How do you tell if a Google review is from a bot?

What are the red flags for fake reviews?

In the past few years, Google has taken a strong stance against online reviews that can be easily detected as fake reviews.

This has had huge benefits for businesses and especially small businesses, whose reviews are becoming more important by the day. Here we're going to tell you about how you can go about finding fake reviews and how you can stop the fakers before they ruin your business for good.

Google has really done a lot to combat fake reviews. Back in 2024, most people would say the best and easiest way to find fakers was to search for it and take a look. If Google saw an obviously false positive in your review, they would take action immediately to remove it. Most reviewers did this well (unless they were very lazy), and in most cases only a few people would notice and mention it, meaning that you could often get away with it. It was only a matter of time before Google got smart and started catching real fakes - the first step came on March 3, 2024, and from then on you needed to do something to stop fake reviews in their tracks.

Here are eight ways to spot fake reviews and prevent them in the future: Look at the number of stars. Before March 2024, many reviews had no stars. They looked like a decent enough review, and Google took this approach. However, things changed once Google noticed how obvious fake reviews were and made a change. Now the vast majority of new reviews, those that look most promising, have a fair few stars on them. That's because Google has learned over time that you should use stars to indicate trust. A poor star count could be a sign that a reviewer has gone overboard and written a fake review, but a large and appropriate number is a clear indicator of authenticity.

Note that this only applies to business reviews and not individual reviews. People can easily get away with stars and still make fake reviews.

Watch out for suspicious profiles. If your online reviews seem a little suspicious, you should look for more information on the account and try to figure out what's going on. Sometimes reviews can be generated by apps or sites that pay reviewers to do them for them. It's not always as easy to figure out as you might think, but look for any unusual behavior when signing in, looking at ratings and reviews and reading posts on Twitter.

Can positive Google reviews be fake?

Are we being tricked?

By Stephen Hird, Content Marketing Manager for Econsultancy.org (and @ecsnet) If our only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. A common adage in marketing. A good marketing strategy can create results but, there are times when you want to avoid marketing at all costs! For example, when you're doing a survey, or taking part in a social experiment or when you have zero visibility into the number of likes, shares and comments you're generating it would be a total disaster. But what happens when your only tool is to generate buzz by posting quality content? Google can be an incredible asset to business. They provide the platform for search, they drive traffic to websites and, on the whole, they work as a great tool for digital marketers. However, there's a risk that this tool could be used to trick you into overspending on content, or creating fake reviews for some form of self-benefit.

The truth about fake reviews. As you can imagine, it's easy for a service that is designed to drive customers or leads, to turn a blind eye to fake reviews. Reviews left by dissatisfied customers can do two things: boost a website's ranking for their own specific services and harm the ranking of others.

For example, the company, Amazon, receives approximately 7 million reviews per month. The reviews are important because they're an easy source of information to find what you want - particularly if you're looking for something a bit risky. However, having this much reviews might mean that users aren't very aware of exactly how they can be manipulated. The vast majority of reviews are written by people who have purchased something and are unhappy with their purchase. This suggests that fake review writers are quite happy to write reviews for brands, even when they weren't actually happy with the purchase, to create false impressions in the eyes of Google.

Some people will say that no one ever writes negative reviews about fake products or services and that, overall, their feedback is positive. I'm inclined to believe this in theory. However, my own experience tells me this is probably an untruth.

If this is really the case, I think there's a good reason for it.

How can you tell if a Google review is real?

Reviews like these are not unique.

As of now, nearly all reviews posted on Google are fraudulent: If you see a review from a non-Google account on your site, it's almost certainly fake. Some of the fake ones come from people that are either trying to gain attention by posting a huge score on a site that's hard to reach, or trying to gain positive SEO by showing up high on SERPs for keywords that are related to their own service.

The problem is real and it's really bad. Fake reviews are bad for everyone. Fake reviews make users wary of buying items on a site without verifying their legitimacy. Fake reviews make companies lose revenue, and fake reviews create misleading information for people to find on the web.

But while fake reviews are definitely an issue on the web, they're actually a more nuanced problem than most sites believe. Real vs. Fake Reviews While the majority of product reviews on the web are undoubtedly fake (like this review by a fake account), most of the real reviews on a given website are posted by real accounts. According to my studies of Google, nearly 80 percent of reviews for sites that sell an item are posted by a real account. Here's the data from my research: This chart isn't entirely about real reviews, though. For some websites, only fake reviews and no real ones show up. This includes review sites and other places on the web where all accounts get labeled as fake when we aren't sure what's going on. But once I do find a site with only fake reviews, it's highly likely to be using fraud, and I haven't found a single case yet of a legitimate review site having that much fake only reviews.

I've also discovered a very interesting trend in Google's reviews. When I look at reviews of individual products on Amazon, they tend to fall into two camps real and fake.

Amazon makes it easy to identify fake reviews. They have a separate section of reviews that just identify themselves as Fake in red text. These reviews tend to be short and mostly written by bots. But with the exception of products that have thousands of Amazon-owned products, most of the reviews for individual products come from accounts that are verified.

How do you tell if a Google review is from a bot?

When we asked this question at SXSW, we learned that we can actually tell if a review is fake by looking at the source IP address of the review.

And we recently caught a bot trying to game the site review system.

The bot, which made a number of reviews of Google products, was identified based on its unusual use of IP addresses. The IP addresses had an exact match when compared with known bots, so we immediately flagged these reviews as bots. (It's worth noting that our system doesn't try to distinguish between two different IPs on the same IP block.)

At SXSW we heard back from a few people who had been targeted by a bot. A couple people had received a message from their bank asking why they were making suspicious activity, or had suddenly received a large amount of cash in their Gmail accounts.

As you might expect, some of the bots we found made very bad reviews. In the past, some of these have gone viral. (In January of 2024, we removed a review after a bot made more than 50,000 votes, which is more votes than anyone has ever managed.) Other reviews contained blatant fake reviews. Here are a couple of examples. It was one of the best phone purchases I've ever made.

Now, we've found over 100 bots, and most of the reviews above were written by bots. What makes a review go viral? Well, a lot of what makes a review viral depends on the reviewer and what kind of content the reviewer creates. Reviews that are liked by the public will likely go viral, even if they're generated by a bot. However, we've found no evidence that Google allows any bot to create reviews, even if the bots are able to create new reviews. Even more troubling, we can't find evidence of any Google review being gamed. That is, we can't find evidence of any kind of collusion or abuse between Google, reviewers and their bots. In many ways, this is surprising, since these tools seem to be working as intended. It should be noted, however, that we're not able to catch every review that's submitted by bots.