Do Google Reviews Expire? (No — But Here's What Changes)
A five-star review from 2019 counts towards your average exactly as much as one from this morning. To a customer reading your profile, it counts for almost nothing.
Short answer: no. Google reviews do not expire. They stay on your profile indefinitely and they count towards your average forever, whether they were written last week or in 2017.
A review only leaves your profile if the reviewer deletes it, or if Google removes it — usually because the account behind it was closed or flagged.
But that's the technical answer, and it's not the useful one. Because while old reviews never stop counting mathematically, they stop working for you a long time before that.
Two ways a review ages
In your average: never
Every review carries identical weight in your star rating regardless of age. There is no decay, no rolling window, no discount for being old. A 1-star from 2018 pulls on your average exactly as hard today as it did the day it was written.
This is why businesses that had a rough patch years ago sometimes can't understand why their rating is still stuck. The old reviews haven't faded — they've just been outnumbered, or not.
In a customer's mind: fast
Ask yourself what you do when researching a business. You read the newest reviews. Most people barely scroll past the first handful, and anything older than about a year gets mentally discounted — reasonably, because staff change, owners change, standards change.
So a profile with 200 reviews where the newest is from eighteen months ago performs worse than a profile with 40 reviews where six arrived this month. The first looks dormant. The second looks busy.
Old reviews hold your average. New reviews win you customers. You need both, but only one of them is something you can do anything about.
Recency and local ranking
Google's local ranking factors are not published in detail, but review recency and review velocity — how steadily new reviews arrive — are widely observed to matter alongside count and rating.
The logic is straightforward from Google's side: a business receiving fresh reviews is demonstrably open, active and being used. One that stopped receiving reviews two years ago may not be. Google would rather not send someone to a business that has quietly closed.
The broader picture is in how Google reviews affect your SEO ranking.
What this means practically
You cannot outrun old bad reviews. You can only outnumber them.
If a bad stretch three years ago left you with eight 1-stars, waiting won't help. They'll be there in a decade. The only lever is new reviews above your current average, in enough volume to shift it — the arithmetic is in recovering from a bad Google rating.
A steady trickle beats an occasional burst
Four reviews a month, every month, does more for you than forty in one campaign and nothing for a year. It looks natural, it keeps your newest reviews fresh, and it avoids the spike pattern that triggers Google's spam filtering.
Your newest five reviews are your shop window
They're what most people actually read. If your five most recent are a 3-star, two 5-stars with no text, an unanswered 1-star and a two-year-old review, that's your reputation — regardless of what the average says.
Should you reply to old reviews?
Yes, and it's more worthwhile than most people expect — an unanswered review from 2022 is still being read in 2026, and it still looks ignored. There's a right way to do it, covered in responding to old Google reviews.
Related questions people ask
Can a reviewer delete an old review? Yes, at any time, with no time limit. Which is why resolving an old complaint properly can still change a review years later.
Can I delete old reviews? No. Businesses cannot delete reviews of any age — here's what you can actually do.
Do reviews from closed accounts still count? If the review is still visible, yes. If the account was fully removed, the review usually goes with it and your average recalculates — a common cause of an unexplained rating drop.
Does replying make an old review look new? No. Your reply doesn't change the review's date or its position in the default sort order.
The one thing to take away
Stop thinking about your review history as a fixed score and start thinking about it as a flow. The average is largely inherited. The flow is entirely yours, and it's what customers actually read.
Reploi keeps every incoming review answered within minutes so your newest reviews — the ones people actually read — always show a business that's paying attention. Start free — 5 replies/month →