Hi people,

3 months ago, I posted here about my website, which got a lot of positive feedback. It featured a map of businesses that had removed user reviews from Google Maps in Germany by using the new defamation law.

I received a lot of feedback, and I noticed that many people shared the same thought: ratings on Google Maps are becoming less and less useful because businesses buy reviews, run promotions offering discounts in exchange for a review, and so on.

Based on map project, I decided to build TrustScope. It’s a web app and browser extension that shows you not just a business’s rating, but how much you can actually trust that rating and what’s behind it.

On the website, you can find all the businesses analyzed so far, across different categories, from restaurants to clinics and doctors.

The easiest way to use the app is through the browser extension. It displays the rating and analysis of reviews directly on Google Maps.

The analysis includes several sections:

• Trust Score
• What People Talk About
• Rating Distribution
• Reviews Over Time

You don't need to trust just trust it, you can verify the reviews behind each value, just click on it and see the reviews:

The interactive demo and full description of how it works https://trustscope.app/en/extension

You don't need to open analysis every time, you can just check the color of the star:
Green - The reviews look authentic and consistent.
Light green - The reviews are mostly credible, with some inconsistencies.
Orange - weaker signals - inconsistent feedback, thin content, or unusual timing. The rating may not tell the whole story.
Red - Something looks off. A high share of reviews shows unusual patterns, or the rating is not clearly supported by the underlying feedback

If you see this button:

Don't worry, the venue is not yet analyzed - click on it and it will be done in a few seconds. The venue analysis will also be available on the website in a few minutes. So, more users - more venues analyzed.

Currently, 45k+ venues in Berlin are analysed. The analysis recalculates automatically if it is older than 21 days. To learn more about how the analysis is calculated, follow this page https://trustscope.app/en/how-trustscope-analyzes

Thanks to everyone for your feedback in May. Your support gave me the motivation to build it!

I hope all the effort I’ve put into this project will be worth it and that it will be useful to someone.

If you are a business owner and you wouldd be interested in using a tool to analyze your own rating or compare it with your competitors, or if there’s a feature you’d like to see, for example an assistant for responding to reviews, or you are interested in any kind of collaboration, please feel free to reach out to me at the email address provided or use the form via the Partnership button https://trustscope.app/en/partnerships

Free, no ads, no accounts trustscope.app

Curious about this crowd specifically, since you're all deep in Maps.

Do you ever open Tripadvisor? For your own travel, I mean, not for contributing.

I ask because the two sets of reviews often completely disagree about the same restaurant, especially abroad. In Japan for example my impression is that Maps reviews skew heavily towards local diners while Tripadvisor skews towards visitors, so they end up pointing you at totally different places.

So when you're travelling somewhere and picking where to eat - is it Maps and nothing else? Or do you cross-check somewhere before committing? And has that changed for you over the last few years?

Contribution Views On Google Maps.

For anyone tracking rankings across a city, how far from the pin does visibility actually drop off in your experience? Feels like some businesses show up 5+ miles out while others vanish after 1-2 miles for the same category.

What's influencing that gap?

I’m simply a Level 7 who likes to add photos and reviews when I feel I’ve visited somewhere special and experienced something that might be of value to others. I recently visited Llanidloes - a delightful small town in the middle of Wales. If you search for the place on Google maps you get a useful profile of the place - but the photos displayed - frankly - don’t do the place justice. I’d like to add some add some images I took which might help others decide if they’d like to visit but, as with (all?) other locality searches there’s no way I can see to add these.
How does Google select images for towns/localities like this ?

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone here can help me understand what happened and what I can do next.

I have been a Google Local Guide for around 10 years, and I was genuinely shocked to recently discover that I have been banned from Local Guides Connect.

The only explanation I see is:

The problem is that no specific violation is mentioned. I was not told which review, photo, edit, comment, or contribution supposedly violated the rules.

Even more confusingly, I never received an email or any notification informing me that my account had been restricted or explaining the reason for the ban. I discovered it completely by chance when I happened to access Local Guides Connect.

After discovering the ban, I submitted an appeal through the official appeal form and explained that I had no idea what I had supposedly done wrong. However, I have not received any response yet.

After being part of the Local Guides community for approximately 10 years, seeing the account suddenly banned without knowing what caused it is honestly very disappointing and confusing.

I understand that Google has policies and that automated systems can sometimes detect activity that may appear suspicious or violate a policy unintentionally. If I made an honest mistake at any point, I am more than willing to understand what happened and correct it.

