Nearly 93 cents of every dollar spent crafting a Google Business Profile reply to a five-star review may be wasted. A dataset of 12,752 rejected review responses, analyzed by Digital Phablet and published June 10, 2026, found that 92.6 percent of silently removed replies were attached to positive reviews, not complaints.
The finding has a direct implication for local SEO practitioners: the reply workflow most businesses treat as a reputation signal is also the one most likely to be filtered out before any customer sees it.
The rejection data
Digital Phablet’s analysis captured three patterns worth separating by type.
The composition finding: positive reviews attract the bulk of removals. The study’s interpretation is that five-star responses tend to use templated, enthusiastic phrasing, either written by staff trained on sample scripts or generated by AI reply tools, and that phrasing is triggering Google’s spam filters.
The volume finding: rejections jumped from 398 in 2023 to 9,393 in just the early portion of 2024. The source does not specify exactly which months of 2024 that figure covers, so the per-month rate is not precisely calculable. What is clear is that the filtering system became substantially more aggressive during that period.
The timing finding: on average, rejected replies were posted roughly 1,221 hours (about 50 days) after the original review went live. Bulk-scheduled or delayed replies appear more often in the rejection dataset, and that pattern has grown over time.
What changed in 2025
Michel van Luijtelaar, co-founder of Digital Phablet, reported on LinkedIn that from April 2025 onward the picture shifted. Total rejection volume fell, and the share of rejections flagged as generic AI templates dropped from above 70 percent to single digits in some months.
Van Luijtelaar offered two competing explanations. Either AI reply tools improved enough to pass Google’s filters, or Google’s moderation pipeline reorganized internally in a way that changed at which stage replies get caught.
The first explanation conflicts with timing: the April 2025 shift does not align cleanly with any widely-announced AI reply feature upgrade. The second explanation, that Google quietly moved the moderation gate, is less flattering but consistent with the data shape. The analysis does not resolve which interpretation is correct.
What this means for local SEO practice
Google does not notify business owners when a reply is rejected. That is the operational problem sitting underneath the study’s numbers. A multi-location brand could be running a systematic reply program across dozens of profiles and have no visibility into how much of that output is being silently discarded.
The 50-day average lag between review and reply is a separate flag. Reply programs that batch-process old reviews, a common pattern when a business joins a new reputation-management tool and wants to backfill responses, appear at higher rejection rates in the dataset. Whether the delay itself triggers filtering, or whether delay correlates with the bulk-template behavior that does, the study cannot confirm.
For practitioners managing Google Business Profile at scale, the near-term audit is straightforward: compare the number of replies your team or tool has submitted against what is actually visible on the profile. If a meaningful gap exists, the templated language is the most likely culprit to address first.
Brands using AI reply tools should cross-check profile visibility now, before assuming their response rate is what their tooling dashboard reports.
Digital Phablet reported these findings on June 10, 2026, in an analysis by Maisah Bustami examining 12,752 rejected Google review responses.
