Google has released its new Google Maps and local spam fighting numbers for the 2023 year, citing a big lift in reviews and other local fraud that was blocked. Google credited a new machine learning algorithm and its spam-fighting team for the improvements. You can see the previous years at 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019 for those data points.

Google said it blocked 45% more policy-violating reviews from this year compared to last year, 100% more policy-violating videos and the rest of the numbers don’t really line up for me from previous years.

Google removed or blocked over 170 million fake reviews, 12 million fake Business Profiles, 14 million policy-violating videos, over 2 million attempts to make fake Business Profiles, and more. Google left out the photos number, and changed how they measure removal of the business profiles.

Google told me, “We’re not sharing our number for photos this year since we wanted to highlight the video piece, although takedowns there have increased as well. And for business profiles, we wanted to share a different perspective by talking about the number of attempts to CLAIM business profiles that don’t belong to them vs. attempts to CREATE fake business profiles; our enforcement number there has stayed steady.”

Here is the chart I have been keeping tabs on from year to year:

Here is a chart:

How did Google improve its algorithm for spam reviews? Google said they “launched a new machine learning algorithm that detects questionable review patterns even faster. It does so by examining longer-term signals on a daily basis — like if a reviewer leaves the same review on multiple businesses or if a business receives a sudden spike in 1 or 5-star reviews. In 2023, this new algorithm helped us take down 45% more fake reviews than the year before.”

Google wrote:

Meanwhile, local SEOs are like, nope, fake reviews are a big issue:

But not all:

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