Review Policy Auditor: 1-star review violations & briefs

For reputation-management and local SEO agencies, and for business owners. Most 1-star reviews are real customers and must be answered, not removed. Some break the platform's content policy: a competitor or ex-employee, someone who never visited, a staff member's phone number, threats, a criminal accusation stated as fact, a review meant for another business, spam links, a burst of near-identical ratings, or a story about "my sister's visit". This Actor reads every 1- and 2-star review you give it, finds those that break Google's published policy, scores them 0-100, quotes the evidence, and writes a takedown evidence brief with ready-to-paste report text, plus a calm public reply for every review.

• 🔍 9 rule groups mapped to Google Maps' content policy names: Rating manipulation / conflict of interest, Off-topic, Personal information, Obscenity & profanity / Harassment, Offensive content (unsubstantiated allegations), Wrong business, Advertising & solicitation, Repetitive content / review bursts, Not first-hand
• 🎯 Honest scoring: reviews that describe a real first-hand experience score low however harsh they are, and never get a brief
• 🧾 Evidence quotes for every point, highlighted in the review
• 📋 Ready-to-paste flag text under 1,000 characters, and where to submit it
• 💬 Professional public reply for every review, which works whether or not the platform removes it
• 🚨 Burst detection: several low ratings within hours, near-identical wording, brand-new reviewer accounts
• 🏢 Batch mode: reviews of all your clients' businesses in one run; reads a reviews dataset you already have on Apify
• 🎨 Your branding on the briefs and the per-business audit report

Example (the default input: 7 low-star reviews of a dental clinic)

Reviewer	Score	Verdict	Main policy point
Anon 22	90	STRONG	Personal information (a staff member's phone number) + harassment
R P	82	STRONG	Unsubstantiated allegations ("scam", "thieves") inside a burst of 3 low ratings in 48 h
Tom R.	70	STRONG	Not first-hand ("my sister went here and said...")
Kevin D.	70	STRONG	Conflict of interest (former employee sending people to a competitor)
J S, M K	65	POSSIBLE	Burst of low ratings, near-identical text, new accounts
Carla M.	0	UNLIKELY	A genuine visit (waiting time, rude receptionist, bill): reply publicly, don't flag

How to use it

1. Put reviews in Reviews (businessName, reviewerName, rating, reviewText, reviewDate, optional reviewUrl, reviewerReviewCount), or enter the reviews dataset ID of a Google Maps reviews scraper run on your own Apify account.
2. Optional but useful: add Business profiles with staffNames, competitorNames, otherBusinessNames and businessPhone.
3. Set Maximum takedown briefs and Maximum business reports, add your branding and the contact for public replies, click Start.
4. Open each brief from briefUrl, check the evidence, then report the review in the platform. Paste each publicResponse as your reply.

Output

One dataset with two record types (recordType):

• review rows: businessName, reviewerName, rating, reviewDate, reviewUrl, reviewId, reviewText, removalScore, verdict (STRONG / POSSIBLE / UNLIKELY), policies, violations (each with policy, weight, why, evidence), burstGroup, flagText, publicResponse, briefUrl
• business-summary rows: businessName, reviewsSupplied, lowStarReviewsAudited, strongCases, possibleCases, genuineExperiences, bursts, reportUrl

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription. Reviews rated above your limit (default: 3 stars and up) are skipped for free.

Event	Price
Low-star review audited (9 rule groups, score, evidence, flag text, public reply)	$0.02
Takedown evidence brief, up to Maximum takedown briefs	$1.00
Business audit report, up to Maximum business reports	$3.00

Examples:

• Default run (7 reviews, 1 brief): 7 × $0.02 + $1.00 = $1.14
• An agency's monthly run, 20 client businesses × 150 low-star reviews, 25 briefs, 20 reports: 3,000 × $0.02 + 25 × $1 + 20 × $3 = $145
• One business, 60 low-star reviews, 5 briefs, 1 report: $9.20

Runs are paid from your Apify balance; the free plan's $5 monthly credit covers several default runs. Use Maximum cost per run in the run options to set a hard cap: the Actor keeps each business's reviews together (bursts need all of them), gives briefs to the highest scores first and stops cleanly at the limit.

Method

Each review is checked by fixed, transparent rules (no AI guessing): phrases, contact-detail patterns, names from your business profile, dates and text similarity across the business's reviews. Every rule has a weight; the removal score combines them as 1 − Π(1 − weight). First-hand details (an appointment, an order, a time, what staff said) lower the off-topic and second-hand weights. Policy names follow Google Maps' "Prohibited & restricted content" policy (checked October 2026).

Honest limits

• The platform decides. A high score means the review matches a published policy reason with quoted evidence; it is not a guarantee.
• Rules are tuned for English reviews.
• Genuine negative reviews from real customers are almost never removed and should not be flagged: answer them. This Actor marks them UNLIKELY and writes the reply.
• For other platforms, policy wording is generic; check their own content guidelines.

Good use

Flag only reviews that break the policy. Never offer incentives for changing or removing reviews, never threaten reviewers, and keep a professional public reply in place (in the US, the FTC rule on consumer reviews, 16 CFR Part 465, forbids review suppression by threats or false accusations). Review texts and reviewer names are processed only as published on the platform.

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Use it from an AI assistant (MCP)

Add Apify's MCP server to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client and this Actor becomes a tool your assistant can run:

{"mcpServers": {"apify": {"url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=translucent_wire/unfair-review-policy-auditor"}}}

AI agents without an Apify account can also run it and pay per run in USDC through Apify's x402 support.