As of the middle of 2019 Google continued to be inundated with fake business listings, some of them are outright scams and fraudsters who harm consumers. All of

As of the middle of 2019 Google continued to be inundated with fake business listings, some of them are outright scams and fraudsters who harm consumers. All of them are intended to harm local businesses by making them invisible compared to the fake listings. I have not heard of Google finding a solution to this problem. Some specific fields, like dentistry, seems to be flooded with SEO that is meant to prevent price comparison research. I'm no expert in ad fraud but I suspect the most polluted categories are the ones with very high click-through revenue. While there are many things Google gets right, including fighting SEO where revenue is not much at stake, they have obvious perverse incentives to ignore these problems as well as the way fake reviews contribute to these problems.