Anyone who has used Google Maps to find a restaurant while traveling abroad has encountered the same frustrating phenomenon: a place with a gleaming 5-star rating, enthusiastic photos, and a prominent position in the results — that turns out to be mediocre, nearly empty of locals, or occasionally a listing that exists primarily to farm tourist traffic.
The problem is structural: Google's default restaurant ranking has long prioritized star rating without adequately weighting the number of reviews behind that rating. A restaurant with a perfect 5.0 score from 12 reviews can outrank a beloved local institution with a 4.4 from 2,000 reviews. For travelers making quick decisions in unfamiliar cities, this has been a consistent source of misdirection.
A post appearing simultaneously on r/travel and r/digitalnomad on the same day suggests Google has quietly addressed this with a new filter option.
What the update actually does
Travelers using Google Maps in Colombia noticed a new filter when searching for restaurants: the ability to set a minimum review count. The practical application is immediate: filter for restaurants with 4.5+ stars AND 1,000+ reviews, and the results shift dramatically toward places with genuine, volume-verified reputations rather than algorithmically boosted newcomers or astroturfed venues.
As one traveler reported after a week using the feature across Colombia: "Been eating some great food." Simple testimony, but meaningful — the filter is working as intended.
Why fake reviews have been such a persistent travel problem
The fake review economy in travel destinations is well-documented. Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe — popular digital nomad hubs where Google Maps is the primary restaurant discovery tool — have been particularly affected. Review farms, reciprocal rating exchanges between local business owners, and newly-opened restaurants padding their scores with family reviews have consistently degraded the reliability of ratings in high-tourism areas.
For travelers spending limited time in a new city, a single bad restaurant recommendation wastes not just money but irreplaceable time. In places like Medellín, Bangkok, or Tbilisi, where the restaurant scene is dense and the gap between tourist-trap and genuinely great is significant, reliable food discovery has real stakes.
The rollout appears uneven
Both travelers who reported the feature noted they were in Colombia when they discovered it, and expressed uncertainty about whether it has been deployed globally. The feature does not appear to be widely documented in Google's official update materials, suggesting a staged rollout rather than a full global launch.
Travelers who want to test whether they have access: open Google Maps, search for restaurants in any location, and look for a filter option related to review count or number of ratings in the filter bar alongside options for price range and distance.
The broader lesson for travel food discovery
Even without this specific update, the principle it encodes is a useful general heuristic: a restaurant with 4.3 stars and 3,000 reviews is almost always a safer bet than one with 4.9 and 40 reviews. Volume creates a self-correcting mechanism that individual inflated ratings cannot replicate.
For the many travelers who use Google Maps as their primary food guide abroad, this filter — if it rolls out globally — represents a meaningful quality-of-life improvement for every meal in every unfamiliar city.
