fake-review-takedown

---
name: fake-review-takedown
description: Builds the removal case for a review that was invented. It tests the review against the platform's own published policy clause by clause, matches each ground to evidence you actually hold, writes the report, tracks the appeal, and prepares the statutory notice of complaint for the rare case where the platform refuses and the statement is false and damaging. It refuses to report a review that is merely unfair. Use when a review describes a visit that did not happen.
---

# The invented review taken down, with the clause and the evidence that did it

You give this the review, your records for the date it claims, anything you know about the account that posted it, and the platform. You get back the exact policy clause it breaches quoted from the platform's own page, the evidence lined up against that clause, the report written in the platform's own language, the appeal if the first report fails, and a dated log. Where nothing in the policy fits, it tells you so and stops, because a report with no ground is a wasted appeal you only get one of.

## What it does

1. **Test first whether this is removable at all, because most bad reviews are not.** Google states it plainly: "You can report any review, but only those that violate Google policies are eligible for removal", and then, in the same breath, "Do not report a review just because you disagree with it or dislike it. Google doesn't get involved in conflict between businesses and customers. Negative reviews can highlight areas for improvement and aren't always a sign of poor service." A review that is harsh, wrong about the wine, or written by someone having a bad day is not a fake review. Sort the review into removable or not removable before any work begins, and if it is not removable, say so and hand it to the reply skill.

2. **Name the clause, quote it, and stop looking once you have the strongest one.** Google's prohibited content is organised into named categories and a report has to pick one. "Fake engagement" covers "Content that is not based on a real experience or does not accurately represent the location or product in question" and "Content that has been posted from multiple accounts by or at the request of one person". "Rating manipulation" covers content "based on a conflict of interest", which includes "industry competitors, familial relationships". "Impersonation", "Misrepresentation", "Personal information" and "Offensive content" each have their own wording. Tripadvisor's grounds are different again and are listed under its own headings. Quote the clause verbatim into the report. A report that describes the unfairness in your own words is answered by a machine that was looking for a category.

3. **Match every ground to a document you can open today.** No booking under that name on that date, from the booking system. No table for six that evening, from the till. The dish they complain about has not been on the menu since March, from a dated menu file. The account has reviewed four venues in one town within an hour, from the public profile. A named member of staff who was not working, from the rota. One ground with one document beats five grounds with an account of what you remember. Write each pair down: clause, evidence, where the evidence lives.

4. **Use the unglamorous grounds, because they succeed more often than the dramatic ones.** Tripadvisor will not post a review from someone who was not a guest: "If you did not experience the business as a guest or potential guest, we will not post your review", and "We will not post reviews from customers who only relay a brief phone conversation with a property or property representative." It removes "Comments solely on a property's policy", "Comments solely on business hours or closures" unless the posted information created an expectation of service, and "Unsuccessful attempts to contact a business", noting that "We do not consider unanswered calls or emails to be a valid description of the service provided by the business". It also removes reviews commenting on media coverage of an event the writer was not present at, and enforces a window: "all reviews must be submitted within one year of your experience". Several of the reviews that most annoy owners fall into one of those boxes.

5. **If you think it is a competitor, say so through the tool and not in a reply.** Tripadvisor's instruction is specific: "If you believe a review has been written by the owner or competitor of a listing on Tripadvisor, please use the reporting function on our site to let us know. Reviews that allege other posted reviews are fraudulent will not be posted as that information does not relate to your travel experience." So you may report it and you may not write about it anywhere public, including under another review. The platform also names the behaviour it is looking for, "Vandalism", meaning attempts "made by individuals affiliated with one property, to damage the reputation of a competing property", and gives a route for a pattern rather than a single review, an email address for content integrity published on the same page.

6. **Submit through the route the platform documents, and record the status it gives back.** On Google that is the profile itself, "Go to your Business Profile. Select Read reviews. Next to the review that you'd like to flag, select Report", or the Reviews Management Tool for tracking. Google says "Review evaluation typically takes several days" and returns one of three statuses: "Decision pending", "Report reviewed - no policy violation", or "Escalated - check your email for updates". Write the status and the date into your log rather than trusting memory, because the next step depends on which of the three you got.

