Google ratings get faked all the time. Type what you're looking for and we read the reviews, then tell you which places you can actually trust.
We read a place's full review history and weigh the signals that are costly for a review farm to fake:
- Verified 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★ ratings), so we only count ones that put real words behind the stars.
- Seasoned 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. The card's “per credible reviewers” / “per seasoned accounts” label tells you which.
- Burst campaigns: clusters of 5★ 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.
- AI-written reviews: generic, templated praise with no real detail.
- 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★ history often signals curated or incentivized reviews, so it can't earn a top grade, even when we can't prove fraud.
An old campaign that today's credible reviewers have long since outweighed is surfaced as history, but won't drag down the live rating.