People rely on Google Maps for accurate, up-to-date information about the real world. To help keep this information fresh and accurate, we make contributing helpful content easy for our community — who shared over 1 billion reviews and suggested 80 million updates to business hours, contact information and more in 2025 alone — while continuously developing new technology to proactively stop fake reviews and scams.
Today, we’re introducing three new ways we’re protecting businesses on Maps, along with highlights from our 2025 Trust & Safety Report.
Stopping review scams before they start
As part of our ongoing investment to fight bad actors, we've upgraded our systems to be even faster at stopping new kinds of scams — like attempts to demand payment in exchange for removing fake one-star reviews. Our systems now better detect specific scam patterns, which lets us stop suspicious posts before they ever go live. If we do see a sudden spike in spam reviews, we’ll quickly remove the fake content, pause new reviews on the profile, alert the Business Profile owner and display a notification banner to let consumers know why contributions are temporarily paused. These protections are rolling out globally in the coming weeks.
