Google Business Profile owners are seeing their review replies disappear from their own dashboards, but only when they are logged in. Log out, or open an incognito window, and the same replies are still there. That split is the clearest signal available: this is a display bug, not a data-loss event, and businesses that assume otherwise risk creating a mess that outlasts the bug itself.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the pattern spreading through the Google Business Profiles Forums on July 22, with owners describing replies that were visible one day and gone the next. One post read: “Till yesterday, I have replied to all reviews, but it is not visible now.” Another: “All replies given to reviews gone missing.”
Two Google Product Experts who monitor the forums independently characterized it as a bug rather than a policy change or a scrubbing of content. Sherry Bonelli wrote, “It’s a bug. Google is aware.” Tim Capper added, “This appears to be a bug at the moment.” Neither described a timeline for a fix, and neither is a Google employee, though Product Experts routinely surface issues Google later confirms.
Schwartz replicated the problem himself. Old replies he had left over the years showed up only when he was logged out. A fresh test reply he posted did not appear in either logged-in or logged-out view after 20 minutes, which suggests the bug behaves inconsistently between new and existing content. He notified Google directly about the issue.
The practical risk here is not the bug. It is the response to the bug. An owner who sees a blank reply field for a review they know they answered has an obvious, understandable urge: retype the reply. That instinct is the trap. If the display issue clears on its own, which is the pattern with prior Google Business Profile glitches, a business ends up with duplicate replies stacked on the same review, a cosmetic mess that is harder to clean up than the original bug ever was.
The fix for an owner right now takes under a minute. Open an incognito window, or log out of the Google account tied to the profile, and check whether the reply is actually there before doing anything else. If it shows up logged out, the content survived and no action is needed. Hold any remediation until Google confirms a fix rather than re-typing replies against an interface that may correct itself overnight.
This is not an isolated incident. Schwartz noted that Google recently fixed a separate bug in which reviews themselves, not replies, were failing to display or were vanishing outright for some profiles. Two distinct review-surface failures inside the same product in a short window point to a reliability problem with Google Business Profile’s rendering layer. That matters because local businesses have no alternative surface: they cannot mirror their Google reviews and replies onto infrastructure they control, so every display bug is a full outage of that trust signal for however long it lasts.
Local SEOs managing multiple profiles should build a standing check into their workflow. Before escalating any client report of missing content on Google Business Profile, verify in incognito first. It is faster than a support ticket, and it will resolve the majority of these panics without touching a single reply.
According to Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz, reporting July 22, 2026.
