Google released spam and fraud prevention stats for Google Maps and local search. In short, Google blocked 21% more reviews, 5% more photos, 40% more videos, and 5% more fake business profiles in 2022 than they did in 2021.

Google removed or blocked 115 million reviews, 200 million user-contributed photos, 7 million user-contributed videos and prevented and removed 20 million Google Business Profiles in 2022.

I have covered this news for the past few years, covering the 2021, 2020 and 2019 data, so I figured I’d compare Google’s efforts here to previous years. I should note, some of the data isn’t aligned perfectly, such as how Google initially just counted removed Business Profiles and not blocked Business Profiles – so keep that in mind.

Here is the data each year:

Here it is in a chart:

Google also said it added some machine learning technology to detect and prevent more fake Business Profiles from being generated and the upload of fake phone numbers in user-contributed photos.

I wonder how this will all handle the new AI-generated review spam efforts.

Forum discussion at Twitter.