🕵️ Is It Legit?

Google says 5 stars. The reviews say otherwise.
We read the reviews and tell you which places you can actually trust.

Check a place with your AI agent

We don't scrape Google. Your agent already has a browser; we have the scoring.

1
Connect the legitreviews MCP to your agent.
Claude Code:
```
claude mcp add --transport http legitreviews https://legitreviews.ai/mcp
```
claude.ai: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector → https://legitreviews.ai/mcp

Any other MCP client (Muse, Cursor, your own agent): the same URL, Streamable HTTP, no key needed to try it.
2

Ask it about a place.

“Is Pizza 4P's Ben Thanh legit? Check its Google reviews with legitreviews.”
3

Read the report. The agent opens the listing in its own browser, collects every review, and submits them here. It gets back the verdict, grade and evidence, and the place appears below for everyone.

No agent? Scripts can POST the same review JSON to /api/submissions; the format is at /api/sources/google-maps. Results from a single unconfirmed submitter are labeled as such until a second source agrees.

What signals do we look for?

We read a place's full review history and weigh the signals that are costly for a review farm to fake:

Burst campaigns: clusters of 5 star reviews dumped on a single day by low-history accounts. A genuine surge keeps a place's normal share of Local Guides, so it isn't counted against it.
Drip-feed farms: reviews arriving nearly every day at a pace no organic business sustains, a paid stream spread thin to dodge obvious spikes.
Cross-posted text: the same review copied word-for-word onto other businesses, a farm seeding a whole chain.
Throwaway accounts: single-review profiles padding the average up.
Review solicitation: reviewers themselves reporting that the business rewards, pressures, or steers reviews (“free dessert if you leave 5 stars”). An LLM reads every such mention; only firsthand reports of policy-violating practices count, and the penalty deepens with each independent witness. Politely asking for a review is allowed by Google and never counted.
Too-perfect records: a spotless, unanimous 5 star history often signals curated or incentivized reviews, so it can't earn a top grade, even when we can't prove fraud.

What's the “adjusted rating”?

What hard-to-fake reviewers actually give, vs the headline number. A gap means the rating is inflated. Two groups qualify:

Credible reviewers are Local Guides who also wrote a substantive review. The badge alone is gameable (farms run Local Guide accounts that drop bare 5 star ratings), so we only count ones that put real words behind the stars.
Established accounts have 30+ lifetime reviews, regardless of badge or text. Farms pad accounts with a handful of reviews to look plausible, but aging thousands of accounts past 30 is the expensive part.

Each place is anchored to whichever group gives the more conservative rating. When a card corrects the headline number, the “per credible reviewers” / “per established accounts” label tells you which.

Where does the review data come from?

From the agents and scripts that submit it. Every submission is checked for structure and consistency (Google's own review and profile ids, timestamps against displayed dates, the rating average against the displayed rating, the count against the listed count, overlap with what we already hold), and a place submitted by one unconfirmed source carries an unverified source note until a second, independent submission agrees. Places we pulled ourselves before October 2026 need no such note.

What does a high score mean?

It means we found no evidence the business is manipulating or inflating its own reviews. It does not promise the rating is accurate: a clean place can still be mis-rated by too few reviews, reviewers who self-select, or honest reviews that just don't match your experience. We measure whether the number looks gamed, not whether it's right.