Pharmacies had the lowest rate across the four sites (1.3%). The category with the highest fake reviews percentage is Locksmiths (14.5%).Next in descending order were Yelp (7.1%), Tripadvisor (5.2%) and Facebook (4.9%). Of the four platforms examined, Google had the highest average percentage of inauthentic reviews across business categories (10.7%).Google is the top local business reviews site in the U.S., used by ~70% of consumers.“Google Removed 130 million fake reviews in 20 it's a multi-billion dollar problem.”Īdditional findings from the report include: 'Unfortunately a lot of consumers take reviews at face value, and are being deceived,” said Curtis Boyd, founder and CEO of the Transparency Company. And while Uberall survey data show that two-thirds (67%) of consumers are concerned about review fraud, most people cannot spot inauthentic reviews. Positive reviews help businesses rank in search results and lead to more conversions. “We wanted to understand how big a problem review fraud is today and where it’s concentrated.”īecause nearly 90% of online consumers consult reviews before buying, reviews have become a high-stakes issue for businesses. “Media coverage of review fraud has been growing, but nobody has quantified the problem,” said Greg Sterling, VP of Market Insights at Uberall. This research was initiated in Q4 2020 and completed in Q2 2021. The study, conducted in partnership with The Transparency Company, used sophisticated machine learning and natural language processing techniques to identify inauthentic reviews across 19 popular local business categories and top U.S.

Uberall, a global leader in ‘Near Me’ Customer Experience solutions, today announced a new report, “ The State of Online Review Fraud ,” which analyzes four million local business reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp and Tripadvisor. This is the first report to take on the growing problem of fake reviews at this level of scale.

Fake reviews on google