Ep 190: Part 2, Interview with Brad Wetherall, ex-Director of GBP Support on Navigating Google Reviews

Brad Wetherall shares insights on the Google review algo, fake reviews, the role of AI in review management, and the need for businesses to understand Google's policies regarding reviews to navigate the complexities of online reviews. Be sure to catch Part 1 of this great interview where we discuss GBP support issues, the vagaries of verification and suspensions and how Google leverages Trust Scores to automate moderation.

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Video Chapters

00:00 Final Thoughts on Reviews and Trust Scores
06:45 Understanding Review Deletion and Algorithm Scrutiny
08:54 The Role of Review Responses in Business Rankings
11:44 Engagement and Its Impact on Reviews
14:32 AI's Influence on Review Management
17:07 Challenges for New Businesses in Review Acquisition
20:15 Best Practices for Managing Reviews
23:51 Google's Support Culture and Business Impact
26:28 The Future of AI and Local Business Visibility

Transcript

Greg (00:14)
We can do a part two of this, So let's talk about reviews. obviously this is something that is very close to both Mike and my heart. I've been involved in a couple of different fake review studies and the first one I

I did with the Transparency Company when I was at Uberall in 2020. they have a methodology, which is, I can't fully explain, but it has multiple factors. And we discovered a lot of review fraud. We looked at TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google, and Yelp. And Google had the, had the highest fraud. The aggregate score was 11 % of reviews that we looked at across 19 categories or,

roughly 20 business categories and 19 DMAs. That was the sort of aggregate number. But in some of these categories, the number was much higher. It was over 20 % in moving and several of the others, I don't have it in front of me. We just did a kind of a quasi follow-up study in a more limited number of categories with a focus on economic harm, trying to generate what is the actual economic harm of fake reviews?

in terms of consumer behavior. this is not about that report. But I'm just saying there have been a number of independent studies that have found quite significant numbers of fake reviews on Google. Now, what's sort of your general statement about that and how Google sees that internally and how it handles review fraud?

Brad Wetherall (01:48)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like fake reviews is something that is again, it's a constant investment, constant battle to try and eliminate the detection or as soon as we detect that it's a fake review, the idea is to try and pull it down immediately.

Greg (02:01)
How

does Google detect review fraud? What's the algorithm?

Brad Wetherall (02:05)
It's very complicated. So There's a lot of signals that go into that. So there is the age of the account that was created. If it was an account that was created yesterday and how much activity has that account had? So like, you know, if it was created yesterday and the first thing that they did was leave one negative review or 5 negative reviews and then one positive review on a competitor all within the same geographic location, then that's

easy to determine that it's fake, right? Because the age of the profile, like if it's a plumber, for example, like would you actually hire 5 different plumbers in the span of a week? The probability of that happening is really low. So there's some obvious things. The complication though is that the companies that are out there that sell these fake reviews are privy to this. They know that that stuff will get taken down really quickly. And so

there's review farms that exist where people will like create a Google account and then they use it a little bit every day over the course of a month. And so when they get an order in for fake reviews, they, they're trying to trick Google's algorithm into believing that it's a real person that it like they've had activity and they've navigated the internet and they've done all these crazy things. So from a profile perspective, we can look at that account and say, all right, this looks like a legitimate human.

And then the next thing is like, what is their activity? So like how many reviews have they left? Do they happen to all be in the same industry? What's the geographic location of, you know, where the person was when they left the review and where is the business, that they're leaving the review for? So for example, if you're like, I'm leaving a review for a plumber in New York, but I live in Bangladesh, right? Like what, what, is the probability that that actually now, now even that in and of itself,

Greg (03:49)
Zero.

Brad Wetherall (03:51)
Well, no, it's not necessarily because the hypothesis was also they could have visited New York and then went back to Bangladesh and left.

Greg (03:57)
And in their

hotel, they needed a plumber. So they called that plumber in the hotel and then went back to Bangladesh and wrote the review.

Brad Wetherall (04:04)
So that's the part that like it's the combination of data, right? So like if you're reviewing a restaurant and then you go back to Bangladesh, like it's not unfeasible to believe that they visited, right? Exactly. So, but all of that is kind of factored in. like it's very complicated. And again, they do that, the fine tuning of it to try and determine, you may remember like a bunch of businesses losing legitimate reviews, right? Like, and then

Greg (04:08)
Sure.

Yes, certainly tourism travel, certainly.

