At Zomato, our motto is to ensure our users never have a bad meal. It’s been more than 10 years of improving upon what we do every day and making sure that our users are able to make informed choices about eating great food. Yet, at the heart of it, we still see ourselves as the place where our users go to share their dining stories (reviews!). That’s why we love to hear from our foodies – be it the good, the bad or the ugly – and all this feedback is also very essential for our restaurant partners to improve upon what they do on a daily basis.

Last year, we ran a series of initiatives to ensure Zomato remains a credible and a bias-free platform for our users and restaurant partners. One such initiative was to allow restaurant partners to report reviews (Project Fairplay) that were written by users to blackmail restaurants in lieu of discounts or free meals. With this feature, we were able to identify a number of users who repeatedly engaged in this practice,  subsequently leading to the removal of their accounts from Zomato.

What’s next?
The next initiative in this project will help us tackle a major problem that plagues most platforms – fake and biased reviews. There is no doubt that restaurants need to invest in marketing and good PR to spread the word about their business. But resorting to unethical methods in order to gain fake reviews is where one needs to draw a line. Such restaurants may temporarily see a spike in their rating but sooner or later, these reviews are caught and deleted from Zomato by our Neutrality Team, resulting in a dramatic decrease in that restaurant’s rating.

Simply put, such malpractices are not worth the restaurants’ time.

As any platform that thrives on user-generated content, Zomato also faces bad actors (both users and restaurants) who write reviews that are not genuine. To counter such reviews, we have strengthened our anti-bias and anti-spam algorithms significantly to weed out fake reviews from Zomato. These algorithms will be run on all reviews received on the platform retrospectively, as well.

Impact of this change
Most restaurants will not see any impact on their rating. However, some will, especially if they’ve been a recipient of fake or solicited reviews. Because of the relative (graded) nature of our ratings, some restaurants may also see their rating go up (or down) without any change in their user content. That’s why, we always recommend getting reviews organically, as the rating derived from such reviews is steadfast and holds true, as well as presents a picture of consistency and quality to (potential) future customers.

With this change, we hope that only the best content percolates to our users, thereby maintaining the trust that our users have on Zomato. As we’ve iterated over the years, we’ve been working on ways to  keep the bias out—an uphill battle worth fighting by all means—and something we will continue to do forever.