Speaker 1: 0:24

Would you say that shopping is in your DNA?

Speaker 2: 0:26

That's a yes, if you're listening, that means yes, yeah, I think it's in my ADHD DNA.

Speaker 1: 0:37

I think it's in your DNA. I think it's in all of our DNA. Yeah, I think what shopping is, or what it represents, is in our DNA.

Speaker 2: 0:44

As Americans.

Speaker 1: 0:46

As people. It's like a human hunting and gathering type of thing.

Speaker 2: 0:49

Oh, for sure, for sure, yes.

Speaker 1: 0:51

So we have a problem to talk about today. How do you, when you need something I'm not talking about like luxury buys like when you need a dress and you know the designer you want and you know what you want, then you know what you want. Yeah, but how do you choose what you want if you don't know the exact item? For example, let's say you need swim goggles, so you've been picking up swimming recently. Yes, and you need some goggles. How do you choose which?

Speaker 2: 1:18

goggles, to buy Best swimming goggles and I try and look for what I would think would be the least influenced. If it's swimminggogglescom, we have the best swimming goggles. I try and look at some consumer reports or reviews you look at.

Speaker 1: 1:47

Consumer reports is basically reviews. Right, it's from consumers and it's also the company itself consumer reports. They do reviews of products. Yes, that's my point yes you look at reviews. This article came across my desk or it didn't come.

Speaker 2: 2:01

I found a blog article okay, I was going to say, like, were you, did it, did it did it, did it say, like were you this just came across my desk.

Speaker 1: 2:09

Tick, tick, tick, tick, yeah Newsflash.

Speaker 2: 2:11

Exactly Muppet Newsflash.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Let's say it popped up on my radar. It was a blog article on White Spark. It was about reviews and it was about fake AI reviews. Ai generated reviews.

Speaker 2: 2:24

And if somebody is just listening for the first time right now, what's White Spark?

Speaker 1: 2:28

White Spark offers SEO services for local businesses. Okay, I will actually talk about them a little bit later. Oh, and that's why it came across my desk, that's why it popped up on my radar and I saw it that it has to do with SEO, specifically with reviews about Google, but I think this can be extrapolated to all reviews, anywhere there are reviews. I think what we're going to talk about would be, in effect, let's say, Okay.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Okay, so this article was summarizing a study done by a company having to do with reviews, having tried to identify fake reviews and estimate how many of them are out there and how do you spot them, and blah blah blah.

Speaker 2: 3:08

Couldn't you just say chat, gpt? Write a good review based on my website.

Speaker 1: 3:14

Sure, it gets to be more complex than that. I mean, there are traditionally, I think, a lot of us kind of know when we might be reading a fake review and traditionally those reviews are just written. That sort of work is outsourced overseas, so a lot of times they're non-native English speakers and that's why you can kind of be like this review seems funny. They have big companies overseas where it's just a factory to create fake reviews. Really, they create fake Google profiles, fake Google reviews, fake Facebook likes, instagram likes. That's where all that stuff is created.

Speaker 2: 3:51

Do we know where it is?

Speaker 1: 3:53

Somewhere overseas where labor is cheap.

Speaker 2: 3:55

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 3:56

So this article summarized some of the findings from this study. I'm going to cover some of them. I think some of them are really interesting. Some of them are kind of like yeah, no duh. Interesting. Some of them are kind of like yeah, no duh. And then a few tips for us as consumers how to spot fake AI reviews moving forward, because it's going to get trickier, it's going to get more difficult to spot them.

Speaker 2: 4:16

Do you think AI is going to learn how to look dumb Right? They're going to put ifs and they're going to misspeak.

Speaker 1: 4:22

They're going to have grammar mistakes, right, because that's one way to spot them. It's like a perfectly written review. Okay, so I'm going to kind of also summarize those findings here. Okay, so I'm going to kind of also summarize those findings here. Okay, give you a couple tips, like I said, tips for us as consumers and a tip for you as a local business owner. So first, this study reviewed 73 million reviews and it reviewed reviews of, specifically, google business profiles, so it didn't look at reviews like on, say, amazon.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Or Yelp, or Yelp. Okay, and it looked at three different industries health industry, legal industry and home service industry.

Speaker 2: 5:17

Okay, so home service like plumbing.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Yes, plumbers, we need a plumber, electrician, a contractor, whatever.

Speaker 2: 5:23

Okay.

Speaker 1: 5:24

Okay, so one of the biggest findings was that reviews are the single most influential factor on purchasing decisions. Not a big surprise, right? Right, 98% of people respond that they rely on reviews before making a buying decision. Again, not that surprising. I've even seen this 98% figure before.

Speaker 2: 5:46

Yeah, I don't doubt it, Because we trust other people.

Speaker 1: 5:49

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:50

I don't doubt it, because we trust other people and we, we, we just trust other people.

Speaker 1: 5:53

It's the closest thing to word of mouth marketing, like if you were, if you were to ask your best friend, uh, hey, have you ever tried X, y, z? And they said, oh, I like this one, you would go get that one. Like it's, it's the closest thing to that that you that can be replicated online.

