In a completely unsurprising use case for AI, bad actors are using tools such as ChatGPT to generate fake reviews on Google. The platform already had a spam problem, but now fake lead-stealing listings will appear more legitimate, and honest businesses will be plagued with even more defamatory material.
Google already struggled with removing spam on their platform, only blocking about 20% of the fake reviews in 2022, and now these more advanced spam bots will be even harder to detect. Google published its report on how it catches fake listings and reviews and the tools used are not optimized for AI content. Google uses metrics such as a single account commenting too frequently or too many new accounts targeting the same business. Google also knows to detect fake phone numbers and remove them from images and other places where users may see that content. Spammers however already know to avoid these pitfalls, made obvious by the fact that 80% of the spam already goes through, and ChatGPT spam will only be better at seeing fake reviews plague the platform.
What is left for businesses to do is manually monitor their listings. Google has yet to make an automatic tool that can deflect this automatic spam so individual marketers need to combat it the old-fashioned way. If your business is plagued by a false review campaign or you are aware one of your ranking competitors is not a legitimate business, you need to flag and report each instance you come across. It can be an arduous process and one not practical for enterprise level businesses, but it is currently the only fix for those afflicted.
DAC can help with spam removal services, so if you are in the position where you couldn’t possibly monitor all of your listings, contact us today.