Google also released the annual Google Maps safety report saying blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews and removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles. Google also said it blocked 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits and placed posting restrictions on more than 783,000 policy-violating accounts.
You can see the previous years at 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019 for those data points.
Here is what Google posted:
- With advanced reasoning capabilities from Gemini, our systems can quickly spot and block suggestions that violate our policies before they go live — like social or political commentary with local nuance.
- If we do see a sudden spike in spam reviews, we’ll quickly remove the fake content, pause new reviews on the profile, alert the Business Profile owner and display a notification banner to let consumers know why contributions are temporarily paused
- We're rolling out proactive email alerts so verified and active owners have a way to easily review important edits to their Business Profiles before they go live.
Sadly, Google did not tell us how many photos or videos they removed this year. But Google did remove 21% more fake reviews than last year. Google removed the same number of fake Google Business Profiles as last year.
| Year | Reviews | Photos | Videos | Profiles |
| 2025 | 292 | N/A | N/A | 13 |
| 2024 | 240 | N/A | N/A | 12 |
| 2023 | 170 | N/A | 14 | 12 |
| 2022 | 115 | 200 | 7 | 20 |
| 2021 | 95 | 190 | 5 | 19 |
| 2020 | 55 | 160 | 3.5 | 3.6 |
| 2019 | 75 | 10 | 3 | 4 |
Here it is as a bar chart:
Forum discussion at X.