Speaker 2: 6:11

Okay online. I used to be the person who people would often come to for those questions around the neighborhood, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I do not doubt it. So this article estimated that because of review fraud meaning fake good reviews it estimated $300 billion in annual consumer harm, so people buying stuff based on reviews because those reviews are good and those reviews were fake.

Speaker 2: 6:37

I don't know how it came up with that figure, but Well, do you remember when I bought that mouth guard cleaner off of.

Speaker 1: 6:43

Amazon. Yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 6:44

And then they sent me a form saying if I gave them a five star review and sent them a photo of proof, they'd give me money and technically that wasn't a fake review.

Speaker 1: 6:56

I've had that too, by the way. I had that with.

Speaker 2: 6:58

Isn't that technically a fake review?

Speaker 1: 6:59

That's not a fake review. We're talking about AI-generated reviews here, so that's not a fake review, but it shows how important those reviews are.

Speaker 2: 7:06

Yeah, yeah, the product that.

Speaker 1: 7:07

I bought based on the good reviews. The product was awful, yeah, and I got the same thing. Hey, leave us a review and you get a free one. I was like, okay, good idea, Okay. So $300 billion in annual consumer harm that averages out to almost $2,400 per household, what so? It's significant, right? It's significant, right. So, of all those 73 million reviews that were analyzed, 14% of them were categorized as extremely suspicious, ie, likely, false, likely, fake. So there were different categories. Some reviews appear fine, some are a little suspicious, some are like, obviously, well, that's really suspicious. 14% were in that category. It's like they're obvious.

Speaker 2: 7:52

Yeah, okay, right, written by cats, ai cats, uh-oh.

Speaker 1: 7:58

And I thought this perhaps was the most interesting and most alarming AI-generated reviews. Beginning in June 2023 to whenever this report ended, sometime in 2024, those AI-generated reviews grew at 80%, month over month. What? Every month, they grew 80%, 80, 8-0., 8-0. So they're almost doubling every month. So this is going to be a big problem. It's going to be an issue. I mean, we just won't be able to trust reviews as much. Unfortunately, in this article there were some things that you can look for, some things that were common among those fake, highly suspicious reviews, things that you and I can look for when we're buying stuff.

Speaker 2: 8:42

And just to clarify, this is different from sponsored reviews that, for example, on YouTube. They have to state we were Correct.

Speaker 1: 8:51

This is not like an influencer.

Speaker 2: 8:53

Right.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Although, to be honest, I think at some point you're watching influencers. The influencer is going to be fake.

Speaker 2: 8:59

Yeah, they're going to have videos.

Speaker 1: 9:00

Yeah, you don't need an actual person to sit there and talk to the camera. Anyway, I digress. Like we said, I think a lot of us kind of feel we can spot the fake reviews. We've had years of practice.

Speaker 2: 9:12

Yeah, Like, for example, I just believe everything I read, though that's my problem.

Speaker 1: 9:16

Yeah, I mean, for example, if a review has poor grammar, like we were saying, it's probably real. If a review is perfectly written, it could be a little suspicious. If a review has, like, professionally taken photos, I always thought those were just placed there by the actual company, it could be could be fake reviews. Okay, how do we're going to talk about? How do you spot fake reviews? Okay, so they probably ran this information through AI to analyze it. Some very specific things to look for. If you see the phrase I recently had the pleasure of working with, that evidently is a telltale sign of an AI generated review. So you read a review for, say, an attorney let's say you need an attorney for some reason and the and the review starts out. I recently had the pleasure of working with blah, blah, blah and blah blah. That phrase is trending in fake, fake reviews. So it's very common across the fake reviews Okay, Reviews that refer to the other reviews. So you've seen reviews that say I don't know what these other two-star reviews are talking about. Always, yeah, Okay, that's also. I'm not saying that can't be in a real review, it can be, but it's very common among what they thought were fake reviews.

Speaker 1: 10:34

Review length was a signal. Longer reviews tend to be fake, and this I would say you have to use your judgment here. I mean, sometimes reviews are long and they're very helpful. Sometimes they're long and maybe they don't need to be. Reviews with cliches in them, so kind of generic sayings like the first thing that struck me. These are examples from the article. Quote the first thing that struck me. The phrase game changer my favorite delivers on its promise. The phrase delivers on its promise, Wow. Quote without the fuss, so kind of generic.

Speaker 2: 11:12

Yeah Well, you know, when I have tried to use AI to help write certain things, I always so generic. It's really just cliche.

Speaker 1: 11:24

That is an issue with the prompt. The more specific you can be with a prompt, the more you can get around that, but I agree with a relatively simple prompt. Yeah, the response is going to be generic, sounding like that Okay, we're on number six now. The review repeats the prompt, and so in this case that would be the full product name or the full name of the business. So, for example, again, let's say you were looking at hiring an attorney, if you had actually gone out and worked with an attorney and you were going to write a review, right, and let's say your attorney's name was James Clearwater, Jane Clearwater.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Jane Clearwater. Uh-huh, so let's say yeah, so the name of her business might be Jane Clearwater.

