20% of Yelp reviews are fake

20% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro&#x27;s where we were about 80% of the reviews.<p>When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can&#x27;t resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast.<p>When you combine that with organizations like Blackwaterops.com (my old company) that used to do 1000s of reviews a day. 20% is really low, and wrong.

Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 20% figure represents the percentage of filtered reviews on Yelp. These are reviews that Yelp finds suspicious enough to not publish. Some filtered reviews may be fake, and some might just be false positives. Similarly, Yelp&#x27;s filter might miss some fake reviews, and end up publishing them. (See <a href="http://www.yelp.com/faq#filter_wrong" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yelp.com&#x2F;faq#filter_wrong</a>). I hope this makes the distinction between fake and filtered clear.<p>Our main goal with this paper was to analyze the economic incentives behind review fraud, and for this we used filtered reviews as a proxy for fake reviews. bobf provides a good summary of our key findings so I won&#x27;t repeat them. For those interested, you can read more here: <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2293164" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2293164</a>

Argh, I am so sick of seeing this article. From the <i>study</i>, 16% of all Yelp posts are <i>identified by Yelp as fake</i>, <i>hidden from view</i>, and <i>not counted into a business&#x27;s average score</i>.<p>This tells us <i>nothing</i> about the percentage of non-removed Yelp reviews that are fake, because all non-removed reviews are assumed, in the data, to be real.<p>This is linkbait and a complete misrepresentation of the data.

I&#x27;m sure there will be a lot of discussion here about the accuracy of the 20% figure, but that actually doesn&#x27;t seem as important as the other findings from the research this article cites (&quot;Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud&quot;, <a href="http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.hbs.edu&#x2F;mluca&#x2F;FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf</a>).<p>The interesting points from the research include:<p>1) Low ratings increase incentives for positive review fraud, and high ratings decrease them.<p>2) Having more reviews reduces incentives for positive review fraud.<p>3) Chain restaurants leave fewer positive fake reviews.<p>4) Businesses who have &quot;claimed&quot; their Yelp page have more interest in Yelp and therefore are suspected as being more likely to commit review fraud.<p>5) Negative fake reviews are likely posted by competitors, and show little correlation to changes in average ratings over time.<p>6) An increase in competition encourages negative review fraud.

Whenever my dad and I are looking for a place to eat I pull up Yelp. He grumbles about the possibility of fake reviews, but I tell him that as long as you look at the sample size (n=25 or more is usually safe) then you shouldn&#x27;t have a problem. I&#x27;ve found amazing restaurants (and many other services) through Yelp that I wouldn&#x27;t have found otherwise.<p>Sure, there have been times where I&#x27;ve eaten at a highly-rated restaurant and thought to myself that there must have been some positive review fraud at work. At the end of the day I have tried something new, and I still have my whole life ahead of me to try other things. Nothing is forcing me to go back to said restaurant. And I generally leave a review questioning the merits of the establishment.<p>The positives of Yelp outweigh the negatives and the NYC regulation is a step in the right direction.

Does anyone really go by the star ratings on Yelp? I read the reviews but I don&#x27;t pay any attention to the overall ratings. One of my favorite places to go is a 2-star, and our local Outback is rated a 5.<p>Plus with the fact that there&#x27;s no standard, some people rate everything a 4 or 5 star while others reserve a 5 star for the best places in the area (or even the genre) to eat.

What I know is true: I&#x27;ve reviewed many places, yelp &#x27;filters&#x27; my reviews as fake even though they are legitimate. So 20% of the ones they don&#x27;t filter are fake, but several of the ones they do filter aren&#x27;t fake? Sounds like the site is just fake.

Yelp exists basically because it shows up in Google search results.<p>Google should be promoting sites that provide value to their users.<p>Considering the quality of Yelp, I really don&#x27;t think they should be showing up in the search results.<p>However, it would take a huge culture change at Google for Yelp to stop showing up in search results, IMO. Even if the quality of their reviews continues to degrade.

I run a small review site and have to deal with issues surrounding fake reviews all the time. Every now and then someone makes a rookie mistake and it gets picked up by my system and automatically filtered but as the years have gone on, I&#x27;ve found people are becoming better at gaming us.<p>I believe there is value in reviews, especially at a local level; I&#x27;ve found out about some really great local businesses based on the reviews but I&#x27;m so tired of people trying to game us. I&#x27;m tired of business owners who would rather argue with me for months on end and threaten legal action to have a totally legitimate negative review removed, or have their friends post glowing reviews, rather than just providing a good service and recognising they can&#x27;t please everyone.<p>I wish there was a sure fire way of determining a persons intention when they write a review but it&#x27;s impossible, so this problem will remain unsolved.

