Google ratings get faked all the time. Type what you're looking for and we read the reviews, then tell you which places you can actually trust.
We read a place's full review history and weigh the signals that are costly for a review farm to fake:
- Verified rating: what hard-to-fake reviewers actually give, vs the headline number — a gap means the rating is inflated. Two groups qualify:
- Credible reviewers are Local Guides who also wrote a substantive review. The badge alone is gameable — farms run Local Guide accounts that drop bare 5★ ratings — so we only count ones that put real words behind the stars.
- Seasoned accounts have 30+ lifetime reviews, regardless of badge or text. Farms pad accounts with a handful of reviews to look plausible, but aging thousands of accounts past 30 is the expensive part.
Each place is anchored to whichever group gives the more conservative rating — the card's “per credible reviewers” / “per seasoned accounts” label tells you which.
- Burst campaigns: clusters of 5★ reviews dumped on a single day by low-history accounts. A genuine surge keeps a place's normal share of Local Guides, so it isn't counted against it.
- Drip-feed farms: reviews arriving nearly every day at a pace no organic business sustains — a paid stream spread thin to dodge obvious spikes.
- Cross-posted text: the same review copied word-for-word onto other businesses — a farm seeding a whole chain.
- Throwaway accounts: single-review profiles padding the average up.
- AI-written reviews: generic, templated praise with no real detail.
- Too-perfect records: a spotless, unanimous 5★ history often signals curated or incentivized reviews, so it can't earn a top grade — even when we can't prove fraud.
An old campaign that today's credible reviewers have long since outweighed is surfaced as history, but won't drag down the live rating.