Each year, Google publishes a Google Maps safety report. The 2025 edition confirms a clear trend: driven by artificial intelligence, the fight against fake reviews and fake profiles is intensifying. We reveal numbers that speak for themselves.
Key takeaways:
- Google removed or blocked 292 million fraudulent reviews in 2025, an increase of 21% compared with 2024.
- More than 13 million fake business profiles were removed, a number stable compared with the previous year.
- 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits were blocked before publication.
- More than 783,000 violating accounts had publishing restrictions imposed.
A (nearly) steady increase since 2019
Historical data published by Google make it possible to measure the scale of the change. In 2019, Google removed 75 million fraudulent reviews. In 2020, that number fell to 55 million before rising again: 95 million in 2021, 115 million in 2022, 170 million in 2023, then 240 million in 2024. In 2025, the counter reached 292 million.
The only exception to this trend is the year 2020, the only year in which the volume slightly declined. Since then, the curve is uninterrupted. This does not necessarily mean that fraud is increasing in the same proportions, but rather that Google’s detection capabilities are improving, which drives up the number of removals.
Artificial intelligence at the heart of the system
Google attributes part of these results to the integration of Gemini, its advanced AI model. Thanks to its reasoning capabilities, the system is now able to detect and block content that violates the platform’s rules even before it is published. This notably includes political or social comments that exploit local nuances, a type of content difficult to identify with traditional filtering methods.
AI does not intervene only upstream. In the event of a sudden spike of suspicious reviews on an establishment, Google says it acts quickly on several fronts simultaneously:
- Removal of fraudulent content,
- Temporary suspension of new reviews on the affected profile,
- Alert sent to the business owner,
- Display of a banner visible to consumers to inform them of the situation.
New protections for business owners
The 2025 report also announces the rollout of proactive email alerts for verified and active owners. These alerts will allow them to review significant changes made to their business listing before they are published. It’s a notable development: until now, owners often discovered these changes after the fact.
This feature addresses a recurring problem: malicious or erroneous changes to Google Business Profile listings. In 2025, Google blocked 79 million edits deemed inaccurate or unverified. It’s a considerable volume that illustrates how wide the attack surface is.
Fake business profiles: a stabilization to monitor
On the front of fake Google Business profiles, the tally is stable: 13 million removed in 2025, compared with 12 million in 2024 and 12 million in 2023. After a peak of 20 million in 2022, the figure has therefore fallen sharply and has stayed around the same level for three years.
This stabilization can be interpreted in two ways: either signup prevention measures are paying off and deterring the creation of fake profiles, or malicious actors have shifted their efforts to other types of manipulation, such as fraudulent reviews, whose volume continues to rise sharply.
What Google doesn't tell us
The report contains a notable blind spot. Google no longer reports the number of photos or videos removed. In 2022, the platform had removed 200 million photos and 7 million videos. In 2023, only videos were mentioned (14 million). Since 2024, this data has completely disappeared from the report. No explanation is given for this absence, which creates some opacity regarding the handling of fraudulent visual content.
The article “Google Maps removed 292 million fraudulent reviews in 2025” was published on the site Abondance.
