EP 189: How Does Google GBP Support Really Work? Brad Wetherall, ex-Director- Support Operations, Interview

Brad Wetherall is the CEO of Bitwize Consulting and the ex-Director of Operations at Google Business Profile support where he spent 10 years. He shares a number of details about how GBP support works, what algos drive outcomes, why they use the processes that they do. If you want to learn more about the vagaries of GBP and its support, this interview is for you. It's is both interesting AND enlightening.

This is Part 1 and we will be sharing Part 2 next week.

00:15 Introduction to Brad Wetherall and His Journey
02:53 Transitioning from Google to Bitwise Consulting
05:34 Understanding Google Business Profile Support Structure
08:03 Support Strategies and User Journeys
11:08 The Evolution of Support Systems at Google
13:36 Challenges in Support: Suspensions and Verifications
16:45 The Algorithm Behind Suspensions and Reviews
19:29 Trust and Reporting Mechanisms in Google Business Profile
22:23 Review Fraud: Detection and Challenges
25:01 The Balance Between Fraud Detection and User Experience
27:46 Video Verification and Its Implications
30:41 Final Thoughts on Reviews and Trust Scores

Transcript:

Greg
Hey, everybody, it's 2025. Welcome back to the Near Memo. This is Episode 189 with Mike and Greg. And today I'm very excited to, we're very excited to welcome Brad Wetherall, who is the former director of operations for GBP. And today he's the CEO of Bitwize Consulting. He's going to give us lot of insight into his time at Google and what's really going on. The real story behind the scenes, ripped from the headlines.

So Brad, why don't you give us little quick kind of download on what you're doing today and what you did at Google before you left or before you were axed, as the case may be, and we can talk about that.

Brad Wetherall
Yeah, no worries. And thanks, Mike and Greg, for having me. So as you mentioned, I was the Director of Operations at Google for the last 10 years. I worked on a variety of different products during my time at Google. I started off working in the Google payment space on the first iteration of Google Wallet. Quickly moved over to the Maps Organization and worked on Google My Business, as it was referred to at the time.

And, worked on that for over 10 years. My responsibilities as the director of operations included, the management of GBP support, but it was also more broadly the operation space. So I worked very closely with the product and engineering teams on feature enhancements, on launching new features, turning off the features that weren't performing as well. And, and all the things in between.

So lots of great experiences there. Before I left Google, I also had expanded my responsibilities to include the Google Shopping team. So that included the Google Merchant Center and Google Domains as well, up until the point that it was sold to Squarespace. So I had a couple of different products in my portfolio, but the Google Business Profile was the one that I have had the longest tenure with and that I have the most expertise with.

To that end, upon leaving Google in january of 2024, I started a consulting business, Bitwise Consulting, that is really focused on leveraging my subject matter expertise and helping businesses and agencies with some of the more tricky challenges that you may experience with the Google Business Profile. A lot of that involves suspensions, verifications, deleted reviews, all the fun stuff that a lot of the businesses are dealing with..

Greg
Yeah, and I characterized your departure as being axed, which to some people may sound like you were fired. You were not fired. I just want to clarify, tell us what happened there.

Brad Wetherall
For personal reasons, we relocated down to Orange County. So I spent, like many of the years at Google in headquarters in Mountain View, relocated down to Los Angeles. At the time during Covid, that was completely fine, work from anywhere kind of thing. In the last couple of years, many businesses are really pushing return to office.

And in Google's case, I think the, the LA location for my area of the business specifically, was an undesirable location. And, ultimately Google made the decision or at least my leadership made the decision to eliminate all of the employees that were working out of the la location and myself included. So I, left Google as a result of the, location policy.

And, I have found myself falling into this role and actually being able to help a lot of businesses with my expertise. So I'm getting quite a lot of enjoyment being on the other side of the curtain now and really going deeper with businesses to help them solve.