Brad Wetherall (04:32)
and then filing tickets with support to be like, hey, I used to have 100 5 star reviews and they all disappeared, I need to get them all back, right? So it's that balance between false positives and fraudulent activity that is constantly that.

Mike Blumenthal (04:45)
And we saw

that occur, the FTC came out with their new regulations and new guidelines. Google wrote a blog post, I think it February, 2022, and all of a sudden review reports of takedowns spiked. So we saw a similar sort of twisting of the dials as it were, happening. And,

Brad Wetherall (05:07)
And I mean, like, there's some easy cases, right? Like if it's violating policy, with like if it's using profanity, if there's personal information, like a lot of those easy stuff gets taken down already, but.

Greg (05:19)
And those things are all identified algorithmically with AI, is that right?

Brad Wetherall (05:23)
That's right.

That's right. Usually a lot of those don't ever get posted. Like we catch them.

Mike Blumenthal (05:27)
Although

the ones that do get posted that have masked the, or that are sort of marginally racist or disableist or whatever, those are very hard to get down because the language is a subtler and you have to have a human look at them. And it often, again, will take me escalation, re-escalation, re-escalation with highlights of the words and why it is.

Brad Wetherall (05:35)
Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (05:55)
prejudicial, that sort of thing.

Brad Wetherall (05:57)
That's

a resourcing problem, right?

Mike Blumenthal (06:00)
And then

though, I find that if I reported about doctors, they're very hesitant to take down a doctor review no matter how bad it gets. No matter what they accuse a doctor. I've had a doctor accused of stealing pain drugs from a patient, illegal activity, an accusation of illegal activity, the doctor could have lost his license. It took me three months to get that review taken down and I just, and only through persistent hammering was I able to.

And it turns out it appears that they won't take doctor reviews down without really a lot of conversation or something.

Brad Wetherall (06:37)
Yeah, yeah, and I think, you know, that's a shame, you know, like I think that, that doesn't sound like the case of a fake review though, that sounds like the case of a negative review.

Mike Blumenthal (06:45)
No, a TOS

Greg (06:46)
That's,

Mike Blumenthal (06:47)
violation, clear TOS violation.

Greg (06:49)
yeah. So just in terms of the algorithm, GMB, G, G, G, B, A, P, G, B, P, A, P, I dot com. We know those guys. Sorry. I tripped over their names. Recently put out a report in which they tried to understand a kind of a rationale for deleted reviews and they correlated certain variables that they found.

Brad Wetherall (06:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (06:58)
GBP.

Greg (07:11)
with deleted reviews, one of which was 5-star reviews. That was 70 plus percent of the reviews that they saw in this data set that had been removed had 5 stars. And then the second category, the second most often reviewed, removed reviews were one-star reviews. Does Google pay special attention to those extremes as part of the algorithm? If you can, if you know the answer to that.

Brad Wetherall (07:37)
Hi.

Greg (07:37)
So in other words, our 5 star

reviews automatically going to get scrutiny.

Mike Blumenthal (07:41)
I would point out that the reviews by nature skew that way. There are more 5-star reviews and more one-star reviews and there are two, three and four-star reviews. So just by the nature of the system, by volume they are more prevalent.

Brad Wetherall (07:51)
Yeah.

Greg (07:54)
You're saved by volume, yeah.

But I'm interested to know if that's a trigger, if those things are triggers as one of the many factors.

Brad Wetherall (08:04)
So I didn't work in the Trust and Safety Organization to know definitively a yes or no answer to that question. My speculation is that it does not. I think that for Mike's perspective, I mean, think that if you think of the culture of reviews, a lot of people will only ever leave a review if their experience was really good or really bad, right? Statistically speaking, right? It's very rare that you'll get people leaving reviews just because they love leaving reviews and they are

Greg (08:10)
What's your speculation?

Right in the middle.

Brad Wetherall (08:30)
right, middle of the road. So, so I do think statistically the reviews steer towards the extremes, the poles. Funny, you mentioned GMB API. I've been working with those guys a lot. I do know that like I use their product.

Greg (08:42)
GBP. You

said it too. Well, so why were you correcting me? No, no, no.

Mike Blumenthal (08:44)
No, no, is GMB API. It's the old initials in their name. I thought you were going to talk about GBP and not GMB.

You were stumbling over GMB and then I, my mistake.

Greg (08:54)
No, it was GMB

API. Okay, anyway, Brad, back to you.

