My Google business is being spammed with a coordinated attack of fake 1 star reviews from a competitor. They are posting fake photos with a false defamatory narrative and left 4, 1 star reviews in the span of 2 hours. All their friends and family are now posting negative reviews as well and they haven’t used our services. My small business has been going 18 years and we didn’t have any negative reviews until this happened recently. Google makes it impossible to navigate this. I’ve reported the reviews , tried to file complaints on the Google business review tool and nothing is happening. How do I get in contact with a human at Google that can manually look into this, stop the coordinated attack of spamming, and freeze my business from receiving these fake negative reviews?

Any help would be appreciated

I am a freelance web developer and one of my clients manufactures exercise equipment and sells online. He is just starting out and working out of his garage and therefore does not have a commercial property with a sign and all that, nor does he invite customers to come to his house.

Regardless, Google is requiring a video to verify his business. I’ve never seen this before. Why are they requiring this for him? Is there a way around it? When I click “verify another way” it doesn’t provide any options..

I know for a fact this would have prevented 90% of my other clients from being on myBusiness.

Is the recent onslaught of fake reviews everyone seems to be experiencing, only happening to businesses with mobile numbers listed?

It feels like businesses with no mobile number provided (i.e. no whatsapp capabality) are not being affected.

Just an observation and happy to be proven wrong :)

Hi Reddit,

Wanted to get your advice on this. Over the last two weeks, there has been tons of new junk removal companies popping up around the Los Angeles area. I'm talking about 40+ all at the same time. They all share the same things: website template is the same (they just change the colors), photos are AI generated (including AI generated storefront pictures) , share the same reviewers (like my picture attached). Anyhow, you see all those red dots that this profile reviewed? Yep - all junk removal profiles created within the last few weeks. It appears that someone found a way to create a whole lot of GBP's. I think it's either a junk removal company acting unethically or maybe a lead gen service that found a way to generate leads through Google. Advice?

Hi - seeking advise for smoothest process of a GBP & LSA address being updated & additional LSA account being made.

Address - Client is currently a SAB and is about to move operations to a new address where we intend to keep as a SAB.

• Before requesting from Google, should they update on website first + other directories/websites and in what period of time prior to requesting an address change - is this actually mandatory?
• Will documents all in the same new address of Companies House certificate of incorporation, Insurance, Utility Bill, Bank statement, professional licenses, qualify as enough to satisfy Google?

LSA accounts - Client currently have 2 live success full LSA accounts, but I want to make a third for them so we can separate budget into different Services.

• Worth waiting for the other live LSA accounts to move address over to the new one first before making the second?

Thanks

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Google has just said we need to verify our business by video and moved all of our photos to "pending" and changing our lead picture to some blurry one a customer took. I can't reply to reviews or add updates.

We're running a small tour business where we meet guests and take them around town. We do the booking/emails in our flat, but our mailing address is a virtual office in our city. People book online and we meet them at a central meeting place and then walk around. We don't have a location.

We don't have any permanent signage, nothing printed on any fixtures, no company t-shirts, business cards, or company van. We don't have a cash register, a point of sale system, a shop, staff room, kitchen or storage room. We do all of our bookings and payments online, and all of our "signage" is online, too. We have Google Workspace with our domain name. We are a registered tax-paying business but Google doesn't seem to accept any documents or online evidence, and we have nothing physical. And our business is registered as a different name than our DBA.

Should I have business cards printed up with our home address on them? Making them unusable for anything but the video verification? I'm especially confused because all of our competitors have addresses showing and are also using virtual offices, but they all seem to be verified.

Please help. I feel like I'm going to cry. 

Is there a reputable KNOWN company (US BASED) that deal with Google listings? I own 2 home service businesses and having really hard time dealing with GMB, I got suspended and generally having hard time.

My company was already verified but we switched names It’s making me re verify but doesn’t work. I’ve been having sm trouble finding someone to help. Has this happened to anyone? How did you fix?

Hello everyone. I live in a condo complex and recently a rental business claimed the website, appointment, phone number on google maps. The page I believe has been claimed by the business.

The page used to be just reviews of the complex and pictures but has now been converted to their business use.

There are other people that rent their spaces in the complex and some that own and live in permanently.

Does anyone know how to remove this business from the page since they do not own and operate the entire building? Seems like the page was completely hijacked and the listing misrepresents the other owners and occupants to make it seem like their business owns the building.

We own a small painting business in which my fiancée is the sole painter & I do admin, in Australia. We have attempted to set up a GMB and not only was it suspended, our appeal was denied for “deceptive content”, with no further clarification, despite attaching documents such as business name registration with ASIC, ABN (Australian business number) & insurance. I was never actually prompted to provide any form of verification when setting up the account, it just went straight into “review”. We don’t have any tax statements as we have only started this financial year and no signage out the front of our home as we don’t operate out of our address - we did set it as service area business with no address attached. We do have all of my fiancées tools, signage on the vehicle and as mentioned, documents supporting it being a legit business. I posted on the GMB forum with no response other than telling me to set it as service area business, which it was from the start. I’m at a loss of what to do at this point! Can anybody help?