Greg
Well, and these businesses are going to benefit for that. I mean, you would still be at Google, but for this return to office policies. But business owners and agencies are the beneficiaries of that. So I know Mike is kind of chomping at the bit to ask a bunch of questions. No? All right. Ok. So go ahead, Mike. Ask your first question.

Mike Blumenthal
I'm sitting here perfectly calmly.

Well, so obviously I been a [GBP] Product Expert since 2007, long before they were product experts, volunteering in the free Google support environment, which always struck me as one of the more bizarre sort of developments that many other companies envy about Google where they offload some of the more complicated support questions. I am just curious about how under you what support, I'm curious how support is broken up. 

Like what support is done by a support team? Where is that support team located? How does it get from that support team to somebody who knows what they're doing? We see a lot of these sort of problematic stuff in the forum where it would seem like these are self-evident problems that should have been resolved, but don't seem to be able to get resolved. And that's typically what we see is sort of stupid outcomes of legitimate business that can't get verified or an employee review that doesn't get taken down or something like that. And I'm just curious sort of how that one, the big picture of support and then two, how it filters out and three, sort of how it ends up in the forum and why I go through 27 steps to get a review taken down that should be obvious to anybody in the world that it should come down.

Brad Wetherall
No worries, Michael. Yeah, there is a lot to unpack. But, before I kind of jump into the support strategy and how I designed it, I wanted to give a special mention, michael.

Greg
A lot of stuff in there.

Mike Blumenthal
You designed it like a line at a disney thing where it seems like you're getting closer, but you're really not.

Brad Wetherall
Well, yes and no, the thing I wanted to mention though Mike is that so I started working on on GBP in around 2013 2014 timeframe and and I remember vividly going into a it was a weekly product meeting where one of the best engineers and leaders that I've ever worked with dan pritchett was his name

I remember him saying in this meeting where it was probably a dozen engineers and pms and I was there representing support. And he made a comment that says, if we do that, we're going to end up on Mike's blog. He actually called you out by name. And I'm like, who is this Mike Blumenthal guy that dan keeps referring to? This was about 10 years ago. You do have quite a. ..

Quite a brand even inside the walls of Google Mike. So congrats on that on your career.

Mike Blumenthal
I work very hard at that brand.

Brad Wetherall
Nice. Yeah. So, all right. So to answer your question. So how was support designed? You know, and I think that it went through quite an evolution over the years. The latest evolution is really around how do we continue to provide high quality support at scale? And I think that's kind of like, you know, I say the term high quality and you kind of look at me like, yeah, well, it is, it is right. And so just for context,

Greg
Isn't that an oxymoron? Yeah.

Brad Wetherall
You know, like in, I say last year it's early 2025 right now. So in 2023, um, we processed over 3 million contacts, right? So like that's kind of like, it's from a support perspective. That's the scale that we're operating at. And so, you know, we.

Mike Blumenthal
Contact

Is inquiry. So it could have seven or eight back and forths, but it's one

Brad Wetherall
Great. Yep.

That's right. Yeah. And, so, just the scale that we operate is huge. The strategy really is to try and identify what are the things that, users Or Businesses can resolve themselves. We, we refer to them as education based user journeys and where, so the action that the support agent takes is information, right? It's like, here is how you solve that yourself.

The other section of cases is troubleshooting based cases, things where you cannot solve that on your own. Someone from Google has to do something, right? We have to go into the backend, flick a switch. We need to Merge Profiles. You can't do any of that stuff on your own, right? Like that's something that we have to do. And so the strategy for support is how do we encourage people who have the ability to solve the problem on their own, to get them the information that they need to resolve it.

And for the people that can't resolve it on their own, how do we expedite getting them to a human agent so that they can, so that we can take that on and resolve that ourselves. So when you go through the support, yes.

Greg
Quick question, quick

Question, just to interject. That's an interesting distinction, something you can resolve on your own versus something that you can't. That's subject to a lot of debate, what Are Businesses capable of resolving on their own. Just real quickly, can you identify how Google delineated between those two use cases?

