Customer ratings: Rogue marketers hit as Google reins in on fake business reviews
Google Customer Reviews is a programme that allows customers to rate their purchase experience and share it with the public so other shoppers make informed purchasing decisions.
Business brands using unorthodox publicity methods on search engine Google by sourcing for fake online reviews could soon hit the end of the road after the tech giant issued a warning to crack down on the practice in a bid to restore hygiene in enterprise marketing endeavours.
In a policy update on its Google Maps offering, the multinational said it will be streamlining its support page to make business reviews more trustworthy by detecting and removing fake reviews.
In the update, Google said it would restrict business profiles that violate their ‘Fake Engagement’ policy by temporarily removing existing reviews and ratings and blocking new ones, in addition to labelling with warning tags the profiles where the fake reviews have been deleted.
“Contributions to maps should reflect a genuine experience at a place or business. Business pages are not permitted to display content that doesn’t accurately represent the location or product in question,” said the tech firm.
Google Maps will also look for reviews that attempt to manipulate ratings by posting from multiple accounts, as well as those that utilise emulators, modified operating systems, or other methods that “mimic genuine engagement.”
Google Customer Reviews is a programme that allows customers to rate their purchase experience and share it with the public so other shoppers make informed purchasing decisions.
Businesses bank on this provision to, among other things, up their online reputation, build trust with their audiences, improve their search engine rankings, and ultimately boost their conversion rates as part of the larger goal of attaining profitability.
Analysts opine that even though it is still unclear how Google will accurately determine the reviews that violate the rules, the threat of being publicly shamed will serve as a deterrent to keep businesses away from trying to artificially inflate their ratings.
According to Nairobi-based digital marketing specialist Lennox Mucheni, the warning label on the business profile will also help users avoid visiting places that Google deems untrustworthy.
“There’s no sane marketer or business owner who would want to risk being put on the red by a reputable, common-use platform like Google. That fear alone of public shaming will work magic because everybody will be striving to comply and maintain their brand reputation in good shape,” says Mr Mucheni.
“The violator label will also come in handy for consumers, as they will be saved from engaging with unscrupulous vendors. It is a masterstroke instead of just having suspicious reviews simply vanishing without explanations.”
The planned crackdown by Google comes at a time when a recent report by digital media analytics firm DoubleVerify shows that cyber fraudsters are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to create fake reviews in the app stores, including allotting five-star ratings to specifically targeted ones in a broader scheme to inflate their credibility in what leads to people downloading potentially harmful or deceptive content.
“DoubeVerify’s Fraud Lab has seen a significant increase in apps with AI-powered fake reviews in 2024, identifying over three times the number compared to the same period in 2023,” notes the firm in the report published earlier this month.
Reviews showed that users who download these apps often find themselves bombarded with an overwhelming number of out-of-context advertisements, akin to websites created solely to display ads.
This approach, DoubleVerify notes, disrupts the user experience and diminishes the app’s long-term viability as frustrated users eventually uninstall the annoying apps.
To identify fake reviews, the report notes, users should be on the lookout for several key indicators, among them uniform syntax and style across supposedly different users, unusual formatting such as capitalising the first letter of each word, as well as consistent five-star ratings even for critical comments such as ‘not quite there yet’.
The firm further cautions users to be wary of situations where every rating is accompanied by a written review despite this being not a requirement, in addition to reviewers only having activity within this specific ecosystem.