Hello, respected business owners.

I wanted to raise this "review for ransom" modus operandi of a very particular set of people where they blast review your GMB with negative reviews until you get suspended. These people will then ask you for an amount for them to remove these reviews that they did.. but when it reached that stage, it's prolly too late.. Google won't lift the suspension, because ofcourse Google won't. 🤣 Unless google updates their system and go full genocidal on the reviews that has geographical issues, those negative reviews will stay.. I understand the importance of positive reviews, and the ratio of positive to negative reviews to keep a business afloat and it's not the easiest thing to achieve..

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Thank you, respected mods for letting me post here. For each of your business's prosperity,

-Bor1sM.

So i have something like 18k pictures on my phone. When I go to upload a picture on my business profile, I have to Wade through 10,000 personal pictures to find a couple professional pictures. In my gallery everything is organized very well, trying to upload I don't get access to the gallery subfolders. Any easy way to do this?

First and foremost I wanted to thank those that have contributed their personal experience and tips. Small but important details, like having business cards ready and unlocking a shop door. I think this is why I got verified this time after being denied and suspended twice.

But shortly after this happens my work truck broke down and I have no way to replace it. I hope to get something going again soon. But don’t give up and study these posts because the information is invaluable.

My experience:

Staged my driver license, business card, proof of insurance next to my tools inside LOCKED shop on a flat easy to see surface. Next I locked the shop door then pressed record live video and RAN out to the corner to show my intersecting street signs and ran back to my home/shop. Quickly showed my work truck with business magnet then ran back to show me unlocking shop and finally breezing through the previous documents I listed. All this in under 2 minutes is ridiculous I know. But it worked. I wonder what people do who don’t live so close to a street sign. Hope this helps somebody else because I know it’s extremely frustrating!

If I alter my company‘s name a little bit, will it get flagged my other one got suspend?

I work with my family business. After years of my asking my father to try to attain Google reviews, instead of Angi and Home Advisor, he finally started getting them in the past year. But I have a concern, because he is getting what I'm afraid is too may. In just the past year we have gotten 58 5-star reviews.

Now I have checked constantly to make sure he is not offering incentives, and to make sure he is not asking for Positive reviews. He is legit just a very personable owner and I guess he fits into causal conversation with out clients to give us a review if they can.

My question is can Google freeze a MyBusiness Account just because they are doing too well? Like.. I've checked; every review is from a legitimate client we have, I'm just afraid Google is going to think it's somehow illegitimate, and that scares me because I know how difficult it can be to unfreeze a frozen account.

I live in a touristy town and am deeply involved in local civics. A while back I noticed that some roads and paths were inaccurately represented on Google maps so I reported them and they got fixed.

This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole with other mapping errors.

Which leads me to my post title. I've noticed that people regularly have their businesses listed in places where there are no businesses, think places like parks, beaches and nature areas.

When I see these I report them as non-existent in that location. Google are pretty good about removing these.

I know my neighbourhood very well and in the case of businesses that are mislocated I'll suggest a better, more accurate location via Google maps.

I also add reviews and photos to legitimate businesses. Only ever positive because it's not my place to trash someone's business - if they're really crap they won't need my help to go out of business.

But thought I would share this here because I suspect I'm not alone in reporting random businesses in weird places.

Hi all, has anyone else experienced usually high rejection for GBP updates in the last week or so? Been regularly updating our profile for years with no major issues, but the same posting formula, video file type and copy etc are not making it through now. Has something changed recently in Googles posting guidelines because I can’t seem to find anything. Oddly too, the email notifications about these rejections are absent too now.

I've been diving deep into the fake review economy lately after watching several businesses in my area get absolutely destroyed by coordinated attacks. The more I research this stuff, the more I realize most small business owners have no idea what they're up against - or how the game has completely changed.

The numbers are insane. We're talking about a $152 billion annual problem in the US alone, with roughly 30% of all online reviews being fake. But here's what really got my attention: 82% of consumers encounter fake reviews regularly, meaning this isn't just hurting individual businesses - it's breaking the entire trust system that reviews depend on.

I started tracking this after noticing some weird patterns in my local market. One day I'm looking at competitors and I see this restaurant that went from 12 reviews to 87 reviews overnight - all 5-stars, all generic language like "great food and service." Then I check the reviewer profiles: no photos, no other reviews, created within days of each other. Classic fake review farm.

The legal game just changed completely. FTC's new rule means businesses can get fined up to $53,088 per fake review. In the UK, they're hitting companies with fines up to 10% of global revenue. I've been tracking some of the enforcement cases - they're not messing around anymore.

