You built up a review count over years and treat the profile as finished, because the number is good and the number does not go down. What is being measured is not the total, and a profile that has not moved since last winter reads to Google as a business that has closed.
A specialist who has worked on more than a thousand Google Business Profiles, almost all of them for agents and brokerages, tells a real estate podcast that the biggest misunderstanding is what the profile is. Agents treat it as a directory listing — name, address, phone, a logo, some reviews. He says “it’s a living, breathing social media platform”, and it is scored on activity.
Then the mechanism nobody is told about: “there’s a massive recency bias”. “Google looks at your business like on a 30 or 45-day clock. And if you have not been active on your Google Business Profile and having active reviews coming in in real-time, they view your business as a dying or a dead business.”
He plays out the version that happens to good agents. “As an ego trip, DJ the realtor thinks his business profile is strong because he has a 100 Google five-star reviews.” But Google looks at the dates, sees nothing recent, no posts, no new customers saying anything — and “Therefore, we’re going to suppress it.”
His phrase for what it looks like from the outside is the dark house metaphor: the most beautiful listing on the street, with every light off. Nobody stops, because nothing signals that anyone is home.
“Google looks at your business like on a 30 or 45-day”
This inverts how agents think about reviews. A hundred reviews is not an asset that keeps paying; it is a record of a period when you were active. The scoring question is not how many people have vouched for you, it is whether anything has happened lately — and a profile with a great total and a dead recent window is being ranked as though the business closed.
Which is good news, because the fix is not another hundred reviews. It is a steady trickle — a few reviews and a few posts inside every month-long window — and it makes the total you already have count for something again. If you have been treating the profile as done, the honest test is to look at the date on your most recent review and your most recent post, and ask whether anything at all has happened inside the last thirty days.