How to Turn Off Facebook Reviews (and Whether You Should)

2026-08-17

Here's something Facebook offers that no other review platform does: an off switch. Any page admin can disable reviews and recommendations entirely, and the moment you do, your rating and every review, good and bad, disappear from public view. It's free, it's instant, and it's reversible.

Whether you should is a genuinely interesting question, and the answer depends on maths most owners never stop to do.

How to turn off Facebook reviews

The exact menu wording shifts as Meta updates the interface, but the path is consistent:

1. Open your Facebook Page as an admin.
2. Go to Settings, then Privacy, then Page and tagging.
3. Find the option for others viewing and leaving reviews on your Page, and toggle it off.

That's it. The Reviews tab disappears from your page, along with your recommendation score. Toggle it back on later and previous recommendations return, so nothing is permanently deleted, just hidden while the switch is off.

The trade-off, honestly

Turning reviews off removes the bad ones. It also removes the good ones, the social proof that nudges a browsing customer into messaging you, and it tells anyone who notices the missing tab that you'd rather not be reviewed. For a business with a healthy rating and a couple of stinkers, that's a terrible trade.

Where the toggle genuinely makes sense: pages under active review-bombing after a viral post or local controversy, businesses whose Facebook rating is deeply underwater with too few genuine reviews to recover it, and businesses whose customers simply don't find them through Facebook, where the tab does nothing but host old grievances.

Where it doesn't: a solid profile marred by a few unfair or fake recommendations. In that case you're burning your asset to kill a few parasites, when the parasites can often be removed individually.

The middle path most owners don't know about

Individual Facebook reviews and recommendations can be reported and removed when they breach Meta's community standards: fake and inauthentic activity, harassment and personal attacks, recommendations from people with no genuine experience of your business, spam and off-topic content. Page admins can report a recommendation directly from the three-dot menu beside it.

Fair warning, Meta's moderation is the least consistent of the major platforms. Casual reports often meet automated silence, and only recommendations with text can generally be reported at all, a bare thumbs-down mostly can't be. Reports built on the right community standard succeed where quick clicks get ignored, which is exactly the case-building we do, detailed on our Facebook review removal page.

Our honest advice

We make money removing reviews, so take note when we say this: sometimes the toggle is the right answer, and it costs nothing. When a business comes to us with a Facebook profile where the free switch genuinely serves them better than paid removals, we tell them exactly that in the audit.

The decision comes down to what you'd be giving up. Count your genuine positive recommendations, weigh them against what's rotten, and factor in how many of the rotten ones actually breach Meta's rules and could come down individually.

If you'd like that assessment done properly, our free audit covers it, along with your Google profile, where the same clean-up thinking applies and where, frankly, the reviews usually matter more. Results within 24 hours, no charge, and a straight answer even when the straight answer is "use the free toggle and keep your money".