Brad Wetherall
We have a pretty robust system in place for case tracking and reporting. And so what we're able to track is what was the symptom. So the symptom is, does the user say the problem is? And then we have another column that says, what was the actual problem? Because a lot of times the user doesn't really have the correct problem identified. And then there's the third section in the column, which is what did we do to resolve that?

Like what was the resolution? And so we look at the data of resolutions where we look at, here's the symptom, here's the resolution pairing. And we're like, the resolution was education, right? All I had to do was say, if you ask me, how do I upload a photo? Right? Like I'm using a very simple example, but like we can have ai generate a step-by-step instruction that says,

"here is how you update a photo" and we personalize it. So it's like, hi, Greg, thanks for contacting us. Here's step one, go to this website, click this button, upload. And theoretically that, that direction would be as good or better than had an agent actually sat down and wrote that out, right? Cause we can script it according to what is needed to solve that problem. So, so usually when it's an education based resolution,

That's the data that we looked at to say, okay, there's a high probability that we can automate the resolution of this problem. Depending on the symptom that you select in the support flow, right? So like if if you know the support flow, you go in, you type in an issue, you select a chip, like what issue it is. A lot of that will then feed how that case proceeds. So like if you deal with something that is a, that requires a human, like,

A merge or something like that, something that is a little bit more difficult to resolve that you can't resolve on your own, then you'll even see different contact methods appear. So instead of just being an email only, you'll now see email, chat and phone as an option for contact. And so you can get an agent on a phone call and talk to them that way. But the symptom that you choose is the thing that derives how

That support case is managed. And, and a lot of the times you'll see that it's being automated or the first step in the process is to send an automated response. The hack for people there though, is that, and I used to call this the escape hatch, if we, for whatever reason, if that automated results that that solution that we send you isn't, isn't, doesn't help you, either because we got the symptom wrong.

And you know, like it's not actually issue a, it's issue b. And so the automated response that we sent you was irrelevant. You can always reply to that email address and it will go to a human straight away, right? So that's kind of the way to go from an automated response into a human case. The exception to the rule would be something like, how do I become number one on Google? That type of question we get a lot. And there's no incremental information that an agent can give you in that case.

In that case, we push you to the documentation that exists on the Help Center. And we send that from a no reply email address so that you can't actually reply and get to a human. Because even if you did, even if you were able to get to a human, they wouldn't be able to give you any more information than what is publicly posted on that website anyway. So they're kind of like the three different categories of support. And the way that we thought about strategy is like,

What is information that we're just going to push you to the Help Center because even if you get to a person, we can't help you. What are the scenarios where we wanna guide you to help yourself? If that doesn't work, you can then reply and get access to a human. And then what cases do we want to expedite you getting to a human because we know you can't resolve this on your own. So we're not even going to try and push you to self help.

Mike Blumenthal
In the scheme of things in my 20 years experience, this is a relatively new flow. Mean, I remember writing blog posts in 2016 about how intuit had solved this basic problem, but Google hadn't even made a start. So first question is, when did you implement this more structured flow? Because it hasn't always been there and it wasn't there for many, many years.

Brad Wetherall
Yeah, we were, we started experimenting with it in the early days of covid. So I want to say 2020 is when we started with it. At the time, you probably remember this, you know, like we just ran into a massive backlog and a lot of this was driven because one of your other questions was like, where's the team located? You know, and, and, know, our team is distributed all around the world. We have Call Centers in india, in san paulo, brazil, in argentina, buenos aires in

Krakow, poland, in kuala lumpur, in malaysia, in japan, right? And a lot of these different locations are all strategically placed for language and, a lot of the english support is out of india. You've probably identified that over the time, but like during covid we, couldn't have people come into the office. And so getting people equipment, you know, like computers and headsets so that they could work from home.

