The Fake Review Economy: Hospitality’s Open Secret

Updated 15 July 2026: This piece was recently featured in The Caterer — welcome, if you've arrived here from that piece.

A restaurant that opened last year should not have 4,000 Google reviews and a near-perfect rating.

Open Google Maps. Search for “restaurants near me.” The algorithm does the rest.

The highest rated places tend to float to the top and draw most attention. Diners assume the crowd has spoken. They choose. They book. They eat. And the whole system is supposed to work on the understanding that what they’re reading is real.

It isn’t. Not anymore.

Fake reviews in hospitality have stopped being an occasional irritant and become something closer to an organised industry. What was once a suspicious handful of five-star posts all referencing the same waiter or host has become a system - industrialised, commercialised, and hiding in plain sight. Platforms know it’s happening. Operators know it’s happening. The regulator has known it’s happening for years. The only people who don’t know are the diners being quietly deceived.

And the numbers make clear why it matters. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) estimates that £23 billion of UK consumer spending is influenced by online reviews every year. That’s not a niche digital concern - that’s the backbone of how British consumers decide where to eat, where to stay and what to buy.

 

I’ve watched it happen in real time.

When Lahpet first started as a pop-up in 2017, reviews accumulated slowly and honestly. A guest would write something thoughtful about a dish; someone else might mention the atmosphere or comment on the service. The numbers crept up over months and years across our new openings and we’ve maintained an average Google rating of 4.5 across our sites to this day. I’m proud of that. Every one of those reviews represents a real person who chose to spend their time telling others about their experience.

That was how it worked.

However, organic review behaviour from genuine diners has been declining ever since - people are busier, habits have changed - and yet at exactly the same time, some restaurants have begun accumulating reviews at a pace that has nothing to do with real customers. The two trends are not a coincidence.

Now consider this: at the first bricks and mortar restaurant I opened in 2018 it’s taken years to accumulate 1400 plus Google reviews and maintain a 4.5 rating.

Meanwhile some restaurants that opened in 2024 already display several thousand reviews, and ratings approaching five stars.

When you see that happen on such competitive territory you start to ask questions.

How is that possible? It can’t be organic, can it? Is this an isolated occurrence? Across London - and I’d wager across every major city - a significant number of restaurants are accumulating reviews at rates that simply do not reflect reality. With organic review behaviour from genuine diners declining faster than ever, operators, and particularly the larger players, have decided to start gaming the system to gain competitive advantage over the huge swathes of central London footfall that use Google to decide where to dine. This has accelerated sharply in London over the last three years and I’ve noticed the same in other cities I’ve visited or researched.

This is not a grey area. It’s an industry.

This isn’t speculation or sour grapes from a competitor - it’s a documented, searchable, openly-advertised commercial operation.

Search online and you’ll find dozens of websites selling Google reviews like advertising placements, with packages tiered by volume. Delivery is scheduled to drip-feed reviews gradually (or after a negative review is left to counterbalance the star rating) to avoid detection. Reviewing accounts are in some cases aged in advance to appear legitimate and writing styles can be varied, but in almost all cases are just generic templates with no depth of genuine dining information.

I know this because I contacted one of these agencies myself.

Out of professional curiosity and genuine concern, I approached a company offering bespoke Google review packages targeting the hospitality sector. The exchange confirmed everything - reviews can be customised in tone, timing and content, and volume can be dialled up or down. The whole transaction seemed frictionless, professional and surprisingly open.

What makes this harder to unpick than it might appear is that many of these accounts are not automated. Behind them is often a real person - managing the profile, varying the language and spacing the activity across different reviews to build the appearance of a genuine reviewer. But click into an account that hasn’t been made private and the tells are usually there. Almost every review mentions a staff member by name - a pattern no genuine reviewer produces consistently. The geographic spread is often so random - a nail bar in Kuala Lumpur, a dentist in Toronto, a restaurant in Shoreditch - that no real person’s habits could explain it.