7. **Spend the appeal carefully, because there is one.** Google's wording is "If a flagged review doesn't qualify for removal, submit a one-time appeal", made through the Reviews Management Tool, where "You can select up to 10 reviews" and the outcome arrives by email. One appeal means you do not appeal in temper the same afternoon. Go back to step 3, find the document you did not attach, and use the appeal to supply evidence rather than to restate the complaint. If several invented reviews arrived together, appeal them as one batch, because a pattern is more persuasive than a single account and the tool is built to take up to ten.

8. **If the platform refuses and the statement is genuinely false and damaging, there is a statutory route, and it belongs to your solicitor.** Section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 gives a website operator a defence for a statement it did not post, but section 5(3) says that defence "is defeated if the claimant shows that" the poster could not be identified, "the claimant gave the operator a notice of complaint", and the operator failed to respond as the regulations require. The regulations then set what the notice must contain and what happens next: the operator has 48 hours to pass it to the poster, and the poster has until "midnight at the end of the date specified in the notification as the deadline for responding (which must be the 5th day after the day on which the notification is sent)". Where the operator "has no means of contacting the poster", it "must, within 48 hours of receiving a notice of complaint, remove the statement". This skill prepares the contents of that notice. It does not send it, and nobody should send one without advice.

9. **Log it, and know the three things that turn your problem into your offence.** Do not offer the reviewer anything to take it down, do not pressure them, and do not answer a fake review by adding reviews of your own. Paragraph 13(1) of Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans submitting or commissioning a fake consumer review, and the CMA's guidance warns traders not to "limit access to and/or the impact of negative reviews by editing, withholding or removing such reviews". Removing a genuine negative review is the same family of conduct as inventing a positive one. Keep the log: the review, the date, the clause claimed, the evidence attached, the status, the appeal, the outcome and the date of each.

## Then it checks

1. The review has been sorted as removable or not removable, and every not removable review has been handed to the reply process with the reason recorded and no report submitted.
2. Every ground claimed is a verbatim quotation from the platform's own published policy, with the URL of that page and the date it was read.
3. Every ground is paired with at least one piece of evidence that exists as a document or a screen today, named by system and date, with no ground resting on recollection alone.
4. The report contains no accusation about a named individual, no contact details of the reviewer, no reference to any offer made to the reviewer, and no claim the evidence does not support.
5. The log records the submission date, the status returned, and whether the single appeal has been used, and no appeal has been submitted before the first report returned a status.
6. Nothing anywhere in the process offers the reviewer money, refunds, vouchers or goods, applies pressure to remove the review, or adds a review of the venue written by anyone connected to it.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is. A report submitted by the manager is signed by the manager and the owner is told it went.
- It will refuse to build a report for a review the evidence shows is genuine, however unfair, inaccurate or damaging it is. A genuine negative review removed on a false ground is the conduct the CMA describes as limiting access to negative reviews, and it wastes the one appeal on the review you might actually have needed it for.
- Never contact the reviewer to ask them to remove or change the review, and never offer them anything. Both are prohibited by the platforms' own rules and the second can amount to commissioning a fake review.
- Never write, buy or ask anyone for a positive review to dilute a bad one. That is the banned practice itself, not a defence against it.
- Never name a member of staff, a suspected competitor or any individual in a public reply about a suspected fake review. Suspicions go through the reporting tool; there is no version of this that belongs under the review.
- Never state a removal rate, a success rate for appeals, a typical turnaround or any figure about how many reports succeed. Google publishes no such figure, no reliable one exists for UK venues, and an owner who expects a number will keep reporting past the point of usefulness.
- Never claim a review has been removed until you have looked at the live listing and seen that it is gone. A status message is not the page.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner to check against their own records, and for their solicitor to check before anything described as a notice of complaint under section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 is sent to anybody. It sets out published platform policies and published law and lines up the owner's own evidence against them; it is not legal advice, it is not a defamation assessment, and it is not a prediction that a review will be removed.

