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> “He realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company’s Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash,” Roy wrote.

Isn't that the crux of the issue? No one except the business owner should be able to edit the Google Listing.



You'd think so, but Google allows people to claim businesses without so much as a shred of proof.

Maybe they have their own heuristics, who knows. When my FIL started a sunflower farm, I wrote a nice review and google offered to have me claim the page.


I have also been offered to claim a business that I reviewed. There isn't even an option to say that you aren't the owner.


Why on earth is that even a suggestion? If it's actually the owner leaving a review of their own business that seems like the kind of situation where at a minimum you wouldn't want to go out of your way to help them claim the listing. The cynic in me thinks this was probably a data driven decision and reflects the sad state of third party reviews and small businesses.


> No one except the business owner should be able to edit the Google Listing.

Or something in between: you should be able to "suggest" an edit and then when enough people confirmed it the information would show up but with something like "not confirmed by the owner".

Otherwise Google would lose all this free workforce that is the people who go to restaurants and then fill the missing bits because the owners don’t know they have a listing on Google Maps / don’t know they can edit it.




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