This is not buried on the dark web. It is not niche. It is, by any honest assessment, rife.

The Patterns Are Obvious - If You Bother to Look.

Once you know what to look for, the fingerprints are everywhere.

Dozens of five-star reviews posted within hours of each other. Some with just the star rating – no written review, others with vague praise with little or no mention of food - “amazing place, would highly recommend” “Sarah our server was a star” - copy-pasted across numerous accounts with little or no history and no other activity. Sudden rating jumps and reviews posted with stock images of dishes lifted from the restaurant’s own website or Google, dropped in to add a veneer of credibility. The same staff names repeated almost mechanically across hundreds of posts in a way no genuine customer pattern would produce.

Some restaurants appear to be generating thirty or more reviews a day, consistently, month after month. That’s not a dining room full of happy customers spontaneously taking to their phones. It’s a content operation.

You can check this yourself. Go to Google Maps and find a restaurant with a suspiciously high review count relative to its age, or even just look for a chain; any operator you know of with say four or five plus sites. Sort the reviews by newest and what you’ll often find after scrolling down looks nothing like genuine customer behaviour. The offenders tend to be multisite operators with the deepest pockets and the least to lose by flagrantly gaming the system.

Why Reviews Matter More Than People Realise.

Some people will shrug at this. Marketing is marketing. Restaurants have always promoted themselves. Manufactured perception shows up elsewhere in hospitality too — see The Busy Restaurant Illusion and The Art of the Manufactured Queue for two more examples of the gap between appearance and reality.

But reviews are not advertising. Advertising is a declared interest - everyone knows a brand is promoting itself. Reviews are meant to represent independent, genuine customer experiences which carry a different kind of authority, and Google knows this, which is why their algorithm amplifies them so heavily in local search.

Diners rely on them. Visitors to a city rely on them. Investors and landlords look at them as proxies for performance. A restaurant’s Google rating has become one of the most commercially significant data points a hospitality business can hold.

When that data is being systematically corrupted the damage is not abstract, and honest operators playing by the rules are being pushed down the rankings by competitors buying their way to the top. The algorithm rewards manipulation and penalises authenticity which is a direct commercial harm - not reputational inconvenience but an actual market distortion.

Platforms Only Move When Forced To.

Google and TripAdvisor have the data to see exactly what’s happening. Review velocity, account age, IP clustering, linguistic fingerprinting - the signals are there and the platforms have the technical capability to act.

They did not act - at least not until regulators made them.

The CMA opened its investigation into Google and Amazon over fake reviews back in June 2021. It took more than three years and the threat of new legislation before Google signed undertakings in January 2025 committing to sanction UK businesses that boost their ratings with fake reviews and add warning alerts to their profiles. Amazon followed in June 2025. The CMA’s own CEO put it plainly: “Left unchecked, fake reviews damage people’s trust and leave businesses who do the right thing at a disadvantage.” That’s precisely what has been happening, for years.

What finally moved the needle was not a crisis of conscience - it was the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which came into force in April 2025 and for the first time explicitly made commissioning fake reviews illegal in the UK, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover for platforms that fail to act. When the financial consequences of inaction became real, platforms started paying attention.

But here’s the uncomfortable follow-up question: if the patterns I’ve described are as visible as I believe them to be, what exactly have Google’s enhanced systems been doing these last 12 months? Because from where I’m standing, the activity hasn’t stopped - it’s just continued.

The Review Gating Problem.

There’s a subtler variant of manipulation worth naming - one that doesn’t involve agencies or fake accounts but is arguably more widespread because it’s baked into technology that looks entirely legitimate.

Some payment flow systems used at the point of checkout are configured to ask customers how their experience was. Positive responders get directed to Google to leave a public review. Negative responders get routed to an internal feedback form that never sees the light of day. The public rating climbs. The complaints disappear. The diner has no idea their feedback was filtered.