Speaker 2: 12:07

Law.

Speaker 1: 12:08

Law exactly. Okay, if you were to leave a review for Jane Clearwater, you would probably refer to her as Jane, you and I. We would say working with Jane was great, right. An AI bot would say probably something like Jane Clearwater Law was great to work with. I enjoyed working with Jane Clearwater Law, right, that would be a giveaway.

Speaker 2: 12:29

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:30

Also highly structured writing. So something that includes like an introduction, maybe bullet points, includes a summary. That's also a red flag. So those are some things to look for as a consumer, as a business owner. What does this mean? So we've talked about the importance yeah, we've talked about the importance of like your Google business profile.

Speaker 1: 12:52

Yes, in 2023, I think it was Google said they had blocked or removed over 170 million policy-violating reviews. So not necessarily fake, but fake definitely fits into that category. So they also are making a pretty concerted effort to get rid of it. They know this is a problem. In the time span of I think it was one year they got rid of 170 million reviews. I will link to that quote. I also linked to this article. But what is specifically a problem for you and I as local business owners, we're not going out and we're not buying AI reviews, right, but something that is happening is there's something called review hijacking. Review hijacking and what this is is someone somehow takes over your Google business profile and they change, say, the phone number and the website address because you already have good reviews and they want to just use your reviews because reviews are so important, right, pirates? Yes, now, I actually had this happen to a client.

Speaker 2: 13:59

And.

Speaker 1: 13:59

I didn't realize this is what it was. But yeah, I had a client pretty successful business, pretty well-known, lots and lots of Google, like hundreds of Google reviews. Someone came to them selling some sort of service I don't know what it was, I wasn't involved and for that service they said oh well, we need access, we need to your Google business profile. Okay, that's sort of normal. Next thing we know we don't have access to the Google business profile anymore and we didn't catch this for months.

Speaker 2: 14:25

Oh right, why would you?

Speaker 1: 14:26

Why would you? Yeah, there's, there's, there's. No, it was only after the client said, hey, we've hardly been getting any calls, or calls are way down, and and we went out and we looked at Google and we did a search for their company name and then we said, oh shit, your phone number is wrong. So, and then it took months. It took months to get it, to get that profile back. Now we got it back, but it was a significant amount of time that we lost and he lost a significant amount of business Of course.

Speaker 2: 14:53

And then? But how then would the like, don't the consumers realize that it's a different name than what they were looking for?

Speaker 1: 15:00

Don't the consumers realize that it's a different name than what they were looking for. I don't think it might occur to them. But at that point, why would you suspect this Like this would never occur to me to be like wait a minute, did you guys steal this business profile? And you're not the company I intended to contact? Like it would, it, just wouldn't. You would overlook that. Yes, it would be. It should be a red flag, but it would it just wouldn't.

Speaker 2: 15:24

You would overlook that. Yes, it would be. It should be a red flag, but you would overlook it. Of course You'd be like, oh, I thought that was an okay anyways.

Speaker 1: 15:28

So one of my points is that your reviews, especially your reviews on your Google business profile, are so important they're important for all the things that we just talked about like 98%, so imagine 98% of your clients looked at your reviews. Okay, ding ding, that's important right there, the review hijacking Ding ding. That's also something to be aware of. Monitor your Google reviews and we've talked about this in another episode a service that White Spark offers.

Speaker 2: 15:58

Aha, now bringing it home.

Speaker 1: 16:00

And it's a dollar a month. Like I, highly recommend it. I will link to that too. I'll link to that episode.

Speaker 2: 16:06

For sure.

Speaker 1: 16:07

And that's why I found this article on WhiteSpark, by the way, of course. But your reviews are also important for SEO. Right, like, when is the last time you did a search for something and those top few results pop up in the maps section, the local? When's the last time, like one of those had a two-star average review? Like it's happened, but it's been years. So those reviews are good for SEO too. Google is not going to recommend a company with poor reviews to their users. They're just not going to. So also try to slowly build up your reviews. Put that into your workflow. You don't need to build a ton overnight, and you shouldn't, because that is a red flag to Google that they are fake.

Speaker 1: 16:50

But put it into your workflow. What I do is after someone. If I'm working with a client, at some point they are really happy about something. That's when I ask oh hey, can you leave a review? In my experience, that's the best time to ask, and on that note, if this podcast episode was helpful to you, why don't you go leave me a review on Google? I will link to that also. That would be awesome, lovely, as long as it's not AI. Yeah, don't have AI, do it for you.

Speaker 2: 17:20

I will link to that also. That would be awesome, as long as it's not AI.

Speaker 1: 17:22

Yeah, don't have AI do it for you.

Speaker 2: 17:25

I recently.

Speaker 1: 17:26

Yes, I recently had the pleasure of working with.

Speaker 2: 17:30

Meredith's husband I recently had the pleasure of. It was a game changer.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Jane Clearworth, jane Clearworth, jane Clearworth.