Brad Wetherall (08:57)
Yeah,

Gmbapi.com as a company, right? Like is that they have this really great software service. I use it myself to kind of manage it. And one of the benefits there is that they actually save a lot of the reviews that are coming in from, from profiles. So if they do get lost, that really helps in the recovery because they have a history of what, what review was made, when it was made. And it's a lot easier in the recovery.

So yeah, gmbapi.com. It's a really, I'm sure they won't mind me saying this. It's cheap, relatively speaking, right? So like it's affordable. That's a better word.

Greg (09:32)
Affordable. Euphemism is affordable.

Mike Blumenthal (09:35)
So

just to comply with our FTC requirements, are you remunerated by them in some capacity?

Brad Wetherall (09:41)
So I am not an employee of the company. I have been advising them but you know just I've used their products personally and I've been advising them as a company, but I am not

Mike Blumenthal (09:52)
but you are being remunerated for that advice. That's the necessary FTC disclosure.

Brad Wetherall (09:57)
yes, not currently, but yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (09:59)
Okay, great. Just a note

on whether one star reviews or two star reviews are being used to identify spam. So I don't know whether it was two years ago, roughly, there was a large number of fake one star review attacks. Google got that under control and the spammers moved to two star review attacks and ultimately Google fixed the algorithm to deal with that. But initially, Greg, they did focus more on one star fake reviews and

The spammers figured that out and Google changed the algorithm to speak to that specifically.

Greg (10:32)
Another quick question, review responses by the business. So the business receives a review in most cases, probably in the majority of cases, businesses don't respond to the reviews. Depends on what segment of the population we're talking about. Does that have any bearing the business response, business owner or representative response to whether review is flagged for removal or whether it actually gets removed? Is that a factor?

at all in the algorithm.

Brad Wetherall (10:58)
I don't, again, I'm not, I didn't write the algorithm, but my educated experience is that no, doesn't. The replying to reviews has a lot of other benefits. Improving your ability for it to get it removed is, don't think one of them. The benefits are really, you can get increased rank. In fact, the GMBA-

Greg (11:17)
OK, so

wait, so that's really interesting. So replying to reviews does improve your rankings on Google.

Brad Wetherall (11:23)
Yes, so like the gmbapi.com, they did a study on this and they showed that for every 10 % of reviews that you reply to will correlate to a 3 % increase in impressions. So like if you are not replying to reviews, start doing that immediately. That's a really quick and easy way to.

Mike Blumenthal (11:44)
But

it's unlikely that this is causal, Greg. It's likely users engaging with the reviews more because there is, right.

Greg (11:51)
Well,

it's of indirectly causal if that's not a contradiction.

Brad Wetherall (11:57)
Right.

Mike Blumenthal (11:57)
Right,

and it probably revolves around engagement as opposed to the specifics of response.

Brad Wetherall (12:01)
Yes, it does.

Greg (12:02)
Well, right. we know

that Google rewards engagement both on the consumer side and now on the small business side or the B2B side.

Brad Wetherall (12:09)
Absolutely.

Mike Blumenthal (12:10)
Just a note on the GMB

API study, they have never looked at what the normal response rate is of regular reviews, how many get responded to. So taking those out of context and saying of the ones that remove this percentage had responses is not a particularly easy number to understand because there was no context to it, right?

Brad Wetherall (12:30)
Right, right.

I agree. I think that the lesson I think for people watching would be does replying to reviews have any inherent benefit? And I think the answer is absolutely it does. Right. I think that, you know, yes, in the form of engagement, you want to be able to make sure that you're controlling your narrative, especially as AI gets more prominent. AI is already

Greg (12:52)
Well, for

your customers, for your customers. mean, the ultimate objective here, I mean, we talk in terms of local SEO and SEO and people are thinking about what can I do to boost my rankings and so on and so forth. But really ultimately it's the customer that you're dealing with and the customer negative reviews, critical reviews expect a response from the business. People who leave critical reviews want a response. People who do read reviews, we've determined in our own Near media research that the minority of

Brad Wetherall (13:12)
Yes.

Greg (13:21)
consumers read reviews, actually read review text. It's something like 20 to something north of 30 something percent,

Mike Blumenthal (13:30)
in europe is like fifty percent in europe and

twenty 5 percent in the united states twenty two percent rexley read reviews

Greg (13:35)
Yes, and it

varies by category, but the majority just look at star ratings and they look at review counts. But for people who read reviews, they do want to see business owner responses.

Brad Wetherall (13:42)
Yes.

Absolutely. In fact, I'm working with another company as well, you know, called called merchant, they have a GBP management software called page. And that company is an AI based company, they do automation, and they automate review replies. So like, if you're looking for and the reason they do that is because they know that engagement, like they automate posts.

