Bad reviews—real or fake—can have a material impact on restaurants’ business.
Jared Cohen was getting his kids ready to go trick-or-treating when his phone began to buzz.
The COO of Chicago-based Protein Bar & Kitchen gets notified whenever one of the chain’s 14 restaurants gets a customer review on Google. The reviews started coming in fast and furious on Halloween, and they weren’t good.
“We don’t get very many [bad reviews], so when we do, we notice them,” Cohen said. “Notifications kept coming in, one-star reviews, and after two or three, it became obvious that, ‘Oh no, something is definitely wrong here.’”
The reviews were all similar. They were written in broken English, and the content was bizarre, with references to rooms and beds rather than food. After about 15 reviews, one of them said, “I can make all these go away. Just contact me.”
“That’s when we all started to realize, oh, we’re the victim of this extortion scam,” Cohen said.
It’s a tactic known as review bombing, in which fraudsters flood a restaurant with negative reviews and then ask for payment to get them to stop.
It’s not clear how common these attacks are. According to the National Restaurant Association, there hasn’t been an uptick in review extortion recently, though fraudulent reviews are now “a pretty standard way to react to something a restaurant does” outside of the dining experience itself, wrote Vanessa Sink, director of media relations for the association, in an email.
For instance, a restaurant that publicly supports a political cause may get spammed with bad reviews by opponents of that cause.
Extortion attempts may be more rare, but they’ve come in bunches recently. Protein Bar was one of several restaurants to get hit with an attack this fall, said Ashley McGowan, VP of customer experience at Marqii, a company that helps restaurants manage their online presence. Five of Marqii’s clients reported a review bomb around the same time, and they all had a similar MO. The company had never seen anything like it before.
“At this velocity, where there are anything from 10 to 20 one-star reviews coming in at the exact same time, this is very new for us,” McGowan said.
Review bomb clusters have also been reported recently in Philadelphia and Chicago.
“We’re a small business. This is my first solo venture. So, yeah, it feels vulnerable.” —Adam Sindler, SHŌ
Though it would be fairly obvious to even the casual observer that the reviews are fake, they can still have a real impact, because restaurants’ Google ratings have become so influential on customers’ dining decisions.
If a restaurant has a poor rating (typically under 4, McGowan said) users might look elsewhere—that is, if Google’s algorithm even surfaces the restaurant at all.
“Obviously, the goal is you want to show up in the top 10, and having a high review rating is important to ensure that you are relevant in the ‘near me’ searches,” she said.
SHŌ, an omakase restaurant in Chicago, was hit by a review bombing in late August, just four months after it opened. Within a 10-hour span, its Google rating dropped from 4.9 to 3.0. For a restaurant that is still working to establish a reputation, it could have been devastating.
“We’re a small business. This is my first solo venture. So, yeah, it feels vulnerable,” owner Adam Sindler said. “We don’t have a huge number of people we can throw on the offensive to handle things like this.”
Because SHŌ is so young, Sindler said it was difficult to tell whether the sudden drop in its Google rating hurt sales.
At Protein Bar, the attack took place on a Friday, and the two affected locations, in Chicago’s office-heavy Loop, were closed for the weekend. “We got really lucky,” Cohen said.
And fortunately for both SHŌ and Protein Bar, they were able to get the problem resolved quickly.
That’s because Google recently took steps to crack down on review extortion schemes. Operators who suspect they’re dealing with a review bomb can now fill out a Merchant Extortion form to elevate the issue with Google and hopefully get the reviews taken down.
Cohen said that the process for disputing one-off fake reviews with Google often ends up in a “black hole.” But the new tool “gave us confidence that we’re not just shouting into the void.”
After uploading screenshots of all of Protein Bar’s suspected fake reviews, they were removed within two or three days, he said. “I was really surprised at the speed at which it got resolved.”
(However, some of the reviews reappeared over a month later, and Protein Bar had to go through the same process again.)
SHŌ’s experience was similar: Within a few days of filling out the form, the fraudulent reviews were gone, Sindler said. It cost the restaurateur a lot of anxiety and at least one sleepless night, but SHŌ’s Google rating is now back up to 4.9.
“It is a slippery slope, because you want to give people the freedom to leave an honest review, whether it’s good or bad.” —Adam Sindler, SHŌ
The new form is not the only safeguard Google has against fake reviews. It also uses AI to monitor for suspicious activity and automatically remove content that violates its policies. This system blocked or removed more than 240 million reviews last year, most of which were stopped before they were even seen, the company said.
“We do not tolerate scams on Google Maps and work around the clock to monitor for suspicious activity,” a Google spokesperson said in an email. “We’ve removed these fake reviews and suspended the accounts responsible.”
Still, Cohen said Google’s handling of reviews in general could be more restaurant-friendly. He noted, for instance, that Google reviews never expire. Protein Bar has reviews that are over a decade old and no longer reflect the brand, but still affect its rating.
“Because Google doesn’t want to spend the time to manage it, they’re like, ‘We don’t touch any old reviews, unless you report it and adjudicate it,’ which is a black hole,” he said.
Sindler said he can understand the importance of reviews from Google’s point of view.
“It is a slippery slope, because you want to give people the freedom to leave an honest review, whether it’s good or bad. People have the right to voice their opinion and we take everything seriously when it comes in.”
Unless, of course, the review is fake, and the person starts asking for a ransom.
“This is something completely different than that.”