Was a logistical complication that we had. And so we ended up with this massive backlog. That's when, not only were we investing in like, how do we make sure that we're prioritizing the cases that need us the most, that's kind of, I think where the concepts kind of came from is that like, we're not going to focus on the education user journeys, because theoretically people can solve them themselves. When we have this massive backlog, we need to prioritize the people that need our help the most.

And that was the things where they can't solve the problem on their own and we have to do something. So that was not a

Mike Blumenthal
So what percentage

Of these three million, how does it break out end user journey requirement versus troubleshooting of the three million roughly? We're talking half and half, 60, 40, 70, 30.

Brad Wetherall
Yeah. So, um, it was,

I mean, I haven't, I haven't seen the numbers in the last year, but it was around, I think 60 40, I think was, was probably around the, it might've gone up a little bit. Maybe approaching the 70 30. So where, where the 60 was the education journeys and the 40 was the troubleshooting. Um, and, and what we found is that, um, and this was just kind of like interesting evolution of our ai algorithm was that.

Um, we would attempt to automate the 60 % and we were successful at automating half of that. So we fully automated about 30 % of our entire support base. The other half got, had replies to them and they went to a human agent. So we didn't really count that as being successfully automated because it still went to a human. Um, the, the, motivation and the goal of the team is how do we make our ai better so that we can, um, successfully automate a larger percentage of.

So that was a big part of the motivation.

Mike Blumenthal
And

Of the 40%, I mean, one of the sort of mythic attributes of Google is to release early and fix it as you go and not worry about bugs too much. My experience is they release early and then never fix these bugs. But what percentage of this 40 % was due to bad code or problematic code, let's call it, or googly code. How's that? Googly code.

What percentage

Of this 40 % was due to systemic issues that you guys really weren't quite capturing?

Brad Wetherall
Yeah, so not a lot, but I think that we would see spikes in data from time to time that was actually driven by a bug. One of the things, I know the hot topics for support is usually suspensions, verifications, and reviews, right? Like they're usually the big three. You may remember a couple of years ago, there was a massive spike in suspensions. That was. ..

Mike Blumenthal
That has been

Ongoing. I mean, it didn't drop really. It peaked and then sort of leveled off at a much higher level.

Brad Wetherall
Yeah, so there's a couple of scenarios there. The time that I'm talking about, there was like a massive jump in suspensions. And that was actually driven when they made an algorithmic change to the suspension model. And they actually changed it, like the entire technology from one code base to a new code base. And we saw a massive increase in suspensions. And that created, again, another backlog where we had to go through and work out.

Which of these suspensions were legitimate and which ones weren't. And that took a long time to resolve. That was a large support incident that happened as a result of a bug in the code. And then the engineers had to really scramble to fix that. And there was a lot of motivation and urgency in trying to stop the bleeding, right? So that we didn't keep suspending incremental clients. And then there was a cleanup exercise to go through and make sure that we were re-enabling.

And, so that, that was, that was one example of where it's kind of a combination of both. And then the, the trust and Safety Organization who is responsible for the algorithm of suspensions and even reviews and determining which one gets approved and which one gets taken down. That team is constantly trying to tweak the algorithm a little bit because the pendulum is really around if they dial up that algorithm so that it's more aggressive.

Yes, we can eliminate a lot more Fraudulent Businesses that are showing up on the map, but we also increase the collateral damage where a lot of Good Businesses get caught in the net. If we dial it back too much, then the bad guys get in, but like less collateral damage. And so the real trick for this team is to configure and dial it and experiment to try and identify what that healthy medium is.

Greg
And if you

Mike Blumenthal
So with suspensions

Though, I'm seeing, I deal with a lot of illegal listings in the forums these days, helping Legitimate Businesses take down illegal listings. And I will present, it gets to the forum because they've gone through the redressal form. These listings are obviously fake, locations, all go to a Call Center. It's like any idiot could see that they're fake locations. And yet I have to escalate them multiple times

Create multiple examples of the abuse and multiple iterations back and forth before I can start getting them taken down. Why does that even happen? It's like anybody looking at these would know quickly that these are fake locations. And yet when I escalate through the forum, through community manager, to wherever they send it, it takes me three or four back and forths to convince them that the list provided was a legitimate list.

