292 million reviews gone in the Google Maps crucible: the 2025 purge

Every year, Google publishes its anti-fraud report for Maps. And every year I read it the way you would read the Metamorphoses: a world that keeps shifting, fakes taking on the face of the real, and an algorithm cast as the cleansing god. In 2025, Google threw 292 million fraudulent reviews on the fire, 21 % more than in 2024. Behind that number sits a quiet but decisive battle for consumer trust. And for the clients of mine whose commercial survival depends on their Google listing, it carries some very practical lessons.

The great work: seven years of separating lead from gold

Alchemists spoke of the great work to describe the slow transmutation of lead into gold. Google has been running its own version on Maps for seven years, at planetary scale. In 2019, 75 million reviews removed. A slight dip in 2020 (55 million) during the pandemic, and the curve has not come back down since: 95 million in 2021, 115 in 2022, 170 in 2023, 240 in 2024, and 292 million this year.

The honest reading of these figures is not "fraud is exploding". It is rather that Google's detection is getting better. The net is tightening. Reviews that sailed through three years ago now get spotted, flagged and removed. Good news in principle. Bad news for listing owners still running badly configured review collection, and I mean the post-job text message campaigns sent out in bulk, at the same moment, with the same link. That is exactly the pattern the algorithm looks for first.

Gemini, Google's Dioscuri

In Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux were the Dioscuri, the heavenly twins, protectors of travellers. Google chose its name well when it called its large model Gemini. On Maps in 2025, Gemini plays exactly that part: a pair of lookouts watching over the travellers of the web, consumers and honest businesses alike.

In practice, bringing Gemini in changes three things.

• Filtering increasingly happens before publication. Until now, Google mostly removed after the fact. A growing share of toxic reviews, off-topic political commentary and personal attacks never reaches the listing at all. Prevention rather than cure.
• Suspicious spikes trigger a layered response. When Google detects a rush of reviews within a few hours on one listing, it temporarily suspends new reviews, alerts the owner, and sometimes displays a banner visible to consumers. I have watched this play out on two client accounts in 2025. It is not a rumour.
• Proactive email alerts are coming for verified, active owners. Google announces in this report that they will soon be able to review significant changes to their listing before publication. That is a real step forward, and long overdue. I have lost count of the shop owners who discovered a malicious address or opening-hours change three weeks after it happened.

Why this purge matters directly to three of my clients

These figures speak to me because they land on accounts I actually work on. Three sectors, three different ways of depending on a Google listing.

Luxury property: when one fake review costs a villa

At Home Booker, which rents high-end villas between Saint-Tropez, Courchevel, Megève and Ibiza, the average booking runs into tens of thousands of euros a week. A client hesitating between two agencies will read the reviews, look at the photos and weigh up the quality of the replies. A single negative review posted by an unscrupulous competitor can tip a 40,000 euro decision. In that kind of market, review management is not a detail, it is a core part of brand value. The Gemini purge is good news, but it does not replace watching every new review as it lands.

Animal health: trust comes before experience

At Pacha Urgences Vétérinaires à Domicile in Marseille, a pet owner does not "try out" a vet the way they would try out a restaurant. They choose on trust. Google reviews weigh enormously on that decision, far more than any services page on the website. For a clinic or an emergency vet service, a dense flow of recent, genuine, properly answered reviews is a direct competitive advantage over the practice down the road. And a temporary review suspension caused by a suspicious spike, even one the algorithm triggers by mistake, hits the business within days. Hence the value of impeccable listing hygiene.

Emergency services: the local pack or nothing

At Control Cana, a 24/7 drain unblocking service across Paris and the Île-de-France region, the fight happens in the Google Maps local pack: the three results shown at the top when someone types "emergency drain unblocking Paris" at two in the morning. Almost nothing gets clicked below that. Position in the local pack depends directly on the listing, on recent reviews, on their average rating and on their credibility. Emergency services are probably among the sectors most exposed to review manipulation: fake positives planted by competitors to lift their own listing, fake negatives to knock out a rival. Google's purge does the cleaning, but the owner still has to stay awake.

