Your reviews don't expire. They just stop working.

No, and this is provable from Google's own documents rather than from vibes. The content policy that governs Maps reviews lists the grounds for removal: fake engagement, incentivized content, harassment, misinformation, personal information, and the other policy categories. Age appears nowhere. Google's guidance on local ranking mentions review count and rating. An expiration date appears nowhere.

So a review posted five years ago has exactly three ways to die. The customer who wrote it deletes it. The Google account that posted it gets deleted or suspended, which silently takes every review that account ever wrote with it. Or the review itself gets removed for violating a policy, sometimes years later, which we will get to, because that last one has gotten much less theoretical since 2026 began.

Owners asking Google's own support forum whether old reviews can be removed for age get the same answer every time: no expiration exists, and a truthful old review cannot be removed just for being old. If you are carrying an ancient one-star and waiting for time to erase it, time is not coming.

Reviews do not expire, but their ranking power ages. The clearest evidence is the industry's longest-running expert survey, Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors. In the 2026 edition, recency of reviews ranks #11 among local pack factors, and sustained review flow over time, as opposed to bursts, ranks #14. In the 2023 edition recency sat around #20. Freshness did not just make the list. It climbed nine spots into the top tier while overall review signals grew from roughly 16% to roughly 20% of ranking weight.

Field observation backs the survey. Sterling Sky published a case study in July 2025 documenting a consistent correlation between fresh reviews arriving and rankings improving, including a client whose local rankings sagged after a three-year review drought and recovered when the flow resumed. Their advice is bluntly practical: match your competitors' velocity. If they collect weekly, a stockpile from 2023 is not saving you.

Note what this means for the metric you watch. Total review count is a lagging indicator, a museum of past effort. The live signal is your last-review date and the steadiness of what arrives. A business with 500 reviews and silence since 2024 is losing, right now, to the competitor with 120 and three new ones this month.

The second decay is faster and happens in your customer's head. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey for 2026 puts numbers on it: 74% of consumers focus on reviews written in the last three months. 32% look specifically at the last two weeks, up from 20% the year before. 18% say only the last week influences them at all.

Asked what makes a review persuasive, consumers put posted in the last month at 44%, essentially tied with a high star rating at 42%. Read that pair again. To the modern review reader, when it was written matters about as much as what it scored. A glowing account of a roof you installed in 2022 is not evidence to them. It is history.

The practical read: your profile is being judged on a rolling ninety-day window whether you like it or not. Inside that window, detail wins. Outside it, even brilliance barely counts.

There is a genuine removal risk to old reviews, and it is the opposite of expiry. Google's moderation systems re-evaluate existing content as they improve, and 2026 has been the year of aggressive sweeps: waves of removals in February, March, and July caught huge numbers of reviews, plenty of them legitimate. Separately, when a reviewer's account is suspended or deleted, every review it ever posted disappears with it, and there is no restoration path for those.

Which old reviews are most exposed? The generic ones. Short, vague, maximum-star reviews are the profile that most resembles spam to a classifier, because that is what purchased reviews look like. A specific account of a real job, with the service named and the experience described, reads as what it is. Reviews with substance are structurally more purge-resistant, which is a sentence we did not expect to type when we started this guide, but the 2026 removal waves made it true.

If reviews have vanished from your profile and you suspect a sweep rather than natural attrition, that is a different problem with its own playbook, covered in our guide to disappearing reviews.

Here is the version of this problem specific to half the trades reading this. Gutter cleaning, window washing, irrigation, snow removal: seasonal businesses naturally collect reviews in bursts, a spring pile and a fall pile with silence between. That pattern now collides with the ranking data twice. Recency decays through every off-season, and Whitespark's factor #14 explicitly rewards sustained flow over bursts, which is the one shape a seasonal business cannot naturally produce.

You cannot invent winter gutter customers, but you can stop leaving the shoulder seasons empty. Off-season service calls, maintenance visits, and the customers you never got around to asking during the rush are all legitimate review sources spread across the quiet months. The goal is not volume. It is a pulse: something real arriving steadily enough that neither the algorithm nor a March shopper concludes the business went dormant.

The mechanical fix is embarrassingly simple: ask every customer at the time of service, all year, instead of batch-remembering in May. A request that goes out automatically when each job closes converts your natural trickle of off-season work into exactly the sustained pattern the burst pattern fails to produce.

Pull up your own profile and ignore the total. Look at the date on your most recent review, because that is what the algorithm weighs, what the shopper checks, and what quietly answers the question is this business still good, or was it good once.

The system that fixes it is not a push. It is a habit: every finished job produces one honest ask, close to the work, while the customer can still describe it. Steady beats big everywhere here. Steady feeds the recency signal, steady survives the purges because specific fresh reviews are the ones that read as real, and steady means no ninety-day window ever finds your profile empty.

small Talk exists to make that habit automatic. The request goes out when the job wraps, the customer answers a few short questions instead of facing a blank box, and the draft built from their answers is specific enough to matter for years, not months. Reviews may not expire. Momentum does. The fix is the same for both.