Brad Wetherall
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it's, that's a, that's more of a resourcing complication, I think, right? Like the timing it takes is that, you know, because of the scale that the Google operates at a lot of this process is, is dependent on the algorithm, right? And so if the algorithm has determined that it's okay or that, you know, it's not fraudulent, then the chance of it getting taken down has to be then pushed to a human to override.

The system.

Mike Blumenthal
So does

Trust of the original reporter on the redressal form make a difference?

Brad Wetherall
Absolutely. Yeah. So that goes into the algorithm that determines whether it's real or not. And so it's not, so there's a couple of correct. So the trust level, you know, Mike, you're a product expert in GBP so you would think that your particular account, if you're flagging it from your email address that is used, that has that high trust score within Google.

Greg
Who's making the report? Who's making the report?

Brad Wetherall
Is going to hold more weight than someone who created a Google account yesterday that has no history to it. Like it isn't a local guide and there's a very low trust score with the account.

Greg
And

Mike Blumenthal
So this

Greg
So local.

Mike Blumenthal
Is true across review reports and fake listings, everything. The original reporting and then is subsequent reporting, people evaluated in that. In other words, comes to the forum and then I escalate it. So might my escalations be viewed differently than tom waddington's who's also a product expert?

Brad Wetherall
100%.

Yes.

So the more the better, right? I mean, like you can kind of think about it, generally speaking, as a voting system, right? And so the idea would be, so like this works across suggested edits on the Google Business Profile, as well as like suspension reinstatements or review removals or reinstatements. It's kind of a voting system. So if you go to A Business that you believe to be fraudulent,

Mike Blumenthal
I have long thought this. Just, is interesting confirmation, but go ahead.

Brad Wetherall
And you say, hey, I think this is fraudulent. Um, that's one vote. Now, if you might have like a product expert status or you're a local guide level seven, right? Kind of like, you know, then maybe that counts for five votes, right? Like as opposed to one, because there's it's weighted exactly. There's a higher trust score with your account. Um, and then if you get five of your mates to go out and do the same thing, if they also have high trust scores, then that's more votes that,

Greg
There's a weighting factor. Yeah.

Brad Wetherall
Change is getting.

Mike Blumenthal
It's cumulative though. In other words,

One plus five plus 20, at some point it gets triggered.

Brad Wetherall
But also, generally speaking, that was a very rudimentary explanation because there's different levels of confidence. So for example, if you're standing in front of the building, right, so there's a geo signal that says, "oh, you're like physically standing at That Business", then that also has higher weight because I believe that you're at the location where you're claiming doesn't exist. Like if I'm sitting in california and I'm reporting something for A Business in new york,

Mike Blumenthal
I get it.

Brad Wetherall
Even though I have a high standing and I used to report stuff from my Google email address all the time, because hey, that's a Google. Com alias, right? But like if I'm nowhere near, if I've never visited that location, if I've never been to, if I haven't been to That City in the last six months or whatever, then that is a negative signal that kind of like works against it. So there's a lot of intelligence that is going on behind the scenes.

Mike Blumenthal
Negative

In the sense that it reduces the report or just or doesn't use the report?

Brad Wetherall
Yeah, it may be so if we think about it as a voting, like if I, if I'm a local guy.

Greg
But is it

Weighted? What Mike is asking is, if you're not physically in front of the building or there's something about your presence or status, is that a subtraction from some scoring?

Brad Wetherall
It's not really,

I wouldn't say it's a subtraction, but it's a glass half full philosophy, right? Versus a glass half empty. So like glass half full being you get extra benefits if there's signals that make me believe that my data has higher quality, right? And then I'm a, so.

Mike Blumenthal
And on my iphone though, where I have location turned off to a large extent, how does that play in then?

