Employers cannot remove Indeed reviews on their own. Only Indeed’s moderation team can take a review down, and only when the content violates the platform’s published guidelines. Honest negative feedback about a workplace almost always stays up, even when it stings. What an employer can do is flag reviews that break the rules, post a public response, and, in narrow cases involving genuinely false statements of fact, consider legal action.
What Indeed Will Actually Remove
Indeed’s review guidelines rest on a single premise: reviews should reflect a real person’s honest experience at a real job. The platform is not built to let companies curate only flattering feedback. Opinions about management, culture, or day-to-day frustrations are generally protected, and the moderation team steps in only when a review crosses a specific policy line.
Content Indeed prohibits and will consider removing includes:
- Personal information such as names of non-public-figure employees, home addresses, personal phone numbers, financial details, or government IDs.1Indeed Support. Company Reviews: Best Practices, Policies, and Guidelines2Employer Help Center. Maintaining User Safety
- Hate speech, discriminatory slurs based on protected characteristics, and violent, vulgar, or sexually explicit material.1Indeed Support. Company Reviews: Best Practices, Policies, and Guidelines
- Unlawful, fraudulent, threatening, abusive, or libelous statements. Reviewers are told to share opinions rather than state opinions as facts.1Indeed Support. Company Reviews: Best Practices, Policies, and Guidelines
- Confidential business information, proprietary data, and internal details a reviewer agreed to keep private.1Indeed Support. Company Reviews: Best Practices, Policies, and Guidelines
- Fake reviews from competitors, people who never worked there, or anyone with a clear conflict of interest.
A harsh review that stays inside those boundaries will almost certainly remain published. Indeed explicitly distinguishes between sharing an opinion, which is protected, and making factual claims, which get more scrutiny. Disagreeing with a reviewer’s characterization of your workplace is not a basis for removal.
How to Flag a Review
When a review does cross a policy line, you report it through your Indeed employer account:
- Log in and open the reviews section of your company page.
- Find the specific review you believe violates the guidelines.
- Click the report option next to the review.
- Choose the violation category that best matches (personal information, hate speech, fraudulent content, and so on).
- Submit the report to Indeed’s moderation queue.
Moderation typically takes roughly five to ten business days. The review usually stays visible during that window unless it involves a serious safety concern. If Indeed removes the content, the change shows up on your company page. If the review stays up, you may not get a detailed explanation. Indeed does not publish the internal criteria its moderators use on close calls, so a report that clearly ties the content to a specific guideline gives you the best shot.
Responding When the Review Stays Up
Most flagged reviews will not qualify for removal, and this is where the public response feature matters. To use it, you first need to claim your company page through Indeed’s employer support portal. That requires an employer account and ownership or administrative access to a page that has not already been claimed.3Employer Help Center. Claiming Your Company Page
Once the page is claimed, the mechanics are simple. Click “Add a Comment” near the bottom of the review, type your reply, and click “Add Comment” to publish. The response appears under your company name, so anyone reading the review sees that the business acknowledged it. Any page owner with access can reply, and claiming the page also gives you a weekly digest of new reviews.4Indeed. Indeed Employer Reviews: Why They Matter and How to Manage
Your response is subject to the same content rules as the review itself. Retaliatory language, personal information about the reviewer, or threats can get your comment removed. A measured, professional reply that acknowledges the concern and offers context tends to land better with prospective candidates than a defensive one.
Legal Lines You Cannot Cross
Before pressuring or penalizing anyone who left a negative review, understand the federal protections in play. Getting this wrong can expose your business to liability far bigger than the review itself.
Protected Concerted Activity
The National Labor Relations Act gives employees the right to act together, including online, to address working conditions, pay, and benefits. A review tied to group concerns or an attempt to rally coworkers around a shared workplace issue may qualify as “protected concerted activity,” and retaliating against the employee could be an unfair labor practice.5National Labor Relations Board. Social Media Threatening adverse consequences for that activity violates Section 8(a)(1) of the Act.6National Labor Relations Board. Interfering With Employee Rights (Section 7 and 8(a)(1))
Not every negative review is protected. Individual venting about a personal grievance, with no link to group action or collective concerns, is not concerted activity. Statements that are knowingly false, egregiously offensive, or that disparage products and services without tying back to a labor issue also fall outside the shield.5National Labor Relations Board. Social Media
Nondisclosure Agreements and the Speak Out Act
Employers sometimes reach for nondisclosure or nondisparagement clauses to silence a reviewer. The federal Speak Out Act, enacted in December 2022, limits that strategy when the review involves sexual harassment or sexual assault. A nondisclosure or nondisparagement clause signed before the dispute arose is not judicially enforceable if the conduct described would violate federal, tribal, or state law. Trade secrets and proprietary information can still be protected through separate agreements.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 19403 – Limitation on Judicial Enforceability of Nondisclosure and Nondisparagement Contract Clauses Relating to Sexual Assault Disputes and Sexual Harassment Disputes
The FTC Rule on Reviews
Trying to game the ratings, or intimidate a reviewer into silence, now carries direct federal exposure. The FTC’s Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials took effect in October 2024 and targets these practices head-on.8Federal Register. Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials The rule prohibits:
- Writing, creating, or buying reviews that misrepresent whether the reviewer exists, actually worked at the company, or had the experience described.
- Offering compensation or incentives in exchange for reviews expressing a particular opinion.
- Using groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or knowingly false public accusations to prevent a review or force its removal.
- Having company insiders post reviews without clearly disclosing their relationship to the business.8Federal Register. Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials
Violations can carry civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation, a figure the FTC adjusts annually for inflation.9Federal Trade Commission. FTC Publishes Inflation-Adjusted Civil Penalty Amounts for 2025 For a company that orchestrates a batch of fake reviews or leans on a reviewer to withdraw, total exposure adds up fast.
When Suing a Reviewer Is on the Table
If a review contains a genuinely defamatory statement, meaning a false claim of fact rather than an unflattering opinion, and it has caused real harm, a lawsuit becomes possible. It is expensive, slow, and uncertain, but the option exists for extreme cases.
Indeed reviews are anonymous by default. Indeed’s guidelines state that the platform may honor subpoenas, search warrants, law enforcement requests, or court orders that require disclosing a reviewer’s identity.1Indeed Support. Company Reviews: Best Practices, Policies, and Guidelines In practice, that usually means filing a lawsuit, sometimes as a “John Doe” case, and getting a court order compelling Indeed to release the reviewer’s information.
To win a defamation case, you generally need to show a false statement of fact, not just an unflattering opinion, and actual harm. “My manager was terrible” is opinion and almost always protected. A specific, demonstrably false accusation that the company committed a crime or violated a specific law is more likely to be actionable.
Reviewers in many states can push back using anti-SLAPP laws. These statutes let courts dismiss lawsuits that target speech on matters of public concern, including online reviews, at an early stage before the reviewer racks up big legal bills. If the court grants an anti-SLAPP motion, the employer who filed the suit may be ordered to pay the reviewer’s attorney fees. Anti-SLAPP protections vary by state; not every state has a statute, and the strength differs where one exists. Talking with an employment attorney about likely cost and likely outcome before filing is a practical first step.