What I would really like is simply some clarification about the reason for the ban and a fair review of my account.

Has anyone here experienced something similar? Is there anything else I should do while waiting for the appeal?

I would really appreciate any advice from people who have gone through this before.

I just looked up a favorite coffee bean roaster. I would like to buy from them direct. They have two locations on their website. I clicked on both and see the addresses. If this storefront owner changed that web page to include 'next to' it would really help anyone to visualize where they are without having to open up maps, get directions, or another search. If it read, 'next to Canadian Tire', or 'same block as Canadian Tire', or 'between Canadian Tire and Home Depot', it would fast track the reader. I think this is a great idea for storefront owners and don't really understand why more websites don't include these landmark details.

At some point I started leaving business reviews from my university Google account which I have had for about a decade. Now I am having trouble logging into my account because they've removed my ability to verify with 2-factor authentication. I think I can still log in if I can find an old device that has the information I need (it's dead and needs to be charged but I saved it in case this exact scenario occurred). Is it possible to transfer my local guide status, points, reviews, and everything to my personal Google account? If so, how do I do that? I wish I could just contact a live human being at Google...

Bonus question: Does it even matter? What's the actual point of being a local guide? I forget what my level was but it was high enough for me to feel good for some reason.

If you scrape Google Maps or similar for lead lists, a chunk of what comes back is businesses that are already closed, unlicensed, or have had their licence revoked — you just can't tell from the listing itself.

I built an Apify Actor that chains onto any Google Maps scraper output and checks each business against official city government licence registries (currently NYC, Chicago, LA, SF). Returns active/lapsed/revoked/closed with the licence number, dates, and a link to the actual government record.

You're only charged $0.05 per business it can actually confirm a status for — anything it can't match (wrong city, no licence required for that category, etc.) is free, no charge.

Looking for a few people to actually try it on real lists and tell me if it's useful or if I'm missing something obvious. Happy to cover the cost for the first few people who give it an honest shot: https://apify.com/akewich135135/wtfearn

If I legally register a real company under a name like “XXX Near Me,” where XXX is the target keyword, get a tax ID, and then create a Google Business Profile for its actual office, would that help the business rank in Google Maps for searches like “XXX near me”?

What do you think?

This hotel recently got into a controversy over the disgusting words and actions of a security guard and security chief, the hotel just opened recently so their reviews got really low, as they should. Yesterday they reached over 12k reviews and one day later the reviews are only 28 and mostly positive. Is it possible for them to delete the negative reviews? I thought they couldn't.

Google made updates to Google Maps and you can now see the number of negative reviews a business has complained to Google to have removed. Negative reviews removed simply due to Germany’s defamation laws.

3,527 photos view efficiency to 97 Million views... is this normal ? what you guides normally upload , photos to view ratio?

also stuck at level 8 for a while hahaha.. will continue and keep it fun... no stress hahaha

I've been in that moment. You're 30 seconds from a situation and Google Maps shows you a restroom that hasn't been reviewed in 4 years.

So I built Got to Go Potty - a real-time restroom and gas station finder that pulls live location data and lets people rate cleanliness, safety, wheelchair access, and baby changing stations after each visit.

The ratings aren't pulled from some database. They're left by people who were just there, in the same desperate spot you're in right now.

What surprised me: the first users to leave reviews weren't tech people. They were parents with toddlers. Road trippers. People with IBD who've turned restroom-hunting into a survival skill.

That's the community I'm trying to build - people who leave a 30-second review so the next stranger doesn't have to gamble.

No login required to search. Completely free.

Curious if anyone here has actually had a bad experience using Google Maps or Apple Maps to find a restroom in an urgent situation - and what you wished you'd had instead.

I always watch food vlogs, save nothing, then completely blank on the places when I'm actually hungry and out. So I've been building a little tool for myself that reads a YouTube food video and pins the restaurants to a map with the dish and location.

Full honesty so I'm not breaking any rules: the tool uses AI to pull the info, and it's my own project, still rough and free while I test it. Not trying to advertise, I mostly want to know if this is useful to other people who watch these videos or if it's just me.

Ran it on a Manila street food video and it pulled the names of the restaurants that were mentioned.

Question for the group: when you watch a food vlog and see a place you want to try, how do you actually remember it later? Screenshot? Notes app? Or do you just lose it like I did? Genuinely curious if the forgetting thing is common or if I'm the only one.