Estate agencies that write fake reviews, or use agencies that submit them on their behalf, face being banned by Google, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) has announced.

The announcement by the CMA follows its investigation into ‘fake and misleading reviews’ where businesses post glowing reviews of their own activities, often to displace negative ones or get higher ‘stars’, or in more serious cases employ agencies that launch campaigns to ‘raise their profile’ on Google searches via fake reviews.

Only a few months ago, The Neg was approached by one such ‘online reputation consultant’ offering to post ‘new and high quality five-star reviews’, source ‘hundreds of followers’ and ‘beat your competition and dominate local search rankings’.

To counter such dodgy practices, the CMA has received a detailed undertaking from Google that it will seek to significantly tighten up its enforcement activities against such fake and misleading reviews and has promised to protect UK consumers from them, and help them take ‘informed transactional decisions about businesses and their products when using Google’.

Fake reviews

The search behemoth has also promised to apply and continue to develop internal measures to identify, investigate and respond to fake reviews, as making it easier for people to report dodgy reviews, work with Trading Standards and ‘dissuade and deter users and businesses from submitting, procuring or otherwise arranging for fake and misleading reviews to be published on Google.

It will also apply sanctions to those found posting fake reviews, including banning them from its Reviews platform.

In 2022 the CMA attempted to introduce legislation that would make posting fake or misleading reviews specifically illegal and the year before an unnamed London agency was included in a list of 40 businesses published by Which? that, it claimed, had all been given the same glowing write-ups by one reviewer, a clear indication that something fishy had been going on.