Is it illegal for a company to delete bad reviews?

On Google the question answers itself, because the business has no delete button. You can reply to a review or report it, and Google decides whether it breaks the content policies. An honest negative review stays.

The law bites where the business controls the reviews: testimonials on its own website, review widgets, and reviews on its own booking or shop pages. Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans publishing consumer reviews in a misleading way. Its examples include failing to publish or removing negative reviews while publishing positive ones, and giving positive reviews greater prominence than negative ones. These have been banned practices since 6 April 2025.

The CMA's guidance on fake reviews adds more examples of conduct that can break the ban: editing, withholding, removing or delaying genuine negative reviews, cherry-picking favourable reviews in a way that misrepresents the overall customer experience, and making an offer to settle a dispute conditional on the customer not leaving a negative review. The penalties are the same as for fake reviews, with CMA fines of up to the higher of 10% of global annual turnover or 300,000 pounds.

Not every removal is suppression. Taking down a review that is fake, abusive, contains someone's personal details or is about a different business is reasonable moderation, and the law expects businesses that publish reviews to take reasonable steps to remove fakes. The test is consistency: apply the same written rules to good and bad reviews alike.

You can still show highlights on your website as long as they don't give a false picture. Displaying live Google reviews with your real overall rating, or linking to your full profile, keeps you on the right side. Hand-picking a dozen five-star reviews and hiding the rest does not.