This story has been updated.
You might want to think twice about making reservations at that restaurant with only five-star raves. And that hotel with all those one-star pans may very well be fine. The reason? Many of the reviews you’re reading may be fictitious.
It’s difficult to obtain reliable figures on what percentage of online reviews are fake, but research by academic and industry institutions, including the University of Illinois at Chicago and Best SEO Companies, a search engine optimization business, puts the figure at between 20 and 40 percent overall. According to an investigation by Which?, a U.K. consumer advice website, almost half of the five-star reviews for two of the top-10 hotels in Last Vegas were questionable.