This practice - known as review gating - almost certainly falls under the DMCC Act’s prohibition on publishing review data in a misleading way, even if it hasn’t yet been explicitly tested in enforcement. The CMA’s guidance is clear that presenting ratings that give an inaccurate picture of genuine customer feedback is illegal. Selectively surfacing only the positive half of your customers’ experiences does exactly that.

It’s widespread, it’s largely invisible, and unlike the agency review market it requires no overseas operation, no fake accounts and no obvious paper trail. Just a configuration setting in a piece of software that most operators and diners would never think to question.

The Honest Operators Are Being Punished for Their Honesty.

There’s a painful irony that anyone in hospitality will recognise.

The restaurants least likely to fake their reviews are often the ones most focused on their craft. Independent operators, owner-led restaurants, kitchens where the founding-chef actually works the pass - these businesses tend to be so absorbed in the quality of what they do that gaming a review algorithm is simply not where their energy goes.

Their ratings grow slowly. They fluctuate with the honest variability of a real business - a bad service on a difficult night, a dish that doesn’t quite land, a complaint that gets a real response. That’s what a functioning review record looks like.

A 4.5 built over nine years of genuine customer feedback means something. A 4.9 assembled over eleven months from thousands of low provenance accounts all pumping out the same generic drivel means nothing - except that someone paid for it.

What Needs to Happen.

This is not a niche industry problem. It’s a digital trust crisis with real economic consequences.

Review platforms need to be held to a higher standard of moderation - proactive, not reactive. Regulators and consumer protection bodies need to treat fake review manipulation as the commercial deception it is, and the hospitality industry itself needs to have this conversation openly, rather than treating it as an uncomfortable open secret.

Some operators incentivise reviews with a freebie at the end of a meal or embed review prompts into QR code payment flows. That sits in a grey area. Contacting diners post-visit and offering them incentives is murkier still. Paying an overseas agency to manufacture reviews wholesale is straightforward consumer fraud.

These are not the same thing and the distinctions matter. But the direction of travel is clear: the incentive to game the system is growing, the tools to do it are readily available and the consequences of doing it are almost non-existent

That has to change.

Hospitality has always been built on trust. The relationship between a restaurant and its guests is fundamentally human - you open your doors, you cook and serve food & drink, and people decide whether to come back. Reviews were supposed to be the digital extension of that relationship - word of mouth at scale.

What they’ve now become, in too many cases, is something closer to a leaderboard you can pay to top.

The question is whether anyone with the power to fix it will actually do so.

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How to Spot Suspicious Restaurant Reviews

There’s no perfect way but patterns appear often enough that the trained eye can recognise them quickly.

1. Repeated mentions of the same staff member

Multiple reviews praising the same individual by name - often someone who may not even exist.

“Maria was amazing.” “Ask for Maria, she made our evening.” “Thank you Maria for your professionalism - 5 stars to you.”

When this appears across many reviews in a short period, it’s a strong signal that the reviews were generated rather than written by genuine diners.

2. Sudden spikes in review volume

Restaurants usually accumulate reviews gradually. Large bursts appearing within a short time window can indicate coordinated activity. If you want to dig deeper, click into the reviewer’s account and you’ll often find sporadic reviews left for various small businesses around the world, each one most often mentioning a specific team member by name.

3. Generic Language, Marketing Copy - or No Copy at All

Real diners tend to mention specific dishes, moments of service or something particular about the room. A five-star rating with no written review isn’t always suspicious on its own - plenty of genuine diners leave a quick star click as a token of appreciation. But when they appear in clusters alongside vague, template-style copy - ‘amazing food’, ‘great atmosphere’, ‘perfect dining experience’ - with no concrete detail and no review history behind the account, the pattern starts to tell a different story. Genuine customers write like people. Generated reviews often write like brochures.

Worth noting: the same agencies selling fake reviews often manage responses too. When a restaurant’s replies are unusually regimented across hundreds of reviews, that pattern can itself be a sign that something more systematic is going on behind the scenes.