When you find and read reviews on Google Maps, they should be accurate and trustworthy. In 2024, Google detailed a slew of exciting new features thanks to Gemini, its AI model, and now we’re learning how those tools are improving Google Maps reviews.

Today, Google Maps is detailing all the progress it made throughout 2024 to prevent and remove deceptive and fake content in reviews. The company explained how it’s using several AI tools to remove fake reviews, scam content, and more from Google Maps. Some of these include illegitimate profile edits, fake reviews, and misleading information.

Basically, your Google Maps reviews should be better today than last year, and they’ll continue to be more trustworthy moving forward. Thanks to several “advanced machine learning algorithms,” the company removed over 240 million reviews last year alone. Moving forward, repeat offenders may have a fake reviews notice on the review page, and in some instances, reviews could get temporarily turned off for select locations.

The search giant said its AI models and algorithms are getting faster and better at detecting “businesses that try to cheat the system by buying fake five-star reviews from people who have never even visited their establishment” and that it’s actively revisiting reviews at a more frequent pace to spot and identify abusive patterns.

In addition to removing nearly 240 million iffy reviews and comments, Google Maps noticed and immediately removed or updated nearly 70 million edits to places that violated the terms of service. It also removed 10,000 listings of bad actors taking over unclaimed business profiles or accounts, and adding misleading information, business details, or reviews.

These moves should not only help make reviews more trustworthy but also slow down bad actors or business owners spamming fake reviews to increase their star ratings.

This year, people in the US, UK, and India may even notice that some places inside Google Maps won’t accept reviews at all. If the company continuously removes fake or suspicious five-star reviews, Maps could take a proactive approach and “temporarily turn off” reviews to slow down all that false engagement, as shown in the image shared above. Then, Google further explained that:

Another huge aspect of Google Maps reviews is photos and video, not just comments and the star-rating system. Google continues to use and refine AI tools to automatically assess all user-submitted photos or videos inside reviews and instantly remove any harmful or offensive media before they’re ever published. And while we didn’t get a number of how much of this content gets blocked before ever seeing the light of day, it’s likely a large number.

In closing, Google detailed how it has recently blocked over 12 million fake business profiles and added restrictions to nearly one million accounts (personal and business) that have violated Maps’ policies on multiple occasions.

So, while we’ve seen Google Maps slowly get a bunch of AR tools, better navigation, features from Waze like community alerts, and new features appearing all the time, the company is also working hard behind the scenes to keep the experience clean, fun, and free of fake reviews that mislead people. As you all know, Google Maps is great for a lot more than just navigation, and the company aims to keep it that way.

Source: Google