Restaurant reviews are an important part of the 21st-century Internet that help you know a restaurant is bad before eating there, saving you time and money you could spend elsewhere. However, the uptick in generative AI and bot accounts combined with unsavory business practices has caused a spike in fake reviews. The good news is that there are some telltale signs that can help you avoid them.
The payoff for each individual fake review is pretty low, so they’re generally very low effort. While dozens together can have a cumulative effect on a restaurant’s star rating, taking a look at a random sampling gives you all the information that you need. This is especially important when looking at public access sites like Yelp, where anyone can comment and post without verifying their attendance. If, however, someone leaves a review on social media with geo-tagged photos, you can safely assume that while their opinion may be up for debate, they did actually eat at the restaurant.
While evidence of dining at a restaurant should probably be taken at face value, the fastest way to spot a fake review is a lack of identifying details. When people have a strong enough opinion to leave a positive or negative review, they’ll naturally want to mention what caused that opinion. Even if the details seem a little irrelevant, a few business-specific points are a surefire sign that a review is legitimate.
Non-sequiturs are a sure sign that someone used AI
The amount of content generative AI and dedicated review farms can churn out is staggering. However, without careful editing and oversight, they tend to just spew out ideas in an unstructured way. If a review jumps all over the place, there’s a solid chance that the review is fake.
A review is a story, and when people tell a story, there’s usually a chronological flow to it. If you were to tell a friend about a restaurant experience, you wouldn’t start with dessert, move on to walking to your table, and then finish with the bread service. But since mass-posting bot accounts and poorly intentioned generative AI users aren’t known for attention to detail, jumping around like this in a review is quite common.
Mentioning a competitor too much shows bad intentions
When someone leaves a bad review, it’s not uncommon to mention a similar business that they think is better. This is especially common for pricier establishments, as even Michelin-star restaurants can have poor reviews, and a poster may just want to look out for the public and recommend somewhere else. However, if a bad review starts to seem like an advertisement for a competitor, that’s a sure sign that it was left in bad faith.
If you’re reading a review and are starting to feel suspicious, check out the poster’s account. If, for example, they leave a one-star review for an Italian restaurant and leave a five-star review for the competitor they repeatedly mentioned, chances are something fishy is going on. This is especially clear if the business they’re badmouthing is an established, local favorite and the one they’re praising just opened and may need some extra customers. While it’s perfectly normal to leave a good rating on a restaurant you loved so much that you mention it in the review of another business, it’s not normal at all to explicitly tell people to only dine elsewhere.
Mentioning too many employee names is suspiciously detailed
While a lack of detail is the easiest sign to spot that a review is fake, sometimes it can go in the other direction. A fake review won’t go so far as to mention the thread count of the tablecloth or the creator of some wall art, but if a business owner wants to generate fake buzz about their restaurant, naming a ton of their employees is easy and effective.
It’s very normal for people to praise their server when they’ve had a great experience at a restaurant, as that person facilitated a wonderful experience. However, when was the last time you dined out and remembered the names of the host, server, sommelier, busser, and food runner? And unless the restaurant is brand new or the reviewer got quite lucky, it’s extremely unlikely they got to meet the owner — who probably has a million other things to do if they want to run a successful restaurant.
Service is an incredibly vital part of a dining experience, second only to the food. So not only does lying about service experience not require a lot of photographic evidence the way raving about the food might, but it may also be quite appealing to someone thinking about dining there. Overall, there’s a lot of motivation to fib about this particular aspect, and it can be difficult to call out unless it’s gratuitously detailed.
If every review is paragraphs long, they’re probably fake
We all have that one friend who loves to fashion themselves as a food critic and leave long restaurant reviews — whether they’re good or bad. While the lack of quality control and insight makes tons of restaurateurs, including Andrew Zimmern, hate it, there’s something to be said about having access to a local’s opinion, even if you don’t have access to the local themselves.
Still, if it seems like every reviewer is a self-proclaimed food critic, it might be time to look elsewhere for an opinion. When you look through a legitimate list of restaurant reviews, half of them have no or very little text. This is especially common for positive reviews, where someone just wants to give the restaurant a little boost by tapping five stars on Google and moving on with their life.
But when every review is a diatribe about the texture of the chicken, the quality of the service, and the terroir of the wine list, you should feel comfortable calling foul. Unwitting bad actors think they’re being effective by going into great detail, but no restaurant is patronized exclusively by well-spoken, articulate diners who love prose. Sometimes, the most genuine review is a one sentence rave about the chocolate cake or thanking someone for their great service.
A long review that has no photos doesn’t quite add up
Good or bad, if someone feels incentivized enough to write paragraphs about their experience at a restaurant, odds are they also feel the need to include some supporting evidence. Nowadays, it’s way more difficult to write a page-long review than it is to snap a few quick photos, so if you see a long review with no photos, then the math may not add up.
When someone leaves a review more than a few sentences long, that means something either radically good or bad happened. While there are exceptions, like the server comping an entree you didn’t like or the live music being way too loud, most restaurant-related events are pretty provable with a bit of photo evidence. If you see a reviewer leaving a 500-page review about their burger being raw in the middle and the linens being dirty, but see no proof, there’s a good chance that they aren’t being truthful, and you should disregard their words.