How to report a fake Google review

How to tell a fake from a bad one, and how to build the case that gets it taken down.

How to tell a fake from a genuinely bad review

This distinction matters because the two need completely different responses, and misreading it wastes the only shot you get.

• The reviewer's profile has one review, or reviews scattered across cities they could not plausibly have visited.
• The review describes a service you do not provide, a staff member who does not work there, or a price you have never charged.
• Several reviews appeared within a short window using similar sentence structures.
• The reviewer has also reviewed two or three of your direct competitors, favourably.
• The account name does not correspond to any customer, patient or client record you hold.

Building the report

Screenshot the reviewer's public profile before you report. Fake accounts get deleted, and once the account is gone so is your evidence of the pattern.

Then run the check that carries the most weight: search your booking system, patient records, invoices or CRM for the name and for the date range described. A dated export showing no match is the single most persuasive thing you can attach.

Report once, choose the fake or non-customer ground, then escalate to support with the screenshots and the export attached.

When it is a competitor

Competitor attacks tend to come in clusters and tend to be sloppy. The same reviewer reviewing five businesses in one category, all negatively except one, is a pattern Google will act on when it is laid out clearly.

If the pattern is sustained rather than a one-off, it stops being a review problem and becomes something closer to a campaign. That is the point to look at coordinated review attacks and at whether a legal route is proportionate.