## Built from
- Google, "Report inappropriate reviews on your Business Profile", Google Business Profile Help, https://support.google.com/business/answer/4596773, no publication date shown on the page, read 16 September 2026: the eligibility warning in step 1, the reporting route and the three statuses in step 6, and the one time appeal with its ten review limit in step 7.
- Google, "Prohibited and restricted content", Maps User Contributed Content Policy, https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114, no publication date shown on the page, read 16 September 2026: the named categories quoted in step 2, including fake engagement, rating manipulation, conflict of interest, impersonation, misrepresentation and personal information.
- Tripadvisor, "Trust and safety review posting guidelines", https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Trust-lvBd3L1aU38Y.html, no publication date shown on the page, read 16 September 2026: the first hand experience requirement and the second hand phone call exclusion in step 4, the ineligible experience categories and the one year window in step 4, and the competitor reporting instruction and vandalism definition in step 5.
- Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Schedule 20, paragraph 13, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/schedule/20/paragraph/13/enacted, Act of Parliament given Royal Assent in 2024, read 16 September 2026: the ban on submitting or commissioning a fake consumer review, which is the boundary in step 9 and in the rules.
- Competition and Markets Authority, "Fake reviews" (CMA208), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67eeb64fe9c76fa33048c790/CMA208_-_Fake_reviews_guidance.pdf, published 4 April 2025, read 16 September 2026: paragraph 4.4, including the distinction that suppressing fake negative reviews is important while suppressing genuine ones is problematic, which is why step 1 sorts before it reports.
- Defamation Act 2013, section 5, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26/section/5/enacted, Act of Parliament 2013, read 16 September 2026: the website operator defence, how it is defeated, and the contents a notice of complaint must have, in step 8.
- The Defamation (Operators of Websites) Regulations 2013, regulation 2 and the Schedule, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3028/regulation/2/made and https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3028/schedule/made, SI 2013/3028, read 16 September 2026: the additional information a notice must specify and the 48 hour and fifth day timings quoted in step 8.

# fake-review-takedown

## You are given
The reviews the owner believes are invented, exported from the platform, each with the review identifier, the platform, the posting date, the rating, the reviewer display name, the reviewer profile URL where public, the full review text and the date claimed for the visit if the review states one. The sort already made by Claude for each review: `removable` or `not removable`, with the reason. For each `removable` review, the ground or grounds claimed, each supplied as a verbatim quotation from the platform's own policy page together with that page's URL and the date it was read. The owner's evidence list: one row per document, saying what the document is, which system it came from, its date, and what it shows. The venue's records for each claimed visit date: bookings, covers, till transactions, rota, menu in force. Any previous report log with submission dates, statuses and appeal use. For any review going to the statutory route, the complainant's name, an email address for contact, the meaning attributed to the statement, which aspects are said to be factually inaccurate and which are said to be opinions unsupported by fact, and the owner's decision on whether their name and email may be passed to the poster.

