Would you trust a cleaner who pays for fake reviews?

And how can you tell the difference?

I recently got a message from a swarmy-looking dude from an indeterminable geographical location offering me 5-star Google fake reviews for my cleaning business for $3 each. It took but a nanosecond to advise that this was unethical and wholly improper.

The review process is about establishing hard-fought and won customer trust through the arduous task of cleaning houses well and consistently. How dare a bot-boy come along and offer to trick customers into trusting a competitor with such questionable ethics?

And so I went and had a look and thought, how can you tell the difference?

All is now getting so compelling, and these bot farms can churn out innumerable 5-star Google Reviews with the press of a button. How very tempting. Spend the day cleaning a house to perfection, hoping to get a five-star review while risking a negative review or paying just three bucks to guarantee a 5-star review? You can have hundreds of them in a row without risking a single negative review. The real question is, why wouldn’t you?

My only answer is that it’s wrong, immoral and unethical.

And what about articles?

How could you know if, for example, these words you are reading now were not created by the massive electronic brain we know as ChatGPT?

At my insistence, our operations manager experimented with ChatGBT. And, within 2.3 seconds, we produced an extremely compelling article that we internally debated adopting and putting on our blog. I am so happy that within our organisation, the light won out with protestations about ethics and energy.

Though I have compelling advice from a great friend and one of SEO’s greatest thinkers that ChatGPT articles are currently being seriously considered to generate content in many leading agencies, we decided firmly against it.

And so, after much pondering within the substantive limitations of a human mind, I have gotten to a place where I believe I can discern a bot review from a real one. And interestingly, the answer for me is beyond the mind and into the body, with the key word being to feel.

Bot reviews feel a little iffy

The bot fake reviews seem great on the surface and are well-written and articulated. But after a while, they feel a little two-dimensional. Flat even. Mimicking emotions but directly describing reality. And they never have a typo! They often run in waves, one after another and tend to be short. Monotonous. They are then interspersed often with a negative review that is clearly human, brimming with emotion.

Interestingly, the bot fake reviews often have funny names and do not have a depth of review history. And they usually have less than three reviews a piece. Most often, all three reviews, when you dig deeply, will be 5-star reviews. And the picture accompanying the name will often feel off and regularly is not that of an actual, “average” human being. Indeed this is the great thing about what I discovered through this process. Whilst the human mind can never now catch up with the exponential growth of AI, the human heart is exceptional. The body can feel with a wisdom that I don’t believe will ever be matched by physical wiring, circuitry, algorithms and electricity.

Go mankind

Can a robot give you the warm hug of a child? Or can a cyborg listen to your heartfelt musings with empathy and warmth, allowing you to feel heard and thereby heal? Can a robot clean your house with love? And can a bot write a review that puts you on the right path to finding an ethical cleaning company? A cleaner whose 100th clean will be as high in quality as their second? Can a computer and an algorithm write an article with the same quirky and dysfunctional depth as a human experiencing life through the ups and downs of living within a biological body? Can an electronic being have a soul?

One thing is for sure, they sure are getting good at mimicry. Scaringly so. But I assure you a bot did not write this article.

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