What to write when you get a genuinely unfair one-star review

Assume it stays up. Google removes reviews that breach policy — not reviews that are merely wrong — and the appeal process is slow and usually unsuccessful.

So write for the next reader, not for the reviewer. The next reader is deciding between you and someone else, and they are reading your reply as evidence of what you are like to deal with when something goes wrong.

That means: no defensiveness, no restating your side in detail, no “as we explained on the phone”. Acknowledge specifically, state plainly what you would do, and offer a way to fix it offline. Three sentences. Any longer and you look rattled.

Then go and get four fresh reviews, because a one-star in a wall of recent five-stars reads as one bad day, while a one-star sitting on top of nothing reads as the whole business.