Greg (14:10)
A

lot of folks are doing that now. A lot of the reputation management tools will do that.

Brad Wetherall (14:12)
Yeah,

exactly. And I think that the reason why I think a lot of these companies, you know, like Merchant are kind of like investing in this is because there is ROI there, right? And that like you people, you can set up the system to automatically reply and even tune it to your language, right? So that that way, you know, you're staying on top of

Greg (14:33)
Is Google in any way going to punish that behavior or filter that behavior where there's an AI response? So there's a growing trend. I don't want to digress too far down this path, but there's a growing trend toward AI review generation and AI review responses in particular. What's Google's attitude toward those?

Brad Wetherall (14:46)
Yep.

Yeah, it's a great question, actually. So I think that it's similar to that of AI-generated content for regular organic SEO, which is Google is now, and you may have even seen this in some of the algorithm updates last year, that they don't say that they are penalizing AI content, but they do say they are rewarding unique content. That's the way that they brand it.

ways Google does know when, at least to a level of percentage or level of precision, they know when content is generated by AI versus when it's written by a human, right? And there's, a lot of tools out there you can use to kind of detect that Google is using that and they are identifying unique content and reward. They say rewarding unique content. So my guess, like there are ways to use AI. There's a way to abuse it. And then there's a way to use it to your advantage. And I think

Abusing it would be just copy and pasting AI content directly in the way to use it more effectively is to train it according to your voice, right? And to use training so that you can be like, look at my website, look at who I am and how I represent myself, write this review from the perspective of that persona, right? There are ways for you to use AI to actually benefit. My speculation as we go further and further into 2025,

is that if you do cookie cutter content, it's not going to be valuable at all because Google's going to see that as regurgitated content. It's not unique. I wouldn't necessarily say that they will penalize it, but they're definitely not going to reward it. They're not going to reward it.

Greg (16:17)
They weren't rewarded.

Mike Blumenthal (16:20)
I have another question about letting reviews through or filtering them. The first question in this regard is whether certain categories are going to more likely to be filtered because they're high distress categories.

Brad Wetherall (16:33)
Absolutely. In fact, that happens today already. We know that certain duress verticals, plumbers, locksmiths, garage door repair, a lot of these companies, like moving companies, know, they are more prone to fraud.

Greg (16:47)
companies we found more

spam and yep.

Brad Wetherall (16:51)
Yep. So, so the algorithm is tuned to be more, more aggressive. Thank you. with, those types of industries versus a restaurant or something.

Greg (16:56)
aggressive.

Which,

can you rattle off what those categories are?

Brad Wetherall (17:06)
I mean, those were the big ones that I can remember.

Mike Blumenthal (17:07)
garage

door openers, moving companies, locksmiths are the three biggest. And then it drops into HVAC and electricians and roofers and almost every other home service business. But they're not as bad as those top three. The next question I have though, is there also a limit in terms of age of business? In other words, this is a new business. I know you said this initially, but it strikes me that how long is there, it's not a penalty, but it's like there seems to be a regulator on

how many reviews a business less than a year old can get, even if they're totally legitimate. Is that perception accurate?

Brad Wetherall (17:39)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yes. Well, so let me, let me put it this way. Um, if you've had no reviews on your business for 10 years, and then all of a sudden you get a hundred reviews in a week, that looks weird. Right. Um, now, now I also know that you could theoretically have been going back to your client base for the last 10 years and asking them to write reviews retroactively, but like, it definitely is a signal that the trust algorithm is going to look at to determine whether

Mike Blumenthal (18:07)
volume

in relation to the size of the business? Or how does Google determine, is it just pure velocity? But if it's a huge business, like Hilton and Times Square, velocity is totally different than a plumber in Buffalo.

Greg (18:11)
Velocity also.

Brad Wetherall (18:22)
It's all of the above, Mike, unfortunately, right? mean, like, this is where the Google algorithm is very complex. And so, you know, that's also why it's hard to predict because a lot of people will come to me and say, Brad, why was this review rejected? And I'm like, geez, mate, I'm only looking at half the picture. I don't know all the data that Google was looking at to determine that outcome.

Mike Blumenthal (18:41)
Speaking

of that data, do they look at projected business volume for a given business in term determining this? I I know they have access to all the credit card information. They have access to Google Pay. They know a lot about business volume per business. Does that come into play?

