With negative review extortion scams on the rise, use Google’s report form

 

Last month, Google launched a form to report negative review extortion scams and it seems to work.

Google Business Profiles has a form where you can report negative review extortion scams, the form launched a month ago. You can find access to the form in this help document and I believe you need to be logged into your Google account with access to the Business Profile you want to report.

Review extortion scams. This negative review extortion scams are on the rise and a huge concern for local SEOs and businesses. A scammer will message you, likely over WhatsApp or email, and tell you that they left a one-star negative review and the only way to remove it is to pay them.

Google wrote in its help document, “These scams may involve a sudden increase in 1-star and 2-star reviews on your Google Business Profile, followed by someone demanding money, goods, or services in exchange for removing the negative reviews.”

The form. The form can be accessed while logged into your Google account by clicking here. The form asks for your information, the affected Google Business Profile details, more details on the extortion review, and additional evidence.

Do not engage. Google posted four tips when you are confronted with these scams:

• Do not engage with or pay the malicious individuals. This can encourage further attempts and doesn’t guarantee the removal of reviews.
• Do not try to resolve it yourself by offering money or services.
• Gather all evidence immediately. The sooner you collect proof, the better.
• Report all relevant communication you receive in the form.

Give it a try. There are some who are doubtful that this form actually does anything. But one local SEO tried it out over the weekend and within a few days, the review in question was removed. So it is worth giving it a shot.

Why we care. Reviews on your local listing, especially on Google Maps and Google Search, can have a huge impact on your business. Negative reviews will encourage customers to look for other businesses, even if those reviews are fraudulent. So, being on top of your reviews and removing the fake and fraudulent reviews is an important task most businesses should do on an ongoing basis.

This form will help you manage some of those fake reviews.

Tim Berners-Lee warns AI may collapse the ad-funded web

 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee helped build the modern web. Now he’s worried AI could help destroy its business model.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, is worried that the ad-supported web will collapse due to AI. In a new interview with Nilay Patel on Decoder, Berners-Lee said:

• “I do worry about the infrastructure of the web when it comes to the stack of all the flow of data, which is produced by people who make their money from advertising. If nobody is actually following through the links, if people are not using search engines, they’re not actually using their websites, then we lose that flow of ad revenue. That whole model crumbles. I do worry about that.”

Why we care. There is a split in our industry, where one side thinks “it’s just SEO” and the other sees a near future where visibility in AI platforms has replaced rankings, clicks, and traffic. We know SEO still isn’t dead and people are still using search engines, but the writing is still on the wall (Google execs have said as much in private). Berners-Lee seems to envision the same future, warning that if people stop following links and visiting websites, the entire web model “crumbles,” leaving AI platforms with value while the ad-supported web and SEO fade.

On monopolies. In the same interview, Berners-Lee said a centralized provider or monopoly isn’t good for the web:

• “When you have a market and a network, then you end up with monopolies. That’s the way markets work.
• “There was a time before Google Chrome was totally dominant, when there was a reasonable market for different browsers. Now Chrome is dominant.
• “There was a time before Google Search came along, there were a number of search engines and so on, but now we have basically one search engine.
• “We have basically one social network. We have basically one marketplace, which is a real problem for people.”

On the semantic web. Berners-Lee worked on the Semantic Web for decades (a web that machines can read as easily as humans). As for where it’s heading next: data by AI, for AI (and also people, but especially AI):

• “The Semantic Web has succeeded to the extent that there’s the linked open data world of public databases of all kinds of things, about proteins, about geography, the OpenStreetMap, and so on. To a certain extent, the Semantic Web has succeeded in two ways: all of that, and because of Schema.org.
• “Schema.org is this project of Google. If you have a website and you want it to be recognized by the search engine, then you put metadata in Semantic Web data, you put machine-readable data on your website. And then the Google search engine will build a mental model of your band or your music, whatever it is you’re selling.
• “In those ways, with the link to the data group and product database, the Semantic Web has been a success. But then we never built the things that would extract semantic data from non-semantic data. Now AI will do that.
• “Now we’ve got another wave of the Semantic Web with AI. You have a possibility where AIs use the Semantic Web to communicate between one and two possibilities and they communicate with each other. There is a web of data that is generated by AIs and used by AIs and used by people, but also mainly used by AIs.”

On blocking AI crawlers. Discussion turned to Cloudflare and their attempt to block crawlers and its pay per crawl initiative. Berners-Lee was asked whether the web’s architecture could be redesigned so websites and database owners could bake a “not unless you pay me” rule into open standards, forcing AI crawlers and other clients across the ecosystem to honor payment requirements by default. His response:

• “You could write the protocols. One, in fact, is micropayments. We’ve had micropayments projects in W3C every now and again over the decades. There have been projects at MIT, for example, for micropayments and so on. So, suddenly there’s a “payment required” error code in HTTP. The idea that people would pay for information on the web; that’s always been there. But of course whether you’re an AI crawler or whether you are an individual person, it’s the way you want to pay for things that’s going to be very different.”

The interview. Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web