Seven routines to protect your Google Business Profile in 2026

Here is what I actually put in place with clients. Nothing exotic, just simple moves repeated on a regular basis. As with any serious practice, what counts is the consistency.

1. Turn on owner alerts and check the account's contact details. Only verified, active listings will receive the proactive alerts Google announced. Log into Google Business Profile Manager and check the email address and phone number attached to the account. Without that, you miss the weak signals.
2. Audit the listing's edits once a month. In Google Business Profile, the "Updates" tab lists the changes applied or suggested by third parties. Google blocked 79 million edits in 2025, which is enormous, but it does not mean nothing slips through. The nastiest changes touch the opening hours, the category or the website address.
3. Set up review collection that is regular and spread out. A steady, natural flow, three to seven reviews a week on a normal business, reads perfectly well. A bulk send to fifty customers on the same day with the same link is a pattern Gemini now catches straight away. Space the requests out, personalise the messages, do not bunch them up.
4. Ban every paid incentive for a positive review. Offering a discount in exchange for a review breaks Google's rules and exposes the listing to suspension. I repeat it to every client, because the temptation is always there. Since Gemini, similar wording from one review to the next, same vocabulary, same turn of phrase, gets detected within hours.
5. Reply to every review, positive and negative alike. A reply is a double signal: activity for Google, which favours living listings, and professionalism for the prospect reading it. On a negative review, answering calmly and factually while offering a direct contact offline defuses the commercial damage even when the review stays up. I set out the full sorting method in answering a bad review: sort before you write.
6. Report obvious fake reviews without delay. The faster the report, the better the odds of removal. The full procedure is below.
7. Watch your brand SERP. The Google Business Profile is only one piece of your online image. Type your company name into Google once a month and look at what comes up on the first page: third-party reviews, forums, press, competitors. A clean brand SERP is the best shield against a smear campaign.

Reporting a fake review: the procedure that actually works

Plenty of businesses report fake reviews badly, get refused, and give up. The procedure that works has four steps.

1. Identify the exact policy breach in Google's content policies: spam, conflict of interest, off-topic content, impersonation, harassment, hate speech and so on. A report with no clear ground is refused almost automatically.
2. Report from the listing itself (the three dots beside the review, then "Report"). That is the first automated pass.
3. If the request fails, go back through the "Manage reviews" tool in Google Business Profile Manager, then through the review removal request form available from Google's help centre. Attach screenshots and whatever evidence you have: no trace of the supposed customer in your records, a date that does not add up, and so on.
4. As a last resort, on a clearly defamatory review that will not go away, a formal legal notice to an identifiable author remains an underused lever. On complex cases or coordinated campaigns, structured reputation work lets you move quickly on several fronts at once.

The report's blind spot: photos and videos

There is a silence in this 2025 report worth pointing out. Google no longer publishes the volume of photos and videos it removes. In 2022, the platform claimed 200 million photos taken down and 7 million videos. In 2023, only the videos appeared (14 million). Since 2024, radio silence.

That opacity on visual content is not harmless. Photos posted by third parties on your listing can be misleading, out of date or plainly damaging: a shot of a dirty dining room taken next door, product photos from another chain, pictures of staff who left years ago. Inspect the "Photos" tab on your listing regularly, and report whatever should not be there.

What I take away

Google Maps is becoming a more reliable platform for consumers, and a more demanding one for business owners. Bringing Gemini into the anti-fraud machinery tightens the collection rules, speeds up the response to suspicious spikes, and will soon open proactive alerts to verified owners. For every business whose commercial performance depends on its Google listing, from high-end property to healthcare, emergency services, restaurants and local retail, listing hygiene is no longer a bonus. It is the foundation.

The alchemy is never finished. The great work of a well-kept listing starts again every month, with the same simple moves repeated. And that is precisely where most businesses let go.

📖 Source: Google's annual report on fighting fraud on Maps, 2025 edition, reported and analysed by Johan Sellitto in Abondance, Google Maps: 292 million fraudulent reviews removed in 2025 (20 April 2026, in French). Original data from Google, confirmed by Search Engine Roundtable on 17 April 2026.