Brad Wetherall (18:47)
Not, not the wrong way around.

Not that I'm aware of. The other factors might contribute to the level of trust because it's about what does Google know about you, right? It's not about are you spending more money or do like, but it's like, if we know more information about you, then you may.

Mike Blumenthal (19:11)
about the

reviewer or the business or both.

Brad Wetherall (19:14)
Both.

I mean, when you write a review, the review stays with the reviewer and then it's attached to the business, right? So like even just systemically, when you think about the database structure, the review, the review is owned by the reviewer, not by the business. And so that like, there's a lot of data that goes into the integrity of the reviewer more so than the business. There's other signals that'll look at the business, but the, from a review perspective.

there's a lot more scrutiny on who's leaving the review versus the business that they're leaving.

Greg (19:43)
The categories we found in that 2020-2021 study that had the highest review fraud percentages were locksmiths, number one, moving companies, number two, plumbers, number three, then digital marketing agencies, personal injury lawyers, dermatologists, cosmetic surgeons, dentists, con... Well, you know, they're...

Brad Wetherall (20:00)
Digital marketing agencies, that's a weird one to show up. wouldn't even do that.

Mike Blumenthal (20:04)
It showed up in my anecdotal

research from the forum too. Almost all the services had higher reports of missing reviews than bricks and mortars, for example.

Greg (20:14)
So what can you, we sort of need to move on to our kind of final segment here. This has been a fascinating conversation. We definitely want to have you back. But what is your general, to sort of cap this review discussion off, what is your general observation or advice to business owners or agencies, digital marketing agencies that are working with business owners around

Brad Wetherall (20:15)
You too.

Greg (20:41)
around reviews, review fraud, review reinstatement, anything that you want to say sort of by way of summary, practical information.

Brad Wetherall (20:49)
Yeah, so two things. mean, buying reviews don't do it. I don't think it's worth the risk. I think that lot of Google's getting more more sophisticated in detecting fake ones and they're penalizing companies. They're putting them in. Joy used to call it review jail, right? where they can... Yep. And that is a very...

Greg (20:53)
Well, right of, yep.

Right, it's this scarlet letter, know, badge of shame.

Brad Wetherall (21:10)
That's a very Google thing to do for transparency. Like they, like to make an example of some of some, some really egregious people and try and scare off people from, doing things. Right. So that's the, you know, done that a number of, a number of cases. But the other thing that I would recommend to businesses is just get more reviews. Right. I think that you, got to make it part of your standard operating procedure to ask for reviews. A lot of companies that I've been working with in my, in my consulting capacity.

feel like they don't feel like they can ask people for reviews. It's like they're nervous to ask for reviews. And I think that people just need to get through that because if they knew that the inherent benefit of how reviews is going to result in increased performance and increased customers, it just needs to become normal, like a normal operating.

Greg (21:59)
The same token, lot of businesses have no hesitation in asking for reviews and we'll hammer away at that. One question about review gating. So the FTC made review gating illegal, meaning by review gating, sort of asking for feedback and then sending somebody who had a positive experience through one door to a review site or whatever, and then the other person gets a internal customer service response. Does Google have any way to detect that? I would assume it does not.

You can look at the platforms and their functionality and the FTC went over after some of the platforms doing that. But does Google have any internal process by which they're trying to detect review gating that's still going on?

Brad Wetherall (22:35)
It's a good question. I know that review gating is against Google policy. That is something that we're very much aware of. And if we find people that are doing it, we will actually delete all their reviews. But as far as is there a systemic detection, I don't know. That's not a yes or a no. I don't know.

Greg (22:51)
It's pretty hard. I think it would be pretty hard.

Mike Blumenthal (22:53)
It's hard to

prove the negative, right? The absence of, and it's hard, it would be very difficult.

Greg (22:58)
Yeah, I mean, I

have experienced it myself recently as a consumer. you know, these businesses from a certain point of view, you know, one of the things that's going on, I think, there's a lot of gray in review fraud. You know, there's the buying of reviews on one extreme. And then there's like friends and family. You open a new business and say, hey, I need some reviews, you know, whatever. And these people might be patrons of the business and they might have had a real experience. But there's also a little

sort of like we want to help this person out kind of thing. right. there's well, and that begs the question of what is a conflict of interest, but let's not get into that. How does Google, Google is not doing any education beyond the FAQs and help articles to my knowledge to educate the businesses at large about what is acceptable, what is not acceptable. And this is, there's a lot of genuine ignorance. And I mean that in a completely descriptive way.

