Reviews on Google Maps are beyond not trustworthy

The reviews on Google Maps aren’t worth the air they are floating in (on wifi). I just looked at my reviews and found a review written 9 years ago for a store that didn’t exist then (a Key Food that took over the space after A&P went out of business a couple of years after my review was claimed to be written), and my review’s content obviously referred to things I never saw exist at either the A&P or the Key Food that didn’t exist then, but absolutely noted regarding another Key Food over a mile south on a different street. I’m not too stupid to know the difference between both addresses, and there is no way in hell I wrote that review for the non existent store hallucinating it was a different store located someplace else. Then, I looked at other reviews of mine, and noticed that when a store did go out of business at an address, Google just took my review for that store, and awarded it to whatever then took over the same location, related or not, by just changing the name of whatever was there. Giving a review of one store to whatever store it wants to claim you intended to review, even if you didn’t review that store. That also helps explain why, a few years ago, I noticed that stores with a few reviews, highly negative, all of a sudden had tons and tons of new reviews, most of which were glowingly positive, like the list of reviews was suddenly whitewashed, with a bunch of the new reviews very non descriptive, when the older negative reviews were very explanatory. It seems that Google just takes whatever reviews from whereever to fill in where the reviews are too sparse for them. Anyone reading Google Maps reviews now is being fooled, and will be more fooled if they make any plans using them.

3 Likes