fake review checker for google maps

We read a place's full review history and weigh the signals that are costly for a review farm to fake:

• Burst campaigns: clusters of 5 star 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.
• Review solicitation: reviewers themselves reporting that the business rewards, pressures, or steers reviews (“free dessert if you leave 5 stars”). An LLM reads every such mention; only firsthand reports of policy-violating practices count, and the penalty deepens with each independent witness. Politely asking for a review is allowed by Google and never counted.
• Too-perfect records: a spotless, unanimous 5 star history often signals curated or incentivized reviews, so it can't earn a top grade, even when we can't prove fraud.

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 star ratings), so we only count ones that put real words behind the stars.
• Established 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. When a place corrects the headline number, the “per credible reviewers” / “per established accounts” label tells you which.