Brad Wetherall (23:26)
Conflict of interest, by the way, is against Google policy. So you shouldn't really.

Greg (23:51)
about what Google expects, what Google will allow, what Google won't allow. And sometimes you don't find that out until after the penalty has been imposed. And it doesn't seem like Google is going to do anything further. They used to do a lot of explainer videos. That seems to have stopped. It doesn't seem like Google is going to do anything further to educate businesses on verification, review policy, these rules that are quite material to the success or failure of businesses.

Brad Wetherall (24:18)
Yeah, I think your assessment is accurate. I think that Google hasn't really done a great job of communicating what the policies are, how they're being enforced, like what is good, what is bad. A lot of that is by design. Google wants to limit the amount of coaching to prevent bad guys from circumventing all of the protections that we put in place. But it's also kind of a pet peeve that I've had historically in my career.

Which is why I feel like now that I am no longer a Google employee, I get invited to speak in a lot of different places. And this podcast, Notwithstanding, where I'm happy to actually talk through about my experience and share some of that. Because Google, I used to get requests to do these talks all the time. And PR would always shut down. Our PR team in Google would say, no, not going to allow you to do that.

Greg (25:07)
Well,

the irony is that if Google did a better job of educating people on the front end, it would have less of a support burden.

Brad Wetherall (25:14)
I completely agree, Greg, I agree. I had that discussion many times and the Trust and Safety organization, the counter argument to that being like, we don't want you to even inadvertently give away information that is going to make it easier for spammers to exploit.

Greg (25:31)
So let's talk about the culture of Google a little bit before we wrap up and the culture of support there. So how would you say that has changed? mean, you're obviously a person who was very sincere and invested in doing the best job you could and making the system efficient and work for people, notwithstanding the limitations you described. How would you describe that culture of support at Google over your tenure and

as an outsider now. You talked about striking a balance and acceptable levels of collateral damage. Is Google simply indifferent to these businesses? Does Google really care about support? Is Google smug about outsourcing support to Mike and people profile experts? Yeah, Product Experts rather.

Mike Blumenthal (26:16)
Bye, Caksubers.

Greg (26:19)
What is sort of the internal sense of how much support matters and how much it matters to these businesses? Is there a sort of a cavalier attitude? That was a very long-winded way to get to that.

Brad Wetherall (26:28)
Yeah,

absolutely not. As to your last question, is there a cavalier attitude? think that my team, I've made lifelong friends for people that I've worked with at Google because they're all really passionate and care a lot about the work they're doing and they really strive to help out businesses, right? To help businesses grow. I think this was evident during the pandemic when, you know, internally we were

We were striving to help businesses grow. then during the pandemic that pivoted to let's help businesses survive. Right. And there was a lot of hours that were put in by a lot of the Googlers on my team, really motivated to helping people like, and they're very passionate and motivated. I think what you, what you see is the challenge that we deal with at the scale that we operate at where, you know, like my, my focus and my, my direction to the, to the Googlers on my team was we need to make sure that we're investing

in a way that has the biggest impact. And that typically revolves around not necessarily solving one problem for one person, but identifying systemic issues and fixing the systemic issues, right? So that we can solve problems for hundreds of thousands of businesses or even millions of businesses. And so, you know, there's definitely no lack of passion within the Google team. they care very much.

But the challenge is to kind of know where to invest because we like at the scale we operate at, we can't deal with onesie twosies. We have to deal with scale. If I transition your question over to like, what is the culture of the extended support organization, right? So like the actual agents that are taking the phone calls, then we try to incentivize that at a Google level to make sure that we're getting the right behaviors. So incentivizing high customer satisfaction, right? CSAT scores is a big one.

efficiency in terms of how fast we resolve, high level of quality and empathy. but in all honesty, right, they, they're playing a numbers game, right? They're trying to close as many cases as they can because we also have efficiency laws where we want each agent to close around 12 to 15 cases a day. Right. And so like, you know, it's, it's a scale game. So like, I think that it's a complicated answer to like, how is the culture of Google? Because.

While I firmly believe that the people there are all amazing individuals and the highlight of my Google career, doing it at the scale that we operate at is complicated.

Greg (28:55)
It's a

microcosm of the larger problem. The Google employees are sincere, good people, nice people, but the logic of the marketplace is such that the outcomes produced are not always beneficial for everybody.

Brad Wetherall (29:05)
Correct.

