Google Business Profile
Why You're Not Getting Notified About New Google Reviews
A review can sit unanswered for weeks if the notification never reaches you. Here's every place the alert usually breaks — and how to check each one in a few minutes.
Updated 23 July 2026 · 6 min read
Why the alert doesn't always arrive
Google Business Profile is supposed to email or push-notify whoever manages a listing whenever a new review comes in. In practice, a lot of businesses only find out about a review when a customer mentions it, or when they happen to check the profile themselves — sometimes weeks after it was posted.
The good news is that a missed notification is almost always a settings or access problem, not a Google outage. It's worth working through each of the common causes below rather than assuming there's nothing you can do.
Check your notification settings first
Inside your Google Business Profile (via the Google Maps app, Search, or business.google.com), there's a notifications setting that controls what you're alerted about — reviews, questions, messages, and more. It's easy for this to get switched off during an app update, a phone change, or when someone else who manages the profile changes shared settings.
Open your profile's settings menu and confirm reviews are ticked on for both email and push notifications, on every device you use to manage the listing.
Make sure the right person is actually a manager
Notifications only go to Google accounts listed as an owner or manager on the profile. If the person who originally set it up has left the business, changed roles, or the profile was set up by an agency or web developer years ago, the account actually receiving alerts may not belong to anyone who currently checks it.
In your Business Profile's people or access settings, review who has access and at what level, and add current staff as managers or owners. It's worth having at least two people with owner-level access, so a single unused Google account doesn't leave the whole business blind to new reviews.
Check email delivery, not just Google's settings
If push notifications work but emails don't seem to arrive, the problem is often on the receiving end: Google's notification emails land in a spam or promotions folder, get caught by an aggressive filter, or go to an inbox nobody checks day to day.
Search your inbox — including spam — for recent messages from Google about your business. If you find one, mark it as not spam and add the sender to your contacts so future alerts land where you'll actually see them.
Multiple locations make this worse
If you manage more than one location, notifications are per-listing, not consolidated by default — so a review at a location nobody actively watches can go unnoticed indefinitely, even if your settings are correct everywhere else.
For a handful of locations, a shared checklist to glance at each profile weekly is a reasonable stopgap. Beyond that, most businesses find it more reliable to use a tool that checks every connected location on a schedule and surfaces new reviews in one place, rather than depending on Google's per-listing alerts. Cedric, for example, checks connected Google Business Profile locations automatically — as often as every 15 minutes on higher plans — so a new review shows up in one inbox regardless of which listing it landed on.
If you think you've missed reviews already
Go through each connected location's review tab directly rather than relying on notifications to catch up retroactively — Google doesn't resend alerts for reviews that are already a few weeks old. Sort by newest, scan for anything unanswered, and reply to the genuinely recent ones first. A considered reply to an older review is still better than none, but a prompt response carries more weight with both the reviewer and future readers.