But here's what's really sophisticated about this: I found marketplaces where you can buy reviews for $0.25 to $100 each, complete with "premium packages" that include aged accounts and geographic targeting. Some of these operations can generate unlimited fake reviews without any technical knowledge. They've got loyalty programs and affiliate commissions - it's a whole economy.

The psychological manipulation is what gets me. These services don't just sell fake positives - they weaponize fake negatives. I've seen local businesses get hit with waves of 1-star reviews mentioning services they don't offer, staff members who don't exist, and problems that never happened. The extortion angle is real too - companies reaching out offering to "fix" negative reviews for thousands of dollars.

Here's the counterintuitive part: Even fake positive reviews backfire. I've been analyzing rating distributions, and customer trust actually peaks around 4.2-4.5 stars. Perfect 5.0 ratings make people suspicious now. Businesses gaming the system often get harsh real reviews from customers whose expectations got artificially inflated.

What really drives this home is seeing legitimate businesses struggle with review collection while the scammers flood platforms with fake content. Most consumers (70%+) will leave a review if asked properly, but only about 32% of businesses actually have systematic approaches to collecting authentic feedback.

The defense strategies are evolving fast. The businesses I see succeeding aren't just hoping for organic reviews - they're building systematic feedback collection into their operations. They're asking at the right moments, making the process genuinely easy, and focusing on the customer experience that generates authentic detailed reviews.

I've been analyzing review patterns across different industries, and the authentic ones are obvious once you know what to look for. Real reviews mention specific details, use varied language, come from accounts with review history, and show normal timing patterns. Fake ones cluster together, use template language, and come from suspicious account profiles.

The platforms are fighting back with machine learning and detection algorithms, but it's basically an arms race. Every time they improve detection, the fake review operations adapt their methods.

What I find most interesting: This whole ecosystem exists because businesses are desperate for reviews, but most are approaching collection completely wrong. The companies that crack authentic review generation become basically immune to fake review attacks because their genuine volume drowns out the fake stuff.

For other small business owners - what are you seeing in your markets? Have you noticed obvious fake review patterns among competitors? And what's working for you in terms of collecting genuine customer feedback?

I'm genuinely curious how widespread this problem is and what strategies are actually working for legitimate businesses in this environment.

Hello we are extremely frustrated and have just come up against a brick wall. Therefore wondering if there is anybody on here that can escalate this matter for us please. Following reinstatement of a suspension which to this day we do not know why, all of our reviews are missing. Despite repeated requests & pleas to google they have told me that our reviews are live and this is not the case sadly. Have tried & tried to go back to them on this but they repeatedly say that this matter is dealt with. Am sure any small business will agree how incredibly difficult it is to obtain customer reviews and although we only had just over 70, they are invaluable. If there is anybody in here that can help I would be eternally grateful. Just need a yes or a no as to whether they can be reinstated 🙈🙈. Thank you so much

This subreddit is full of scammers. They are all just waiting for you to reveal the name of your business on Google so they can give you bunch of 1 star reviews and ask you to pay them in order to remove their reviews.

Here’s a condensed guide to ranking and managing a Google Business Profile. This version is based on feedback I received from my earlier post where I broke down the good, the bad, and everything in between. Instead of making it overly long, I’ve streamlined it into three main phases and refined the points based on community suggestions.

For full transparency, these are the same strategies I use with my own clients, everything listed here is part of my real-world process.

Phase 1: Setup & Optimization

• Claim and verify your Google Business Profile (GBP).
• Complete all fields (NAP, hours, categories, services, description, photos).
• Embed a Google Map and display NAP across your website.
• Ensure mobile-friendly design and fast load speed.
• Implement schema markup (LocalBusiness, Reviews, GeoCoordinates).

Phase 2: Visibility & Reputation

• Audit and fix NAP consistency across Google, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, and directories.
• Build citations from local and industry directories.
• Encourage customer reviews with links, QR codes, or follow-ups.
• Respond promptly to all reviews (positive & negative).
• Publish localized content (blogs, location pages, FAQs).
• Optimize content for local keywords and voice search.

Phase 3: Growth & Monitoring

• Earn local backlinks through news mentions, sponsorships, and community partnerships.
• Track GBP insights (calls, clicks, directions) and website analytics.
• Run SEO audits regularly for NAP issues, duplicate listings, or thin pages.
• Adjust strategy based on performance and competitor activity.
• Stay active on GBP with regular posts, photos, and service updates.

Hi everyone,

I just started a concrete coating business and I’m trying to create a Google Business Profile (GBP). Unfortunately, it keeps getting suspended, and I’ve already appealed twice with no luck. (Deceptive Content)

I registered the business as a Service Area Business (SAB) and included my home address (the same one listed on my Articles of Organization). I’ve also submitted my DBA certificate and other documents to prove this is a legitimate business.

From what I’ve read, it seems suspensions are really common for SABs, but I’m not sure how to actually resolve this. Has anyone dealt with this before, and what steps finally worked to get reinstated?

Any guidance would be hugely appreciated!