Google Maps Expanding ‘suspected Fake Reviews’ Warnings

Google Maps is detailing its 2024 progress in “preventing and taking down deceptive content,” which includes adding fake review warnings.

Google credits AI as allowing it to better detect “businesses that try to cheat the system by buying fake five-star reviews from people who have never even visited their establishment.” Specifically, Google now has the ability to “revisit reviews more frequently to identify new abuse patterns even months after they were originally posted.”

In the US, UK, and India, Google Maps is now noting if it “recently removed suspicious five-star reviews in certain circumstances.” Reviews might be “temporarily turned off” when fake engagement is detected. In general, Google last year “placed posting restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts that repeatedly violated our policies.”

Google Maps will begin to show these fake review warnings around the world next month.

Google has also “trained a new model with the help of Gemini” that identifies potentially suspicious profile edits.

Gemini only needs a few examples to learn what’s suspicious and can apply this knowledge across many business categories and languages. This new model has already helped us block thousands of suspicious Business Profile edits this year.

In other stats, Google Maps credits:

ML algorithms for blocking or removing “more than 240 million policy-violating reviews from 2024.” Google says the “vast majority of which were removed before they were seen.”
An improved detection system that blocked or removed “more than 70 million policy-violating edits to places”. It has also removed or blocked “more than 12 million fake Business Profiles.”