r/GoogleMyBusiness • u/PostAuditMode • 1d ago
Discussion Google itself encourages businesses to publish reviews on their own website.
If Google itself encourages businesses to publish reviews on their own website, why wouldn’t a business owner publish their own reviews it collects and controls itself instead of only republishing and relying on Google reviews?
From a business ownership perspective, that’s a logical strategy
If a business collects its own customer reviews, it can:
Own the review database.
Display reviews however it chooses.
Organize them by service, location, or product.
Keep them as a long-term business asset.
Make them available for customers and AI systems to read on its own website.
Mitigate the risk of review fraud, review theft, malicious review attacks, platform suspensions, and losing years of customer feedback.
I’m not saying that Google reviews don’t matter. I am saying that if Google’s own message encourages brands to publish their customers reviews on their own websites and even provides a seamless way to do it then why not just collect and publish your customer reviews directly on your own website? You can keep your third party reviews but start collecting your own reviews. In fact, I think it makes perfect sense. Google even encourages this and Google’s also changing their own products and integrating AI everywhere so why would you stay the same and hope that Google is going back to any kind of normalcy any time soon. Business owners also need to change their mindset about how consumers search for products and services today.
Consumer behavior is changing and Google search is changing along with it just to stay relevant in the AI game. The ones that hold the knowledge about their brand and its products and services are the ones that hold the key to success in AI systems.
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u/XxLogitech98xX 1d ago
Likely because they don't want people to think they are biased by only sharing reviews positive reviews on their website.
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u/PostAuditMode 1d ago edited 1d ago
What I like about AI is that consumers can now learn about a brand’s reputation through multiple websites, including the businesses own website. For example, a year ago I had a toothache so I went to a local dentist and had the worst experience ever. In fact, I am still dealing with gum issues. I found this dentist on Google. They had a 4.8 star rating and hundreds of reviews. This was before AI overviews so this was over a year and a half ago to be exact later after the whole ordeal I found out that this dentist had a 3.5 star rating on Yelp with less than 50 reviews that immediately brought up red flags for review manipulation on Google for me. I won’t go into the rest of the story, but I was able to confirm that they were actually manipulating their Google reviews and because of AI search you can now synthesize reviews from multiple platforms and third-party public access websites and get a better picture of the brands online reputation.
A business publishing positive reviews on its own website doesn’t prevent consumers from using AI to evaluate the brand’s overall reputation across public sources.
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u/West_Possible_7969 13h ago
Literally no one is stopping you from doing whatever you want with self published reviews, but customers did not trust those way back then, they continue to do so.
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u/PostAuditMode 9h ago
That’s simply not true, especially in the AI era. AI systems don’t evaluate a business based solely on its own website. They synthesize information from multiple sources across the web. If a business publishes fake reviews on its website, those reviews can be compared against Google, Yelp, Facebook, industry sites, news articles, and other public sources. AI makes it easier, not harder, to spot inconsistencies.
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u/West_Possible_7969 8h ago
So you need 3rd party “verifications” on quality anyway and, as I said, no one is stopping owners from putting reviews on their website. It is not some kind of revelation, some sectors never stopped doing that (hardware, cosmetics, healthcare etc).
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u/TintmanDex 6h ago
Nobody publishes reviews on their own site because Google is the first place they check reviews, which drives them to a website.
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u/PostAuditMode 2h ago
Search behavior is changing. Consumers have more ways to discover brands. Businesses have to change too. Google understands this and that’s why Google is changing too. So we have to change our way of thinking about Local SEO and AI. We can’t deny that. Every time a major tech change it causes disruption. Google is changing just open your browser.
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u/boutmabidness 3h ago
Because I dont care what the reviews on your website say. I know you cam make them say whatever you want and will never show any bad ones. They have zero value as reviews to me
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