Yes, sometimes — but the success rate is modest and it depends entirely on whether the review breaks a stated policy rather than on whether it is unfair. “This is not a real customer” is not a removable category by itself. “This review contains no experience of the business and links to a competitor” is.
What Google will actually remove
The reviews that come down are the ones you can map to a specific policy violation: content from a competitor or someone with an undisclosed conflict of interest, reviews for the wrong business, off-topic content with no service experience in it, profanity or harassment, personal information, promotional content, and obvious spam patterns like several identical reviews from new accounts on the same day.
The reviews that stay up are the ones most owners want gone: a genuinely bad experience described harshly, a complaint about price, a review from someone who did not buy but interacted with your business, or a rating with no text at all.
How to file so it has a chance
Flag it in your Google Business Profile, then follow up through Business Profile support rather than relying on the flag alone. State the specific policy violated — quote it — and attach evidence: dates, job records, screenshots, anything showing the reviewer was never a customer or is affiliated with a competitor. A report that says “this is false” gets denied. A report that says “this account posted identical text on three competitors in our category on the same day, screenshots attached” is workable.
Expect to escalate more than once, and expect some to simply not come down.
The realistic strategy
Removal is one tactic, not the plan. The reliable move against a small number of bad reviews is volume — a 1-star among 15 reviews is a wound, and among 150 it is noise. Combine a reply that reads well to future customers with a steady request workflow, and the review stops mattering long before Google decides anything.
If you are seeing coordinated fake reviews rather than isolated ones, that is a different problem with a different playbook — the fake review removal guide covers documenting a pattern, and GBP spam fighting covers competitor manipulation more broadly.