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Google agreed to strengthen how it detects and penalises fake reviews after an investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The CMA accepted the legally binding undertakings on January 24, 2025. They cover reviews and star ratings for UK businesses and services shown in Google Search and Google Maps—not every review worldwide or product reviews generally. Possible consequences include warnings on business profiles, a pause on receiving reviews, and, for repeat offenders, removal of all reviews for six months or longer.
What Google agreed to do
Google signed its undertaking on December 19, 2024; the CMA accepted and announced it on January 24, 2025. The commitments strengthen the processes Google uses to identify suspicious review activity and act against businesses and reviewers. Google must also report its progress to the CMA over three years. The undertaking sets commitments for enforcement; it does not prescribe a particular algorithm or guarantee that every fake review will be found. The CMA’s announcement and Google’s undertaking set out the terms.
Consequences for businesses
If Google finds that a business has used fake reviews to inflate its rating, the measures can include a prominent warning on its profile and temporarily turning off its ability to receive new reviews. For a business that repeatedly engages in fake-review activity, Google may remove all of its reviews for six months or longer. These are potential responses to findings of manipulation, not automatic penalties whenever a business receives a suspicious or disputed review.
Consequences for reviewers
People who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews for UK businesses may have their reviews removed and be banned from posting new ones. The commitment can apply regardless of where the reviewer is located, when the activity concerns UK businesses within the undertaking’s scope.
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Reporting suspicious reviews and incentives
Google committed to making it easier for consumers to report suspicious reviews and review incentives, including offers made online or in person. An incentive can be a payment, reward, discount or other benefit connected to a review. A review that is simply positive is not, for that reason alone, evidence of manipulation. Relevant distinctions include whether the reviewer actually used the business, whether a benefit was offered in exchange for a review, and whether the benefit depended on positive sentiment. Coordinated fake accounts or fabricated experiences raise different concerns from an authentic customer’s favourable opinion.
Which reviews are covered—and which are not
The undertaking concerns reviews and star ratings for UK businesses and services shown in Google Search and Google Maps. It is not a general agreement about every kind of content on Google, product reviews on retail pages, or reviews hosted by unrelated platforms. Nor does the UK undertaking mean that the same rules and sanctions apply everywhere.
The CMA said Google planned to extend its sanctions programme to additional non-UK businesses, including EU businesses, by the end of 2025. That was a planned expansion; the announcement does not establish that the full system now operates identically in every country. The CMA’s announcement describes the scope and planned extension.
Why the CMA intervened
The CMA opened a formal investigation into Google and Amazon in June 2021, after earlier work on whether platforms were doing enough to address fake reviews. Its concerns included how effectively Google detected and removed them, whether it recognised suspicious behaviour, whether it acted against both reviewers and businesses, and whether users could readily report suspected manipulation. The investigation focused on consumer protection and the reliability of review profiles, not a finding that Google had abused a dominant market position. The CMA’s online-reviews case page records the investigation history.
The CMA said that as much as £23 billion in UK consumer spending annually may be influenced by online reviews, and cited research finding that 89% of consumers use online reviews when researching a product or service. These are figures attributed to the CMA, not universal measures of every consumer’s behaviour or spending. The regulator’s concern is that misleading ratings can steer customers towards a business on false grounds and disadvantage businesses that compete without inflating their reviews. The CMA announcement gives the figures and its rationale.
What a profile warning does—and does not—tell you
A warning signals suspicious activity involving a business’s use of fake reviews. It does not, by itself, establish that every review on the profile is fabricated. A business can have both genuine and fake reviews, and a review may be removed for reasons such as spam, a conflict of interest or other policy violations rather than proven fraud.
Review patterns can help a consumer decide what to investigate, but none is conclusive on its own. A sudden burst of similar reviews, generic wording, implausible details, or accounts reviewing unrelated businesses in several locations may warrant caution. An enthusiastic or poorly written review is not automatically fake; a negative review is not automatically genuine. Coordinated negative reviews can also harm a business, so the issue is whether reviews reflect real experiences and comply with platform rules—not whether they are positive or negative.
The undertakings strengthen detection and enforcement; they do not promise perfect detection, immediate removal of every fraudulent review, or a flawless rating after removals. The CMA announcement does not provide a public false-positive rate, detailed moderation methodology or a complete dataset on appeals outcomes. Consumers should therefore treat the star average as one signal, not as proof of quality or misconduct.
What UK businesses should change
The safest approach is to collect feedback consistently from eligible customers, without paying for favourable sentiment or steering unhappy customers away from public reviews. Businesses remain responsible for the methods used by their staff and contractors; outsourcing review requests does not make a risky practice safe.
- Do not buy reviews, commission fake testimonials or ask employees, owners, relatives or agencies to pose as ordinary customers.
- Do not offer money, gifts, discounts or free products in exchange for a particular positive review. An incentive should not be assumed permissible simply because it does not explicitly demand five stars; UK law and Google’s platform rules are not necessarily identical.
- Do not use review gating: asking only customers who report being satisfied to post publicly while diverting dissatisfied customers elsewhere.
- Do not suppress genuine criticism or make resolving a complaint conditional on a customer removing or changing a negative review.
- Audit agencies and reputation-management contractors. Check how they select recipients, handle incentives, disclose commercial relationships and preserve records of review requests.
- Keep clear records of legitimate review-collection practices, and set a policy against fake reviews if your business publishes consumer reviews.
The CMA’s practical guidance explains obligations for businesses and review publishers: fake-review guidance, a short guide for businesses publishing reviews, guidance for online review sites, and guidance for businesses and agencies.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How UK consumer law changed
The Google undertaking sits alongside a change in UK consumer law. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 regime that came into force in April 2025, fake reviews and certain concealed incentivised reviews are banned practices. The CMA can determine certain consumer-law infringements directly rather than first bringing a court case. The CMA said the regime can allow fines of up to 10% of a firm’s global turnover. That is a statutory maximum, not a fine imposed on Google under this agreement, and it is not an automatic penalty for every breach. The CMA’s reviews and endorsements guidance collection explains the regime.
The law and platform rules should not be treated as interchangeable. A business should not assume that a review method permitted under one set of rules is acceptable under the other. For a particular campaign or incentive, consult the relevant CMA guidance and Google’s applicable policies rather than relying on the fact that an incentive did not expressly require a five-star rating.
What the agreement means for consumers and businesses
For consumers, the practical change is a stronger set of reporting and enforcement measures around Google business reviews, with potential consequences for both repeat reviewers and businesses manipulating ratings. If a review or incentive looks suspicious, use Google’s reporting function; when comparing businesses, look beyond a single score and consider the content and pattern of reviews.
For businesses, the agreement raises the consequences of manipulating reviews and makes review-collection practices a compliance issue, including when an outside agency runs them. It does not make a genuine negative review evidence of wrongdoing, nor does it guarantee that a business can have a disputed review removed.
Where the wider CMA work stands
The CMA’s Google case is listed as concluded through the undertakings, while its broader work on online reviews has continued, including guidance and further activity involving other platforms and businesses. The regulator’s online-reviews case page, online-consumer-reviews activity page and fake-review guidance provide the official record. Google’s commitments are a UK-specific enforcement step within that wider effort—not a declaration that online reviews are now reliably authentic.
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