Mike Blumenthal (29:06)
Some quick

math here, 3 million contacts, 40 % of those, 1.2 million were troubleshooting, which is the bulk of the users we see in the forums. My estimate is that we see 100 in the Google Business Profile Forum, see 150,000 contacts a year, give or take in total, which then get escalated.

You know, many of them are suspensions, verification and reviews, as you pointed out, many of which get escalated. So is that number accurate? Are those numbers roughly accurate that the private, that the public forum is dealing with 10 % of the troubleshooting issues, give or take?

Brad Wetherall (29:46)
It sounds a little high, but ballpark, think that that's about right. I think there's generally more... In the day since I left Google, I think it's getting harder and harder to get access to a human is my observation. And I'm starting to see a lot more no-reply email address aliases coming out as opposed to people that are allowed to reply and get access to a human.

I do think that there is a lot like Google's very cost conscientious at the moment. And transparently, there's not a huge amount of investment in GBP at the moment. A lot of the a lot of the investment internally has pivoted over to the shopping products at the switching center next and Google brand profiles, which is a new thing that got announced last year that I think is going to have more prevalence in 2025.

Greg (30:24)
See, I... Yeah.

Brad Wetherall (30:36)
I think that GBP is being maintained, but I don't think there's a huge amount of investment going into it. that's kind of another reason why it's, you know, like the levels of support and improving support, I don't think is a huge priority for the overall business because they're focusing on.

Mike Blumenthal (30:54)
Is that decision based on the ideal that Google will be able to answer questions about a given business using AI as opposed to input from the business owner?

Brad Wetherall (31:02)
Yes.

you know, I think it's, the philosophy is like, like differentiating the signal from noise, right? Like in, this, in this huge sea of support contacts that we get every day, you know, 3 million contacts. It's probably more than that. If I were to look at 2024 data. but it's really about like, how do we focus on the things that we need to focus on and like,

use AI to support the things that we don't need to focus on. And so I think that's, that's kind of like the responsible investment of AI is like, how do we try and use that? We don't want to necessarily ignore people that are having problems.

Mike Blumenthal (31:41)
I'm not talking

about problems, I'm talking about content, right? In other words, local content that has surfaced regularly in the search results to answer a user's query. Obviously there, there's a tension between the business who is theoretically a trusted resource for that content, third party providers of that content. And to some extent we're seeing with Ask Maps, the ability of Google to generate the answers about that business.

Brad Wetherall (32:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (32:10)
using AI. I'm talking about that tension.

Brad Wetherall (32:11)
Yeah. Got it. Yeah. That's it. That's it. That's That's, think that's a really great question because I think it, it talks to the future of search and, and, you know, like how much investment do we need to put into content in order to influence what AI says about us. And, and, and a quick 30 second story on this is that before I left Google, I was working on the generative search experience GSE, which is, which is being rebranded to the AI over

And so like the AI overview, the PM came to me and asked me, you know, what are merchants going to ask? Or what is their feedback going to be when we launch the SG or AI overview? And I said, they're going to ask three things. One, how do I get in the AI overview? Two, how do I get out of the AI overview if I don't wanna be in it? And three, how do I change the information that it says about me in the AI overview? And the PM turns to me and says, they're not going to be able to do any of those things.

Right. And I think that you can kind of, you can, you can understand that because AI isn't a database that you can tweak. It's, it's a, it's generated based on a lot of different sources of data. It uses GBP data. uses website data. It uses social media data. It uses all of this stuff to come up with a perspective on the company or the topic that you're talking about. So for my future recommendation.

would be you cannot stop investing in having good content on your website and having good data and managing your GBP profiles, your presence in social media. All of that is contributing to your company's brand and AI is going to summarize that and represent that to the world. And so whether that's ChatGBT, Gemini, Claude, any of these other AI bots, you need to be investing in the way that you are represented digitally.

Greg (33:58)
There's a bunch of additional questions that we could ask you and that I'd love to talk to you about. But let me ask you just really quickly about brand. That's a hot topic these days because of, for all the reasons that you know in SEO. The sort of current SEO advice is you build your brand off Google, people are going to search for your brand on Google. Google's going to surface that because it responds to branded queries. And more and more of the queries on Google are navigational or brand queries.

What was the internal attitude? I recognize you're in the support organization, but what was the internal attitude about how you build your brand? You just alluded to this. How you build your brand as a local business, purposes of Google visibility. mean, reviews is an obvious one, but go ahead.

Brad Wetherall (34:38)
Yeah, and I think...

Yeah reviews is an obvious one.

