Four different problems produce the same complaint.

Work from the cheapest explanation to the most expensive. Three of the four causes can be confirmed in a few minutes from your own phone, and confirming them early stops you assuming enforcement that is not happening.

The single most useful test is to open your profile in a private browsing window, signed out of every Google account, on a phone rather than a laptop. That is what your customer sees. If the review option is missing there but present when you are signed in as the owner, the problem is with the public listing rather than with the customer.

An unverified profile is the most common reason review posting is unavailable, and it catches owners who verified years ago. Google periodically requires re-verification, and a profile that fails it can stop accepting reviews while remaining visible in search.

Verification also lapses after ordinary business events. Changing the business name, moving address, changing category, or adding a second location can all send a profile back for review. The owner sees a prompt in Business Profile manager. The customer just sees a page that will not let them post.

Check the profile's status directly rather than inferring it from search results. A profile can appear in Maps while being unverified, which is exactly why this cause gets missed.

Duplicate profiles are created more often than owners realize. Google generates listings from other data sources, a previous owner may have created one, a franchise system may have added one, and a well-meaning employee may have made another.

The symptom is specific and confusing: reviews genuinely post, but they land on a profile you are not looking at. Your review count does not move, customers insist they left a review, and both of you are correct.

Search your business name plus your street address in Google Maps, then search the name alone and scan for a second pin at a slightly different address or with a slightly different name. Report any duplicate through Google's process so the listings can be merged rather than deleting one yourself, because merging preserves the reviews.

Google's Business Profile restrictions page confirms that a profile violating the Fake Engagement policy may have new reviews paused or existing reviews unpublished. That produces a listing where posting appears to be turned off, without any message explaining why.

This cause has a distinguishing feature: reviews were arriving normally and then stopped. Verification and duplicate problems usually mean reviews never worked properly in the first place. A clean history followed by a hard stop points at enforcement, particularly if a public warning banner appeared on the profile around the same time.

The conduct that triggers it is described in Google's prohibited content policy: paid reviews, incentivized reviews, reviews collected on a business device in a way that reads as pressure, and bursts of activity that do not match the profile's history.

Suspension is more severe than a review restriction and easier to identify. A suspended profile is removed from Maps and search entirely, and Business Profile manager states the status plainly rather than leaving you guessing.

Suspensions commonly follow edits that look like policy problems: a keyword-stuffed business name, an address Google cannot confirm, a category that does not match the business, or a virtual office used as a street address. None of those are about reviews, but all of them stop reviews.

The path back is the reinstatement request rather than support chat. Fix the underlying detail first, because submitting a reinstatement while the problem is still live tends to produce a second denial.

Stop spending review requests on a profile that cannot accept them. Every request sent into a broken listing is a customer you have already asked, and asking the same person twice a month later works poorly.

Keep collecting the customer feedback itself, even when Google cannot take it. A customer who has just finished a job remembers detail that is gone in three weeks. Capturing what they would have said, and asking them to post it once the profile is working, preserves the reviews you would otherwise lose entirely.

Do not create a new profile to get around the problem. A second listing for the same business makes the duplicate situation worse, splits whatever reviews you do collect, and is itself a policy violation.