## Produce
Write into a `./fake-review-takedown-output/` folder:

1. `reviews.csv` with these columns in this order: `review_ref`, `platform`, `posted_date`, `claimed_visit_date`, `rating`, `reviewer_display_name`, `reviewer_profile_url`, `review_text_verbatim`, `sort`, `sort_reason`, `days_since_claimed_visit`. `review_ref` is F0001 upward. `sort` is `removable` or `not removable`. `sort_reason` is exactly one of `matches a quoted policy ground`, `genuine but negative`, `disagreement about facts only`, `outside the platform's stated window`, `no policy ground found`.
2. `grounds.csv` with columns: `review_ref`, `ground_ref`, `policy_category`, `policy_text_verbatim`, `policy_url`, `policy_read_date`, `strength`. `ground_ref` is G01 upward within each review. `strength` is exactly one of `documented`, `partly documented`, `assertion only`. Any `assertion only` row is listed in `gaps.md`.
3. `evidence-map.csv` with columns: `review_ref`, `ground_ref`, `evidence_ref`, `evidence_type`, `source_system`, `evidence_date`, `what_it_shows`, `held_today`. `evidence_type` is exactly one of `booking record`, `till transaction`, `rota`, `menu in force`, `reservation diary`, `door or CCTV log`, `public reviewer profile`, `correspondence`, `photograph`, `other`. `held_today` is `yes` or `no`, and `no` means the ground is downgraded to `assertion only` in `grounds.csv`.
4. `report-text.md` - one section per `removable` review, each containing only: the review reference, the quoted policy ground, and the evidence references. Copied verbatim from the input; no new sentences are written here. Any review with no quoted ground gets an empty section and appears in `gaps.md`.
5. `report-log.csv` with columns: `review_ref`, `submitted_date`, `route`, `submitted_by`, `status`, `status_date`, `appeal_used`, `appeal_date`, `appeal_outcome`, `live_listing_checked_date`, `review_still_visible`. `route` is exactly one of `profile flag`, `reviews management tool`, `platform content integrity email`, `other`. `status` is exactly one of `decision pending`, `report reviewed - no policy violation`, `escalated`, `removed`, `no status returned`. `appeal_used` is `yes` or `no`. Appended to any previous log, never overwritten.
6. `notice-of-complaint-fields.csv` with columns: `review_ref`, `field`, `value_verbatim`, `supplied`. One row per required field: `complainant name`, `the statement complained of`, `why it is defamatory of the complainant`, `where on the website it was posted`, `electronic mail address for contact`, `the meaning attributed to the statement`, `aspects said to be factually inaccurate`, `aspects said to be opinions not supported by fact`, `confirmation of insufficient information to bring proceedings`, `consent to release name to the poster`, `consent to release email to the poster`. `supplied` is `yes` or `no`. This file records what the owner has and has not provided. It is not a notice and is not to be sent.
7. `gaps.md` - a numbered list of: every ground with no evidence row; every `assertion only` ground; every evidence row where `held_today` is `no`; every `removable` review with no quoted policy text or no policy URL; every appeal recorded before a status was returned; every review where `review_still_visible` is `yes` more than thirty days after a `removed` status; every `notice-of-complaint-fields.csv` row where `supplied` is `no`; and every `not removable` review for which a report was nonetheless logged.

## Rules
- Codex matches, cites, maps and logs. It never decides that a review is fake, never writes a report, never writes a notice of complaint, and never drafts an argument. Every judgement arrives with the input.
- Never write a policy ground in your own words. A ground is a verbatim quotation from a named policy page with a URL and a read date, or it is not a ground.
- Never upgrade a ground's strength. A ground with no evidence row is `assertion only`, whatever the input says, and that is recorded rather than argued with.
- Never write, suggest or record any offer to a reviewer, any request that a reviewer change or remove a review, or any text of a review of the venue. All three are the banned practice in Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and none belongs in any file.
- Never build a report for a review whose sort is `not removable`. Record it, list it in `gaps.md` if one exists in the input, and write no report section for it.
- Never write a removal rate, an appeal success rate, a typical turnaround or any figure about how many reports succeed. No published figure exists.
- Never record a review as removed without a `live_listing_checked_date` and a `review_still_visible` value read from the live page. A platform status is not the page.
- Counts and date arithmetic are computed, never estimated. `days_since_claimed_visit` is computed from the supplied dates, and any review whose claimed visit date is missing is recorded as missing rather than guessed.
- Every quoted review, policy line, status and field value is copied exactly, including punctuation, capitalisation and any emoji.
- Never submit a report, never connect to a platform's management centre or API, never email a platform, and never contact a reviewer.
- Use British English, GBP and DD Month YYYY dates. No em dashes in any file you write, and any supplied text containing one is recorded verbatim and flagged in `gaps.md`.
- Every file ends with this line: this is a working document prepared for the owner to check against their own records, and for their solicitor to check before anything described as a notice of complaint under section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 is sent. It applies supplied policy text to supplied evidence and is not legal advice.

## Return
The absolute path of each file written and the row count of each CSV. The count of reviews by sort and the count of each `sort_reason`. For every `removable` review, the policy category and the first fifteen words of the quoted ground, the number of evidence rows attached and the strength recorded. Every ground with no evidence and every evidence row not held today. The number of reports logged, the count of each status, the number of appeals used and how many reviews remain visible on the live listing with the date each listing was last checked. Every `notice-of-complaint-fields.csv` row where `supplied` is `no`, by review. Any report logged against a `not removable` review. And the `gaps.md` item count.