Google Maps Blocked 20% More Fake Reviews In 2022

Apr 3, 2023 - 7:21 am 1 by
Filed Under Google Maps

Google Woman Restaurants Reviews

Google released spam and fraud prevention stats for Google Maps and local search. In short, Google blocked 21% more reviews, 5% more photos, 40% more videos, and 5% more fake business profiles in 2022 than they did in 2021.

Google removed or blocked 115 million reviews, 200 million user-contributed photos, 7 million user-contributed videos and prevented and removed 20 million Google Business Profiles in 2022.

I have covered this news for the past few years, covering the 2021, 2020 and 2019 data, so I figured I'd compare Google's efforts here to previous years. I should note, some of the data isn't aligned perfectly, such as how Google initially just counted removed Business Profiles and not blocked Business Profiles - so keep that in mind.

Here is the data each year:

click for full size

Here it is in a chart:

click for full size

Google also said it added some machine learning technology to detect and prevent more fake Business Profiles from being generated and the upload of fake phone numbers in user-contributed photos.

I wonder how this will all handle the new AI-generated review spam efforts.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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