Your Google Business Profile is suspended. What the API calls it, and what to do

If your review replies have stopped appearing and you can find nothing wrong with the wording, the problem may not be the wording. Google’s Business Profile API returns a policy reason with a rejected reply, and one of those reasons is LOCATION_SUSPENDED, whose entire published description is “This Business Profile has been suspended.” A suspension can arrive as the answer to a question you asked about a sentence.

Suspension is a value on a review reply

The v4 REST reference documents the field that carries it. policyViolation is “Optional. Output only. The policy violation that resulted in rejection. Only populated if reviewReplyState is REJECTED.” A banner across those pages says:

You can now view the specific policy violations for any of your review replies that have been rejected in the Reviews API.

The enum it points at is introduced this way:

Represents standardized policy violations. New values may be added in the future. Clients should be prepared to handle unknown values.

The framing is broader than “policy violations” suggests. Some values describe what you typed. Others describe what has happened to your profile or to the Google Account attached to it, and no rewrite clears those.

The values that describe an account, not a sentence

Google’s descriptions in full, because the wording is all there is of each one:

Value	Google’s description
LOCATION_SUSPENDED	“This Business Profile has been suspended.”
LOCATION_DISABLED	“This Business Profile has been disabled.”
ACCOUNT_RESTRICTED_AND_SUSPENDED	“A Google Account associated with this Business Profile has been placed under restriction, resulting in the suspension of the Business Profile.”
ASSOCIATED_ACCOUNT_SUSPENDED	“A Google Account associated with this Business Profile is not in good standing. Business Profiles associated with that account have been suspended.”
PO_BOX	“Your Business Profile has been suspended because your business address can’t be a PO box.”
GOOGLE_PAY_SUSPENSION	“Business Profiles associated with your Payments profile have been suspended.”
LOCATION_VERIFICATION_REQUIRED	“This Business Profile is not verified.”
OWNERSHIP_REVOKED	“Another Google Account has claimed this Business Profile. You can no longer manage this profile.”
BUSINESS_INELIGIBLE	“Your business is not eligible for a Business Profile.”

Our own count, not Google’s: fourteen of the forty-three values in that enum describe the state of the profile or the account rather than the text of a reply. Twelve concern the profile or the account, and two more concern a change you made to your listing. Google publishes no such grouping and no total, so treat the number as arithmetic we did in public.

One pair is worth reading side by side. ACCOUNT_RESTRICTED_AND_EDIT_REJECTED is described as “A Google Account associated with this Business Profile has been placed under restriction, causing edits to be rejected. Unlike ACCOUNT_RESTRICTED_AND_SUSPENDED, the Business Profile itself remains active and is not suspended.” A restricted account and a suspended profile are two different states, and Google draws the distinction inside one value’s description. If rejected edits rather than a vanished reply are the symptom you actually have, that state has its own statuses and its own route out, in editing a Business Profile and the edits Google reviews.

For the rest of the list, including the reasons that really are about your wording, see the published rejection reasons.

What Google says a suspension is

The help page is short about the cause and specific about the remedy:

We may suspend or disable Business Profiles that don’t follow our guidelines. If you believe your profile should be reinstated, you can submit an appeal.

The guidelines it refers to are explicit that suspension is the enforcement behind them. That page opens with the requirement “To make sure your Business Profile won’t be suspended we require that you:” and lists three things: “Avoid prohibited content and behavior.”, “Reflect your business accurately.” and “Comply with the product guidelines in this article.” It closes with the reservation:

Important: Google reserves the right to suspend access to Business Profiles on Google or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines, and may work with law enforcement in the event that the violation is unlawful.

Restriction first, then the profile

If your reason names an account rather than a location, Google sets the order of operations, not you. The help page:

Your account may be restricted when you violate our policy. As a result of an account restriction, the Business Profiles you manage are suspended and you won’t be able to create or claim other profiles.

And the sequence:

To lift the restriction, you can provide a reason and submit an appeal for your account on your My accounts page. You can find and track the status of your appeal there as well.

Then, in Google’s words, “Once the account restriction is lifted, to remove the Business Profile suspension, you can submit an appeal for your Business Profile.” Two appeals, in that order. ACCOUNT_RESTRICTED_AND_SUSPENDED and ASSOCIATED_ACCOUNT_SUSPENDED are the values that put you on that path; LOCATION_SUSPENDED on its own does not.

What the appeal tool shows you

The reason appears outside the API too. Google documents that the appeals tool displays three things: “The restricted profile”, “The reason for the moderation action” and “A link to the violated policy”. With no API access, that is where to read it. Getting into it in the order Google sets, the documents it asks you to attach and the problems its routing chart sends somewhere else are all in appealing a suspension through the appeals tool.

Two instructions on that page are worth following exactly. On evidence: “Important: Once you open the evidence form, you must submit it within 60 minutes or it won’t be attached to your appeal.” And on the temptation to start over: “Important: Do not create a new Business Profile for the same business while your appeal is under review.”

The statuses the tool reports are “Submitted”, “Approved”, “Not Approved”, “Can’t be appealed” and “Eligible for appeal”. A denial may not be the end: “Only if your reinstatement request is denied, we may be able to do an additional review to prove your eligibility.” One region gets a further note: “If you’re located in a European Economic Area (EEA) member state or territory, you may have additional redress options.”

Where the enum and the guidelines line up

PO_BOX is the only value that names a specific cause of suspension in its own description, and the guidelines are correspondingly precise about addresses. “P.O. boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations aren’t acceptable.” A rented address is covered too: “If your business rents a physical mailing address but doesn’t operate out of that location, also known as a virtual office, that location isn’t eligible for a Business Profile.” So is signage: “Businesses showing their address on Google should maintain permanent fixed signage of their business name at the address.”

What none of this tells you

Google does not define the difference between suspended and disabled on the page that handles both, and the enum gives each a value and one sentence with no contrast drawn. We have not tested what distinguishes them and we are not going to assert it.

Nothing we read publishes how often profiles are suspended, or how often an appeal succeeds. So this page prints no figure for either, and no article should promise you a reinstatement it cannot see the decision on.

The reason also only reaches you through a reply, since policyViolation is populated when reviewReplyState is REJECTED. That is an odd home for a profile diagnostic, and it is why a suspension can reach you as a wording problem. For the wording itself, see responding to a negative review.

The short version

Check the reason before you edit the reply. If it names the profile or the account, no rewrite will help, the appeal is the only route Google publishes, and an account restriction has to be lifted before a profile suspension can be.