Mike Blumenthal (34:45)
I would add in my research with Ask Maps, the new AI insertion in Maps, not just reviews on Google, reviews everywhere are showing up in the AI answers, reviews from third parties, particularly reviews even from your website when you use schema are showing up in review questions asked of Ask Maps. So I would say reviews everywhere, Greg, just as a side note. Sorry, go ahead.

Brad Wetherall (35:09)
Yep.

No, no, I agree. you know, I think that, in any type of engagement. like photos is a really big part of, of GDP optimization as well. And it's not just taking your photos and loading in a hundred. It's feeding it every couple of weeks, feeding it new photos, right? Like, and, and spacing that out. it goes to show engagement and it goes to show, that you're, you're constantly committed to providing high quality.

data and that increases your trust and relevancy in the eyes of search, right? Because it's like it's a more trustworthy signal. And so I think that, the short answer is yes. think that it's investing in GBP will help give you prominence in the local pack, investing in your website and your website content will help you with organic. And then obviously social media is a big influencing part as well, which we're seeing to get that.

Greg (35:58)
It's a kind of an ironic return to what existed before. In the beginning, there was a lot of different sources for consumers to get information about local businesses. Then it became all about Google. And now what's happening is AI is sort of, you know, there's a kind of migration to other sites, fragmentation. And AI is, as Mike is suggesting, of bringing these other sources back into the visibility calculation. And so it's a book, it's a weird sort of

Brad Wetherall (36:22)
I agree.

Greg (36:26)
return to an older kind of way of thinking about how consumers are discovering you.

Brad Wetherall (36:29)
Play three.

Mike Blumenthal (36:30)
older

technically also because prior to 2012, you couldn't fix a broken Google business profile that merged from a neighbor's business. And this is going to be very similar. You're not going to be able to fix this output when it's broken. Right? So not only is it similar in its reach, it's similar in its impact, which raises this question though, that Greg has often asked is does Google have liability for this content that they are generating?

If it's false, in other words, this is no longer a case where a business is using the platform to promote their business. Google is using the business to generate content. Google's creating the content. Who holds the liability in that context?

Greg (37:09)
Google's creating the content.

Well,

that's what you would call a novel legal question that hasn't been addressed. And it's not going to show up except in a defamatory, you where somebody has a real incentive to sue. It's going to be in a sort of an egregious example with some kind of harm that will motivate somebody to sue. And that's where it'll arise. I mean, it's, you know, I don't want to digress into a whole legal discussion.

Brad Wetherall (37:19)
So.

Greg (37:41)
There's so many interesting things here to talk about, I think unless Mike, there's a kind of, Brad, we'd love your final thoughts and any advice you have for agencies and local marketers. And unless Mike, you have any kind of final questions, we should wrap up and then we'll have you back, definitely.

Brad Wetherall (37:41)
Thank you.

Yeah, no worries. I think I've appreciated the conversation. think suspensions, reviews, verification, those are usually the things that most people are interested in. So I think we covered majority of that in today's podcast. The one thing that I'll end is that I am available as a consultant if people are stuck on something or they want to learn more.

Greg (38:18)
How

can they contact you?

Brad Wetherall (38:21)
Yep. So you can contact me. My website is bitwiseconsulting.com. So bitwise with a Z. And you can just contact me through the website and I'd be happy to set up some time and talk to you about whatever challenge that you may be having. And yeah, I'm like, I'm really excited to be able to help businesses and agencies. You know, I think that at the scale that we operated out of Google, I would really only get to talk to like

the Walmarts and the Targets and the Starbuckses of the world. So like being able to talk to a lot of agencies is really exciting and I love hearing the various stories and challenges.

Greg (38:56)
with this.

Mike Blumenthal (38:56)
And he

gets to talk to me, the mythic blogger.

Brad Wetherall (38:59)
Yeah,

the world famous Mike Blumenthal, right? Like that Dan Pritchett introduced me to all those years ago. And I'm like, who is that bloke?

Mike Blumenthal (39:03)
Yeah.

If you

run into Dan, I tell him he's one of the people I think of as a prince and a gentleman.

Brad Wetherall (39:13)
One of the best leaders that I've worked with at Google is Dan. He's a great writer.

Mike Blumenthal (39:17)
Truly.

Greg (39:18)
Okay, all right, on that positive note, friendly note, thanks, Brad Wetherall, for being with us and we'll definitely have you back and thanks for all your thoughts and advice and insider perspective.

Brad Wetherall (39:30)
Not my pleasure. Thanks for having me.