" The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college to write more and more positive reviews."

A cottage industry of liars. I was pretty naive in college and I still would have been skeptical about that.

I swear the 'keep doing what you're doing' must either be the standard HR planted review (I wasn't invited to the HR conference where they learned that!), or it's GD's own spam for pay. I've seen that too frequently at toxic jobs for it to be coincidence.

Luckily, just like Amazon reviews, it's pretty easy to determine worthwhile info from how specific and balanced it is. The aggregate scores are obviously worthless, because either shills or spurned employees taint the mix.

I enjoy when there are responses from the business: that can often show egotistical management that thinks their poo doesn't stink.

Heard the same from a friend of a friend, they would game Trip Advisor reviews by giving discounts to customers and the daughter would make accounts and leave positive reviews all the time.

There seriously needs to be a watchdog group or AI service (startup idea!) that vets reviews with heuristics like anomaly detection for VPN ip address reviews in succession or browser fingerprinting.

Also ChatGPT is gonna make writing unique reviews a thing of the past. Expect fake reviews sounding indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.