Seamless Is Finally Fixing Its Lousy, Inaccurate Restaurant Reviews

How much do you actually trust Grubhub and Seamless restaurant reviews?

Until Monday, the system of online reviewing and rating hadn't changed much in nearly a decade. Grubhub, which owns Seamless, has grappled with how to weed out fake reviews, fake ratings, and even fake restaurants.

"There are always going to be bad actors, or so to speak," said Sudev Balakrishnan, Grubhub's senior vice president of product. "But the past prevalence of fraud in the space has damaged consumer trust in various systems."

As a result, Grubhub is rolling out a system it says will ensure integrity in reviews and ratings. While ratings are numerical, reviews contain written feedback from diners to provide context on the numerical ratings, explained a Grubhub spokesperson. After customers receive their meal, a short survey from Grubhub prompts them to answer questions about accuracy of delivery time, order accuracy, and food quality. Then after the survey, diners rate their overall experience, which is aggregated into an overall star rating. After that, diners can write a review.

Information from the old ratings will be combined with the new ratings. "However, knowing that customers value more recent information when using reviews as a factor in making ordering decisions, we have listed the most recent reviews first," said a spokesperson.

Each review must also be attached to a specific order, so that fakers can't just sign in and write a review.

The new system has been in limited beta since December, and has already collected more data than Grubhub's previous system had collected in 10 years, Balakrishnan said.

The issue of verifying reviews has long been an object of criticism directed at Grubhub and Seamless. One restaurant listed on Seamless and spotted by Business Insider had five stars and 598 ratings, but only seven reviews—a sign that the majority were fake.

Users reportedly would cross check the reviews on those apps with reviews for the same restaurant listed on Yelp. The discrepancy on Yelp between restaurant reviews and reality has been less drastic—in part because Yelp requires users to post reviews and ratings together in order to eliminate fake reviews.

At times, even entire fake restaurants have reportedly been listed on Seamless.

"Decreasing fraud is a problem we take seriously," says Balakrishnan. "The best way to decrease fraud is a combination of monitoring, how ratings are collected, and sheer volume, going after coverage. By using these mechanisms, we have more diners giving ratings and reviews, more people giving us data points. Being tied in specifically to an order makes it protected."