Brad Wetherall
Well, then it just won't use the signal, right? So you don't get the benefit of saying, hey, I'm physically at that location. I'm reporting that it doesn't exist. If you've got location turned off, you don't get the benefit of that.

Greg
Because they can't get the signal. Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal
So when

I do these reports, I should turn my location on, go log into a vpn and then report it. Is that what you're saying here?

Brad Wetherall
That's

Not exactly what I'm saying

Greg
So Brad,

I want to ask something about the algorithm. So the review algorithm and the listing suspension algorithm are distinct, is that correct? Or are they part of one big algorithm? So in terms of this fine line that you said, this balance that Google is trying to strike between aggressive, removing more listings and creating more

Mike Blumenthal
Just checking.

Greg
Letting more bad guys through, is one of the calculations in that algorithm tweaking the burden on support. In other words, if you dial up the algorithm and cast a wider net, you're going to have a lot more support issues than if you didn't do that. Is that a consideration calculus that goes into the thinking?

Brad Wetherall
That's right.

It is.

The complication I would get into is that as I was leading the Support Organization, I would go to the trust and safety team and I'm like, there's way too many suspensions coming through. My goal is to eliminate the problem from happening in the first place to reduce my support volume. That was a big part of the culture of the team. How do we prevent the issue from happening in the first place? And so one of my goals was to go to the trust and safety team and say, hey,

Can you fix the algorithm so that you're not getting a lot of this collateral damage caught in the net? And they would come back to me and say, look, generally, like when they look at the data, the amount of false positives that they are reporting in the system. So they look at how many people were appealing the decision and how many were successfully overturned as a signal on how many were false positives. And they were saying that our false positive rate fluctuated between five and 10%. And so

The theory from the trust and safety team is that they're good with that. That's a pretty successful outcome from keeping all the bad guys out. And if the collateral damage is limited to five to 10%, then that's something that they were okay with. They're like, look, we'll just let support deal with that five to 10 %" now, my counter argument was always, we're dealing with a hundred Million Businesses. Like 10 million. ..

Or 10 % of false positives is still 10 Million Businesses. So like the scale that we're operating at is still quite large and you get a lot of collateral damage in that. But their response like in agGregate, and this is why I think the scale at which we operate is so important is because they see that as a success. They don't see that as a problem. And so. ..

Mike Blumenthal
Does five or 10 % apply to reviews as well as suspensions, as well as verifications? Is that number roughly what you're seeing in terms of false positives?

Brad Wetherall
Yes.

Yeah, I mean, the metrics are different for the different types of moderation. So suspensions, edits, reviews, they have their own measurements. I think the objective is to keep it under 10%. It definitely fluctuates, as you know, know, tweaks in the algorithm might push it above and below, but the theory is to keep it below 10%.

Mike Blumenthal
So the switch to video verification occurred largely after this tweak to the algorithm. And it appears to have its own set of bugs where it doesn't allow upload at certain times of the day or the pipeline gets too busy. It just shuts the user off and user can't upload it. But how does that change in verification? It appears to me that almost every service Area Business in the world

Was required to re-verify at some point over the last three years. Is that a correct observation?

Brad Wetherall
I think it might be a side effect or I want to hesitate from using the term coincidence, but it definitely wasn't by design. I think that the story behind the evolution of verification was we just wanted to get out of the Postcard Business, right? I think that, you know, like years ago when I joined Google and they explained to me that the most used method Of Business verification was postcards.

I thought that was an analogy for something. I didn't actually think that they physically printed a postcard, put a stamp on it and put it in the mail because like we're Google, why would we do that? And I think that like they explained it to me and the reason is really good, right? I mean, it's a really effective way to confirm both existence and affiliation. They're the two things that we're really trying to discover with verification. And postcard was a good way to do that because if you can receive a postcard, I know the building exists.