I was offered a hotel discount if I posted a (good) review for the place. Just another source of biased commentary.

Another problem I&#x27;ve seen with Yelp is reviews that aren&#x27;t actually for the intended place. My father-in-law owns a few restaurants. One of them has &gt;300 reviews (solid 4 stars), but shares part of its&#x27; name with another restaurant with &gt;1500 reviews (3.5 stars, with a heavy downward trend).<p>Most reviews posted for his restaurant are either 4 or 5 stars, with the majority of lower reviews referencing the other restaurant either by name, menu items, or decor. I&#x27;m not sure if the issue is one of UI design, mobile app, or poor search handling - although I heavily suspect search is the culprit.<p>Unfortunately there doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to address these mis-posted reviews, that I&#x27;ve seen. I would love to hear any suggestions that would help though.

Actually, that&#x27;s far far smaller than I expected. That means that 80% are legit?

I&#x27;ve found that Foursquare has a higher signal-to-noise than Yelp for restaurant reviews&#x2F;tips.

<i>&quot;There is one site where users share opinions with greater transparency than Yelp or Google: Facebook. The world’s biggest social-networking site prohibits the use of fake names.&quot;</i><p>Uh, I don&#x27;t really think Facebook&#x27;s real name policy has any effect here (it&#x27;s policy is actually a lot weaker than Google in practice afaik). I do think people share their real opinion on Facebook more often but I think that&#x27;s because of Facebook&#x27;s huge audience. People basically want to share their real opinions with their real friends (not necessarily their friends there under real name). And people don&#x27;t really have that many opinions about just plain products. And when people do, they mostly feel kind of sleazy sharing those opinions with the world for commercial purposes. Facebook is always trying to get people to integrate their socializing with advertising&#x2F;commercial-recommendations but it has been unsuccessful and would probably start to truly lose users if it really forced people&#x27;s hands.<p>The problem is most people care so little about the products they buy that they&#x27;d rather not write a review. That&#x27;s unlikely to change.

My father-in-law is a veterinarian, and he got a call one day from a Yelp advertising sales person, who made it clear that if he didn&#x27;t buy advertising from them, negative reviews would start showing up. So I just treat Yelp as legal extortion.

Unfortunately, not to use Yelp as a business is not an option according to <a href="https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biz.yelp.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;common_questions</a>:<p><i>I&#x27;m a business owner and don&#x27;t want my business to be listed on Yelp — can I have it removed from Yelp?</i><p><i>Consumers have the right to talk about what they like (and don&#x27;t like) about a meal they ate, a plumber they hired, or a car wash they visited. We don&#x27;t remove business listings, so your best bet is to engage with your fans and critics alike, and hear what they have to say.</i>

anyone who considers this news hasn&#x27;t hang around freelancing sites. You can pay $10 for 20 yelp reviews.

I recently posted 2 reviews on Yelp (I&#x27;m not very active on it; this was probably my 2nd and 3rd ever). I gave rave reviews for both. One is filtered, one is not. I see a 50% failure rate in filtering, from my extremely small sample size. Oh, and one of them was in NYC (the non-filtered one). The filtered one, well the chef knows who I am, since I said the same thing to him at dinner that I posted in the review.

It doesn&#x27;t matter. Over time, the value of all un-curated reviews approaches zero. One of the oldest review platforms, IMDB, being the prime example of this.<p>I don&#x27;t often agree with Nicholas Carr, but in this particular case, the wisdom of the crowds fails miserably, with or without astroturfing.

&gt; There is one site where users share opinions with greater &gt; transparency than Yelp or Google: Facebook. The world’s &gt; biggest social-networking site prohibits the use of fake &gt; names.<p>Facebook isn&#x27;t that transparent. You can&#x27;t scrape Facebook.

Anyone want to speculate on what percentage of Angie&#x27;s List reviews are fake? On one hand you have to pay to leave a review. On the other hand, Angie&#x27;s List gets paid if a business registers twenty fake accounts to post fake reviews.

Flagged - The headline is VERY misleading. Read the comments from the co-author. 20% of reviews are voluntarily filtered by Yelp. Though the issue is certainly real.

I predict that more than 20% of these comments will think more than 20% of reviews are fake.

Lol and what about Amazon?!

20% seems surprisingly low.

You do all realize this is major publicity for yelp, right? yelp!

Wow. Only 20%?

If you want to write a good fake review, make sure you trash the place on small things first.<p>small bar...lighting was too low...but great food and service<p>;-)