for one. You reply, saying what you fixed. Google notifies them. They are already holding the only control that can change the review, in the account they wrote it from. An owner who treats the reply as a statement for strangers to read is leaving the other half of its job on the table.
If writing that reply is the part you keep putting off, our negative review response templates are the wording for the ones that are hardest to start.
If you are the owner asking for an update
Sometimes the reply is not enough and you do have to ask. The ask is fine. The mechanics of the ask are where this goes wrong.
Do not offer anything for it. An edit bought with a discount is an incentivised review, and the rules on that do not soften because the review already existed. What is and is not allowed is set out in Google's review policy.
Do not ask for a specific rating. Ask them to say what happened, including that it was fixed.
And tell them where the control is, in the message, in one line. Contribute, then View your profile, then See all reviews, then More, then Edit review. They are reading your message on a phone, so give them the phone path. Otherwise they will do what everyone does, open your listing, fail to find their own review, and decide it is not worth the trouble. The gap between a customer who agreed to update a review and one who actually did is almost always that.
If you are the customer
Say what changed and why. A review that reads "the owner called me back and sorted it, updating from one star to four" is more useful to the next reader than a four-star review with no history, because it says something about how the business behaves when something goes wrong.
If you have never left one before and you are starting from scratch rather than amending, the path is slightly different and it is written up in how to leave a Google review.
The honest limit of all this
Editing moves one review, and only when somebody else is willing to move it. The rating a stranger reads in the map pack is an average, and an average shifts when new reviews arrive rather than when old ones are revised. That part is yours: our review link generator builds the direct link that drops a customer straight onto the review form, which is the difference between a request that gets acted on and one that gets postponed. The message you put the link in is the other half, and the Google review template has the text, email and in-person versions of that ask ready to copy.