It’s hard to listen to the online haters, and even more difficult when they have a direct impact on a business you’re running. But this is what hospitality businesses are being forced to do as diners turn to Google reviews to tell the world about their soggy salads or too-hot coffee, the rude waitstaff or the bee in their bonnet.

Eat at a restaurant today, and you’ll get an email or text tomorrow asking “how did we do”, complete with a link to review the experience on Google. Email addresses are collected upon booking and used to garner feedback, often on Google’s review platform that allows anyone to leave a star rating and a comment. These reviews in turn become a primary means by which we discover new businesses, or places to eat out.

Benilato, a nomadic gelato cart that moves around Byron Shire and is located at Newrybar on Wednesdays, slips Google Reviews into its day-to-day marketing strategy. Owner Beniamino Verdoliva is a smiling, positive energetic force standing behind his ice cream cart, doling out scoops on balmy days. It feels as “offline” as a business can get. But when customers rave after their first taste, ice cream on their lips, Verdoliva replies with a tip: they can write a review on Google.

“Word of mouth is the most powerful way of marketing. But these days people don’t talk so much as much as they used to. They get all their information from their phones. We need to communicate the modern way, to work with the system. A business used to say ‘tell your friends’ and now we say ‘tell Google’,” Verdoliva laughs.

Google reviews, like counterparts across Yelp!, Facebook and elsewhere, are not to be trusted blindly. The reliability of Google reviews is often called into question, and fake reviews do happen. In a 2022 scam targeting restaurants in New York and San Francisco, criminals left negative ratings on restaurants’ Google pages as a bargaining chip to extort digital gift cards. A year later, an Australian consumer watchdog examination of 137 online businesses found 37 percent were manipulating reviews to have fake positive reviews on websites, Facebook pages and third-party review platforms published or negative reviews scrubbed.

Because Google doesn’t verify reviews, there is no way to be sure whether the five – or one-star review you’re reading was written by someone who actually ate at the restaurant, or even entered the building.

Rose Howard, the head of content at Buffet, a hospitality-focussed digital agency, says that like anything on the internet, these are tools that can be used for bad and good. “There are people who are unfair, and I understand why chefs or restaurants get very upset … But Google is an aggregator. We might not trust one opinion but with enough reviews it should be relatively reliable. If there are fewer reviews it’s less weighty.”

Despite its obvious faults, Google Reviews are a powerful way to discover and learn more about a place you’re thinking about trying. Rebecca Neall, group marketing manager at hospitality group Etymon, which has venues including LouLou Bistro and Poetica Bar and Grill, says Google reviews are very important, “whether there is validity to them or not.”

“Social media is how [customers] discover us and then they might go to the website to look further, but they will often go to Google, which has its reviews front and centre,” she says.

There are two elements to a Google review, the first is the average review score, which is on a 1–5 scale. The second is the comment itself. The more reviews a business has on Google, the higher of an authority score it will be given in Google’s algorithm.

Google reviewers tend to be specifically analytical in their comments. They are less general in their swipes or praises, and tend to say why they like or dislike something. It’s the dislikes that make the most gripping reading, and that leave many businesses riled.

A positive review doesn’t come as naturally in the written context, says Verdoliva of the gelato cart business. “People have high expectations. So when it’s good they don’t write anything.”

Being a large hospo group, Etymon has a reservations department that addresses Google reviews no matter what the star is. Neall says any review from 1-3 stars means the business will “go in and investigate a booking”. “We check cameras, we talk to the server, and we reach out to the guest and hear them out, hear the personal experiences. This is word of mouth marketing.”

Verdoliva agrees it’s the negative reviews that are hard to ignore, and that will leave many potential customers put off forever: “If a mistake happens they write about it straight away… We get a lot of lovely people, but people will write something if there is something small wrong. Too much coffee in their affogato, for example.”

Bad reviews often appear damning when we’re scrolling for places to eat, but there’s an opportunity there for businesses to turn the situation around. Rose Howard at Buffet says the safe and more common way for businesses to approach bad comments or star ratings is to be apologetic and offer something free in the hope that the commenter will change their mind.

Scathing, reactive, bitter replies from businesses in response to petty or unfair reviews only make them look worse.

“It’s brazen to say ‘we don’t agree with this’ publicly. Whether you agree or not, our general advice is to say ‘we hear you’, and then offer something on the house privately, to get them back in again. Once you’ve lost that customer, the risk is that they will tell their family and friends. Take it to the DMs. You don’t want to go viral in the comments,” says Howard.

“When a bunch of people have left bad reviews that are thematically the same, it serves a restaurant to listen and look deeper – it’s a temperature check on what is really happening. It needs to be addressed,” she says.

There’s something about the cloaks-and-daggers nature of online comments, including but not exclusively Google Reviews, that turns a small matter into something more sinister, or outraged, or petty. Benilato’s gelato guru Verdoliva says he can’t understand why customers don’t say something when they are standing in front of him – perhaps the scoop is smaller than they expected or the cost higher. “I can easily explain or I can fix the problem right away,” he
says.

Instead they take to the comments, empowered by the forum provided to them by Google. He has to respond politely. The frustration of many business owners can at times be transparent.

Google has provided another place for people to put their opinions, whatever they are. Once upon a time such thoughts would have been shared with a real, not virtual, community. “A lot of people just throw their opinion out there. Because of social media they believe those opinions are worth putting online, when it could have been worked out in person,” says Neall.

Google reviews become a touchpoint for most of us discovering new places to go, especially when exploring a new city. “I like to troll the reviews, it’s interesting,” laughs Howard. We search and we click and we scroll, absorbed by strangers’ opinions and looking for what is ranking high, so that we may eat out well.

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