New ways we’re protecting businesses on Maps

Bibek Samantaray

Group Product Manager, User Generated Content

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.

Using Gemini to catch fake edits even faster

To keep place names on Maps accurate, we're now using our Gemini models to automatically catch unhelpful edits faster than ever. With advanced reasoning capabilities from Gemini, our systems can quickly spot and block suggestions that violate our policies before they go live — like social or political commentary with local nuance. This new protection is rolling out now on Android, iOS and desktop globally.

Making it easier to manage Business Profiles

Maps is a helpful place for people to share updates about local businesses, like new store hours or temporary closures. While business owners have always been able to monitor their own profiles, we’re now making it even easier for them to catch inaccurate suggestions. Starting this month, we're rolling out proactive email alerts so verified and active owners have a way to easily review important edits to their Business Profiles before they go live.

Tracking our progress in 2025

Our evolving AI models and expert analysts are more effective than ever at catching abuse. Here’s an overview of how we protected Maps in 2025:

By continuously investing in these systems, we’re helping business owners focus on their customers, knowing their reputation on Maps is being protected.

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