Can You Turn Off or Delete Facebook Reviews? What Actually Works

One bad recommendation lands on your Page and the first thing you type into a search bar is "turn off Facebook reviews." The switch exists. Whether you should flip it is a different question, and the answer depends on which problem you are actually trying to solve.

What You Can and Cannot Do With Facebook Reviews

Facebook reviews have been Recommendations since 2018: a customer says whether they recommend you, adds text if they want, and picks who can see it. The controls Meta gives a Page owner are narrower than most people expect.

Everything below is drawn from Meta's own help pages, linked where they apply. If a guide tells you there is a "hide review" button, it is describing a Facebook that no longer exists.

How to Turn Off Facebook Reviews (Meta's Current Steps)

These are Meta's steps from its help page, Turn Recommendations on or off for your business Page, for the desktop site:

1. Log into Facebook, then click your profile photo in the top right.
2. Click See all profiles, then select the Page you want to switch into.
3. Click your Page's profile photo in the top right.
4. Click Settings & privacy, then click Settings.
5. Click Page and tagging.
6. Toggle Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page? on or off.

Two things trip people up. The setting is not labelled "Recommendations" or "Reviews tab," so searching your settings for either word finds nothing; it lives under Page and tagging with that long question as its name. And it only exists on a Page. If you are looking at a personal profile or a Group, there is no switch because there are no reviews.

What Happens When You Turn Reviews Off

Meta's description of the consequence is one sentence: "Turning Recommendations off will disable Recommendations and remove the rating and reviews from your Page."

In practice that means three things happen at once. Nobody can leave a new recommendation. Your rating number disappears. And the Reviews tab, with every recommendation in it, stops showing to visitors.

What Meta does not say is what happens when you turn the switch back on. Its word is "remove," not "delete," and the same page notes that "if your Page previously had reviews, Recommendations have been automatically turned on for your Page," which is the closest it comes to describing the history as something that sits behind the switch. Do not build a plan on either reading. If you flip it off during a bad week, check your own Page when you flip it back rather than assuming the reviews return or assuming they are gone.

How to Delete a Facebook Review: The Honest Answer

You cannot. There is no button on a Page that deletes a review or recommendation another person wrote. What you have instead are three routes, and only one of them is fully in your control.

Route 1: Report the review to Meta

Meta's page on reporting a Recommendation or review gives these steps:

1. Below your Page's cover photo, click Reviews under Details. You may need to click More first.
2. Click See all next to Recent reviews.
3. Click the options menu in the top right of the review you want to report.
4. Click Report post.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Meta says: "We'll review your report and may remove Recommendations that don't follow our standards." The standard is its Community Standards, so spam, harassment, hate speech, and similar violations are what a report is for. A review that is unfair, exaggerated, or written by someone you think was never a customer is not a violation by itself, and the report will not remove it.

The same page adds one limit worth knowing: "Recommendations that only include a star rating can't be reported." Read that as: a report needs written content to evaluate. A bare thumbs-down with no text leaves nothing for Meta's team to weigh against the rules.

If a review you once saw is gone, do not assume your report worked. Meta's own explanation is that "it may have been removed or the person who posted it may have changed the audience for the post." Recommendations shared with friends only vanish from your view without anyone deleting anything, which is also why your review count never quite matches what a customer sees.

Route 2: Ask the reviewer to remove it

The person who wrote the review can take it down. Meta's help page for reviewers says: "When you review a business on Facebook, you can go back and edit or delete your review at any time." They do it from their profile's Activity Log, under Interactions, then Reviews, and Meta notes the option is available in the Facebook app for iPhone and Android.

That makes the reviewer the fastest deletion path there is, but only if you have fixed whatever they were angry about. Facebook does not hand you a private line to a reviewer the way Yelp does, so the ask usually happens in person, by phone, or after they message your Page. Solve the problem first, then ask once, politely. Never offer money, a discount, or a free anything in exchange for changing or removing a review.

Route 3: Reply underneath it

This is the one route that does not depend on Meta or the reviewer agreeing with you. A calm reply from your Page, two or three sentences, sits directly under the review for every future visitor to read. It cannot remove the review, but it changes what the review means to the next person.

Thank them, name the specific thing they raised, say what you did about it, and invite them to message the Page. Skip the excuses and do not argue line by line. The full walkthrough on responding to Facebook reviews covers the setup and templates, and the free Facebook review response generator drafts the comment in seconds, no signup needed.

When Turning Off Facebook Reviews Actually Makes Sense

The switch is a legitimate tool in a few situations:

• You are being review-bombed. A pile-on from people who were never customers, often triggered by a viral post, can bury a Page in hours. Turning reviews off is a circuit breaker while your reports are pending. When the storm passes, turn it back on and check what your Page shows.
• The Page never serves customers. A holding company, an internal team, or a Page that exists only to run ads has nothing to gain from a Reviews tab.
• You are closing or merging the Page. If the Page is being retired, there is no reason to keep collecting feedback on it.

It almost never makes sense for the reason people usually reach for it: one bad review among many good ones. Meta's help page puts the cost plainly: "Recommendations help customers learn more about your business and may make your Page easier to find in Facebook search." Turning them off to bury one complaint trades every good review, your rating, and that visibility for the removal of a single paragraph that a reply could have answered.

Why Can't People Leave a Review on My Page?

The same switch explains most of the "my customers can't review me" complaints, so it is worth checking before anything else.

• The switch is off. Settings, then Page and tagging, then make sure "Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page?" is on.
• It is not a Page. Personal profiles and Groups do not have reviews. Only a business Page does.
• The tab is hidden under More. Meta says the Reviews tab is "below your cover photo" and that "you may need to select More first." Customers looking for a Reviews button on the main Page view often stop before they find it.
• They shared it with friends only. A recommendation shared with a custom audience is real, but Meta's rating page says "only recommendations that are shared publicly are included in a Page's overall rating." As the admin, the count you see is the public count, and public reviews show a globe icon next to the date.

Facebook Has a Switch. Google Does Not.

If you manage both platforms, the contrast is the whole story. Google gives business owners no way to turn off reviews at all: you can flag a policy violation and you can reply, and that is the full list. Facebook gives you one blunt switch that takes everything down at once. Neither platform lets an owner delete a single review, and on both, the reply is the tool you actually control.

That reply is also the part worth making effortless. Facebook has no open review API, so no tool can reliably post replies there for you, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. We do not monitor or post to Facebook; the free generator writes the comment and you paste it. Google is different: ReplyOnTheFly watches your Google reviews 24/7, writes a reply in your voice, and emails it to you for one-tap approval. If you want the Google half handled today, create a free account and your next review arrives in your inbox with the reply already written. The platform-by-platform guide covers the rest.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

You can turn off Facebook reviews, and Meta's steps take about a minute. You cannot delete one review, hide one review, or keep the good ones while dropping the bad one. The switch is a circuit breaker for a review-bombing, not a fix for a single complaint.

• The switch lives under Settings, then Page and tagging: "Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page?"
• Turning it off removes the rating and every review from your Page, in Meta's words. Meta does not say what returns when you switch it back on.
• One bad review has three routes: report it if it breaks Community Standards, ask the reviewer (they can delete their own at any time), or reply underneath it.
• The reply is the only route you control, and it is what the next visitor reads.