If you receive the postcard and you plug that code into your digital representation, like your email address and you complete it, then you're affiliated with that company. So great! I have that data there. And so getting out of the Postcard Business was the main motivation for switching over to video verification.

Mike Blumenthal
So I assume

With the video verification, it somehow seems to look at the documents you included to be sure that they are adequate to meet the needs of these two standards of proof, true existence and your right to do that. Is this all ai driven or primarily ai driven on the video verification?

Brad Wetherall
That's right. That's right.

So it's both, there's an ai, there's an automated check of the data sometimes. And again, this comes back to trust as well. So what's the trust score? And this actually changed. Like many years ago, Mike, you may remember this, but the theory was that the barrier to entry for GBP was really high. So in order to do anything, you had to verify, and we pushed you through all these hoops, and it was really difficult. And then once you're in, then

You've got the keys to the door, and you can do whatever you want. The philosophy from the product and engineering team was, "how do we lower the barrier to entry? " how do we allow you to do little things? If you want to update data on The Profile itself, great. Let's let you do that. That's higher quality data that Google then gets to serve to consumers. But if you try and do something that looks suspicious, like if you change the address or the name or the phone number or the website,

That's a little bit more suspicious that requires an elevated level of trust. So then we have a look at your trust score. Like, do we believe that you work for This Business? If your trust score is high enough, we may let that edit go through fine. But if the trust score is not high enough, then in the terms of the pms, we would have you jump through a couple of hoops, right? Like in that hoop would be usually verification. Like, let's prove that you are who you say you are. And video verification.

We believe that that was more effective than postcard verification, because you can do it faster. So like postcard verification, you have to wait for the postcard, it sometimes takes a week, maybe more. Video verification, you can do it today, theoretically. But we need to see some level of evidence. We need to see existence and affiliation. Existence being, show me that it physically exists in the world, street signs and things like that, the actual building, so that I know it exists. And then affiliation, show yourself unlocking the door and walking in or. ..

Opening up a cash register or in the case of a service Area Business, show your branded vehicle and start the car, right? Because then I know that you're an authorized representative of The Business. And so if you cover those two things, and that's where documentation becomes a big part of that as well. So like if you can show A Business license that has the name of The Business and the address on it, then it connects The Business and the address together. And that's an official document. And so like that, that's all the evidence that we need to verify.

Mike Blumenthal
Although,

So this person verifies, but the trust level still doesn't seem quite as high as say a local guide 10 who manages to move That Business location to east jehunga screwing That Business totally. And That Business, when they attempt to bring it back to where it belongs, gets suspended and has to go through the unsuspension process. So, I mean, there seems to be still a disconnect in this sort of trust model.

Of business owner who's verified versus some schmuck off the street who's done a lot of edits and he manages to screw Your Business.

Greg
Well, I didn't-

And

It allows people who have carefully built a reputation on Google as local guides to trump, so to speak, The Business owner who may have less of a track record.

Brad Wetherall
Yeah

So, I mean, and this is where the trust score is a living breathing thing, right?

Mike Blumenthal
With asthma on occasion.

Brad Wetherall

So like if you, if you want to build your trust, yeah. So if you want to build your trust score, if you go in and make a bunch of edits that are successful, that are received, then your trust score goes up. If you verify, successfully verify Your Business, then your trust score goes up because now we believe that you are an authorized representative of That Business. So like we're going to authorize you to make changes to That Profile. It doesn't necessarily make you an authority on Other Businesses, but for That Business, your trust score goes up. But you can also have your trust score go down. And the trust score going down is when you do suspicious or negative things where if you move A Business and then we see that it was appealed and moved back, then that negatively impacts your trust score because you made an incorrect edit.

So that trust score will fluctuate. If people are out there, you know, Moving Businesses, then I think that their ability to do that is going to get more and more difficult because they're going to negatively impact their trust score and it's going to prevent them from doing that in the future.

Greg
So I think, Mike, we should probably move on to reviews.

Mike Blumenthal
We probably should, but this is like rich, interesting stuff.