The short answer: no. There is no setting in Google Business Profile that turns reviews off, hides the review section, or holds reviews for your approval before they appear. No plan, no support request and no verification level unlocks one.
That is not an oversight, and it is worth understanding why, because the reasoning also explains why every clever workaround fails. Google does not treat your listing as your advertising space. It treats it as a record of a place that exists in the world, kept for the benefit of people searching for that place. Reviews are part of that record — contributed by the public, about the public’s experience.
A business that could switch its reviews off would produce a directory where the only silent listings are the ones with something to hide, which would be useless to searchers within a week. So the control does not exist, and it is not going to.
Why people go looking for the switch
Nearly everyone arriving at this question is in one of four situations, and the right response is different for each:
- One unfair review that is sitting at the top of the listing and does not reflect what happened.
- A burst of hostile reviews after a public disagreement, a redundancy, or a competitor’s campaign.
- A regulated profession — vets, dentists, solicitors, accountants — where confidentiality prevents you from answering properly.
- General exposure anxiety: a small team that would simply rather not be publicly rated at all.
Only the first two have a route to removal, and only sometimes. The other two need a different strategy entirely, which the rest of this piece is about.
Three workarounds that make it worse
1. Deleting your Business Profile
The intuitive move, and the one that backfires most completely. Removing your profile removes your management of the listing — not necessarily the listing. Google can hold an entry for a genuine place regardless of whether anyone claims it, and reviews already attached to it can remain. The likely outcome is that the reviews stay visible, you can no longer reply to them, and you have lost control of your own hours, photos and phone number as well.
2. Marking yourself permanently closed
Occasionally suggested in forums as a way to make a listing go quiet. It does not delete reviews, it does tell every customer searching for you that you have gone out of business, and it damages your position in local results. Undoing it means going through reinstatement. This is a self-inflicted wound dressed up as a tactic.
3. Starting a fresh listing
Creating a second profile for the same place to leave the old reviews behind means running a duplicate listing, which Google’s guidelines do not allow. Duplicates tend to be merged or removed, and in the meantime your reviews, ratings and local ranking are split across two entries. Legitimate changes — a new name, a new address — are handled by editing the profile you already have, not replacing it. We wrote about that specific case in changing your business name and what happens to your reviews.
The five things you actually control
You cannot switch reviews off. You have more influence over what people see than most owners realise, though, and it lives in these five places.
1. Reporting reviews that break the rules
Google will remove content that breaches its policies — reviews that are off-topic, abusive, contain personal information, are advertising, or come from someone with a conflict of interest such as a competitor or a former employee. What it will not remove is an honest negative opinion, however unfair it feels. Report the ones with a policy angle and describe the breach rather than the injustice; our guide on getting a bad Google review removed walks through the process and its realistic success rate.
2. The reply, which is read more than the review
A calm, specific, non-defensive reply is the single highest-leverage thing available to you, because future customers read the exchange, not the complaint on its own. A measured response under an angry review frequently persuades more effectively than the review dissuades. See how to respond to negative Google reviews — and the same discipline applies to the good ones, which most businesses ignore.
3. Volume, which is the only real defence
A one-star review against eleven others is a catastrophe. The same review against three hundred is a rounding error a reader scrolls past. Businesses that ask consistently are not lucky; they have simply made the single bad experience statistically boring. This is slow, unglamorous and by far the most effective answer to “how do I turn these off” — start with how to get more Google reviews.
4. Asking properly — and legally
Asking every customer is fine. Asking only the happy ones, offering a discount for a five-star rating, or having staff post reviews is not — it breaches Google’s policies and runs into UK consumer protection rules on fake and incentivised reviews. The distinction matters more than people assume, and it is set out in Google review rules for UK businesses.
5. Your own website, where you decide
Here the position reverses completely. Your website is your marketing material, and nobody expects a business to publish its worst reviews on its own homepage any more than they expect a restaurant to print a bad write-up on the menu. A reviews widget can be filtered by minimum star rating, and on a paid plan set to feature specific reviews. Your Google listing carries on showing everything, exactly as before — which is what keeps the whole thing honest.
The reframe worth having
A business with no reviews is not a business with no reputation — it is a business whose reputation is invisible, competing against ones whose reputation is not. Given a choice between an unrated business and a 4.6-star one with a couple of grumpy reviews, people choose the 4.6 nearly every time. A perfect five with eight reviews reads as suspicious; a strong average with the occasional bad day reads as real.
Which means the goal was never silence. It was weight of evidence — and then making sure the evidence is somewhere your customers actually look, which is usually your own website rather than page two of Maps.
Put the good ones where they do some work
WeWidget shows your real Google reviews on your own site: search your business name — no Google login, nothing to configure — choose from 15+ styles, paste two lines of code. Reviews re-sync from Google daily and every plan has unlimited page views. The rating badge is free forever with no card; full review widgets have a 30-day free trial, also with no card, and start at £5 a month. See the live examples →
Where to go next
If a review has vanished on its own and you would rather it had not, why Google reviews disappear covers the usual causes. If you are in a profession where you cannot reply freely, the page for veterinary practices and the one for solicitors deal with that directly. And if you have decided to build volume instead, review QR codes are the least awkward way to ask in person.