Review Defense
helps businesses protect their online reputation by identifying suspicious Google reviews and taking action against them.
Overview
Review Defense helps businesses protect their online reputation by identifying suspicious Google reviews and taking action against them. Using advanced AI and large-scale review pattern analysis, Review Defense evaluates the legitimacy of reviews on your Google Business Profile and provides clear insights you can act on.
What’s New
With recent updates, Review Defense now includes an improved onboarding experience, additional plan tiers and clearer plan selection, as well as structured competitor setup for higher-tier reports.
The new multi-location page for Review Defense allows you to view and compare the progress of all your businesses in one place, enabling deeper analysis of each location's performance.
How Review Defense Works
Review Defense analyzes your Google reviews against patterns learned from hundreds of thousands of known fraudulent and deceptive reviews. Each review is evaluated for legitimacy and flagged when it shows signs of being fake, spam, or AI-generated. Reviews are also checked for content that violates Google’s Terms of Service.
Results are presented in a location-level report in your GatherUp account, helping you understand:
- How many of your reviews may be suspicious
- The potential impact of suspicious reviews on your ratings and overall reputation
- Which reviews should be disputed or monitored
Higher-tier plans extend this analysis to competitors and automate parts of the dispute process. The system can automatically report your location’s disputable negative reviews that are unfairly lowering your star rating. It can also automatically report your competitor’s unfairly inflated positive reviews.
Why use this feature?
Easily spot risky reviews: Identify reviews that may be fake, AI-written, or violate Google’s TOS, allowing you to take prompt action to protect your reputation.
Defend your reputation: Automatically report your suspicious negative reviews to Google, safeguarding your hard-earned feedback from potential penalties imposed by Google or the FTC.
Challenge competitors: Level the playing field by identifying competitors who may be using fake positive reviews to gain an unfair advantage. The Integrity Plan will automatically report competitors' suspicious positive reviews to Google for removal.
Understand review impressions: Gain insights into how often your positive/negative and legit/suspicious reviews are viewed by profile visitors, helping you understand their impact on customer perception.
Win back customers from the competition: Removing false positive reviews from your competitors can reduce their average star rating, hindering their prominence in search results and driving customers to your more positive (and more authentic) online reputation.
Reputation Audit
For locations without an active Review Defense plan, GatherUp offers a Reputation Audit.
The Reputation Audit provides a high-level snapshot of your review risk, including:
- Total Google reviews
- Number of potentially disputable reviews
- Estimated impact on your rating if suspicious reviews were removed
This audit is designed to help you understand the value of Review Defense before choosing a plan. From the audit results, eligible users can continue directly to plan selection.
Review Defense Plans
Review Defense offers three plans, designed to scale with your needs.
* The report will alert you to positive reviews on your profile that are suspicious and could be flagged by the FTC or Google. The best practice is to have these reviews removed to protect your listing. However, the report will not automatically report suspicious positive reviews for removal. This gives you the opportunity to address the issue directly with a customer, protecting your average rating and review volume.
** The report will automatically report suspicious positive reviews on competitor profiles.
Choosing, Upgrading, or Managing a Plan
Admins and Owners can manage Review Defense plans through a dedicated tier selection page, accessible from:
- The Reputation Audit (“Defend My Reputation”)
- Add-ons & Integrations
- Existing Review Defense reports (for upgrades)
From this page, you can:
- Start a plan
- Upgrade or downgrade between plans
- Cancel an existing plan
All plan changes include a confirmation step to review pricing, terms, subscription duration, and what will change before finalizing.
What Happens After Setup
- The system begins deep analysis to generate your report, which may take up to 24 hours
- Once generated, Review Defense reports are updated daily with the latest review data
- Suspicious reviews may be re-evaluated and re-reported over time (depending on the plan)
- Google ultimately determines whether a challenged review is removed
Competitor Setup (Illuminate & Integrity Plans)
Competitor analysis is available on the Illuminate and Integrity plans.
Initial Competitor Selection
When you first start or upgrade to one of these plans, you’ll be prompted to select competitors to include in your report. Suggested competitors may be provided to help you get started.
- Illuminate plans support up to 6 competitors
- Integrity plans support up to 15 competitors
- At least one competitor is required to generate a competitor report
Adding More Competitors Later
If you haven’t reached your plan’s limit, you can add more competitors from your Review Defense report at any time. When additional competitors are added, your report is updated to include them.
Changing Competitors
Once added, competitors cannot be removed or changed from your report until your subscription approaches renewal, about one year from signup.
Multi-Location View
You can now view all your locations in a single-page overview. Use this page to compare progress between locations and see the distribution of your reputation risk across your brand. You can also select a location to navigate to its individual report and see performance in more detail.
To get to this view, select Review Defense in the side navigation from the business dashboard.
Things to Know
- Only Admins and Owners can manage plans or competitors
- Review removal is not guaranteed and depends on Google’s policies
- Plans include a minimum commitment period of one year; details are shown during signup and confirmation.
- Competitors can only be changed or removed during your renewal period. Contact support for assistance.
Ready to Get Started?
Navigate to a location in your GatherUp account and open Review Defense from the side menu.
If you don’t yet have a plan, start with the Reputation Audit to see how Review Defense can help protect your business.
Have questions? Shoot us a message at info@gatherup.com