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.
Both need the same three clicks. Only one of them needs to know what the edit does to the date.
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 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.
Delete review sits in that same menu, 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 remove 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, and replying requires a verified profile, which is its own piece of work covered in Google Business Profile verification.
If you are the owner asking for an update
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. Your contributions, then Reviews, then More, then Edit review. 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.