Google has been releasing an annual report on the number of reviews blocked or removed for several years now. In a Googler’s post, 292 million reviews were blocked, and 13 million were removed in 2025. The post states that while 292 million reviews were blocked, 1 billion reviews were posted and are live. Google blocked …

I received a tip that Nicholas Abaza is having his friends leave reviews on his Google Business Profile (GBP). I was given four names to check: Jorge Borunda, Michael Trevino, Seth Nicamoff, and Adam Fomby. Adam Fomby is a founding partner at Borunda and Fomby. He left reviews for Borunda P.C., Law Office of Nicholas …

On March 10th, 2026, Google employee Lisa Landsman published a post on the help forum. The write-up is directed towards small businesses and addresses rankings and online reviews. The spotlight on reviews section has some great nuggets of wisdom. Pro-Tips for Managing Feedback  Lisa is telling people to show they are listening by replying to …

It has come to my attention that One Property Management at 1350 Boyson Rd A-1, Hiawatha, IA 52233 ran a review contest to bolster its Google reviews. They put out door hangers advising that, for the month of February 2026, anyone who posted a review was eligible for a $5.00 gift card. One Property Management …

For the past few months, I have been building a fake review detection tool. What used to take me hours to compute by hand, I can now do in minutes. My tool shows all the businesses reviewed by the same people who reviewed the scanned business. Here are the results after scanning the Google Business …

On Friday, April 3rd, 2026, somebody posted on Reddit complaining about fraudulent Google Business Profiles (GBPs) in the market. The fraudulent GBPs are targeting air duct cleaning services. There appear to be two networks and a handful of other GBPs violating the TOS. I feel there are two different networks because each uses the same …