“It’s impossible”: dragged before a Burgundy court by a guesthouse victim of “fake” reviews from people who hadn’t actually tested its services, Google said on Monday “does not have the means” to verify the comments.
“Google does not verify (reviews, ed.). It’s impossible. Google has no reliable way to determine whether someone used the services” of the rated establishment, argued Sébastien Proust, a lawyer for the American giant, before the Chalon-sur-Saône court (Saône-et-Loire).
Negative reviews posted by internet users who had never stayed at the château
The world’s leading internet company was being sued civilly by a two-room guesthouse housed in the small Château de Balleure, in the hamlet of Etrigny, which has been fighting this battle for eight years. In 2018 and then in 2020, the château received two harsh ratings on Google Maps. “The impact was substantial”, recalls Raoul Salama, the owner. “A 10% drop in a rating translates to a 30% drop in revenue”, he says.
It filed lawsuits to compel Google to disclose the names, which the Dijon Court of Appeal ordered on June 21, 2022. When contacted, the fake customers admitted they had never used the château’s services. In fact, they were passing nearby and received a Google Maps push notification inviting them to rate the château, but not asking whether they had visited it. A cyclist or hiker passing near the château thus appears among the 17 contested reviews.
“Why not?” replied Google’s lawyer. “Contributors can just as well rate a monument encountered during a hike. It isn’t a fake review because these are real people who wanted to rate it”, he asserts.
Google invokes freedom of expression to justify its limits on moderation
Anyway, checking all the reviews would require Google to expend a “considerable energy” and “all poorly rated professionals would demand the removal of negative reviews. It would kill the reviews”, to the detriment of “freedom of expression”, argues Me Proust, who labels the phenomenon as “marginal”.
Asked by AFP, American Kay Dean, a former federal investigator turned expert in internet fraud, described the problem as “massive”.
“In 2025, Google itself said it had removed 292 million fake reviews. According to CQ Researcher (an American publication of reference analyses, ed.), up to 45% of internet comments are considered to come from people who have not tried a product or service”, she adds from the United States.
“These fake reviews are a scourge”, stressed the château de Balleure’s lawyer, Frédéric Hopgood. “We mislead the consumer. Beyond the château, it affects all businesses”, he added. “Google took 43 months for one, and 39 months for the other”, to remove the first two contentious reviews, in 2018 and 2020, he notes.
However, the French Law on Confidence in the Digital Economy (LCEN), which transposes a European directive, requires the illicit review to be removed “promptly”. And, since then, they have reappeared, along with about fifteen others.
Google has indeed put in place a procedure to verify reviews, but through artificial intelligence.
Yet the behemoth Google is “overwhelmed” by the phenomenon, according to the lawyer, who instead calls for a check by “a human moderator”, as TripAdvisor and Booking have done after abandoning AI for this kind of control.
More than laxity, it is a strategy Google has implemented, accuses Me Hopgood: “This is a deliberate intent: clicks on real or fake reviews drive Google’s economy”.
The ruling has been reserved for January 12.
