Google’s Local Guide program: Wins, woes and what’s next?

Is becoming a local guide worth the investment of your time and energy?

As we approach the 10th anniversary of this major Google program, evaluating its successes and failures will help you answer this question for yourself.

What is Google’s Local Guides program?

Google’s Local Guides program is an open-source project that allows contributors, officially called “Local Guides,” to upload photos, answers, reviews, edits and other content to Google Maps and related Search products in exchange for benefits, including points and perks. 

Key Google Local Guides moments

• 2015: Google rolls its City Experts into its new Local Guides program.
• 2016: Google gamifies the program by offering Local Guides points in exchange for activities like photo uploads and listing edits and perks like one terabyte of free storage; 5 million users signed up to be Local Guides within this first year.
• 2019: Within four years of launching, Google’s Local Guides program attracted 120 million members in 24,000 global locations.
• 2023: 150 million Local Guides had signed up to participate.
• 2024: Google celebrates the 8th anniversary of its Local Guides Connect website and forum, designed to bring Local Guides together and promote the program’s achievements.

Google has successfully engaged millions of people worldwide over the past decade with its Local Guides program.

With 150 million active participants, the program shows how appealing it is to earn rewards by contributing to Google’s local information.

The greatest rate of participant growth was in the three years following the launch of perks, but the program continues to bring in new users.

You can read more about the program in Google’s documentation.

What aspects of Google’s Local Guides program are problematic?

An awkward stance on incentives

While the Local Guides program is undeniably popular, local SEO practitioners pointed out an emerging gray area when Google began incentivizing contributions to the system in 2016.

Most significantly, it’s been Google’s long-standing policy that local business reviews should never be incentivized. The “Prohibited and restricted content” policy expressly forbids:

“Content that has been posted due to an incentive offered by a business – such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services.”

Google wants this to be understood as a restriction on local business owners offering people gifts, free meals, coupons and other perks in exchange for reviews. 

However, unless Google does not consider itself a “business,” it appears to be violating its own guidelines by enticing Local Guides with bonuses as a reward for reviews and other contributions. 

Some see no problem with this scenario, but others find the dynamic uncomfortable because it feels inconsistent that Google incentivizes review content while telling business owners never to do so.

An erosion of quality: business abuse of UGC

The concern about providing incentives for user-generated content (UGC) is that it can lead to a decline in the overall quality of that content.

Local business owners are real people. Their companies serve real-world communities.

It can be worrisome to see an entity as dominant as Google treat brick-and-mortar and service area business brands (and the livelihoods they represent) like a video game where players earn points. This approach to actual reality strikes some observers as out-of-touch, immature or even arrogant.

Look at the following collage and ask yourself whether the Local Guides here made these contributions to the Google Business Profile Q&A sections of multiple businesses to whip up some points or to genuinely benefit a neighbor and a community:

At first, it seems mysterious that people who don’t know the answers to questions about local businesses are spending so much time providing non-answers to their neighbors. 

It becomes clearer when one notes that all of the responses in the above screenshots originate from Google’s Local Guides, who are gaming for points and perks.

These non-answers help no one – and Google’s product quality suffers from them. 

Unfortunately, even a brief investigation of other Google Business Profile features surfaces similar pollution. Local Guides are uploading questionable reviews, poor-quality photos and useless answers on the profiles of millions of businesses. 

Providing incentives for creating content seems to go against Google’s emphasis on producing helpful content, even if Google itself isn’t the author. It’s also true that any review content, regardless of whether it’s incentivized, can be completely unhelpful. 

Motives behind Local Guide contributions

Many Local Guides volunteer because they genuinely want to contribute positively to the communities where they live or travel. They have a sincere interest in mapping applications and a desire to promote great nearby businesses.

However, a significant number of participants are using their free time to exploit the system for personal gain.

It’s a bit perplexing, given that none of Google’s rewards could be considered extravagant. It takes quite a bit of time to write even nonsensical answers and reviews, and it can be hard to imagine having so much time on your hands that you’d spend hours spamming a platform in hopes of an unguaranteed pair of socks. 

When the player’s motivation is praiseworthy, helpful content can benefit real-world communities. But Google’s motivation for turning hospitals, food banks, financial institutions and other vital local resources into a kind of “Candy Crush Saga” or “Stardew Valley” may deserve further scrutiny, especially when we look at the impact of this attitude on both human searchers and SERP quality. 

What are the positive aspects of Google’s Local Guides program?

If you’re considering whether to “get with the program,” it may help to look at these examples, drawn from Reddit, of why some people sign up to become Local Guides:

These reasons can be grouped into a few key motivations:

• It’s a fun hobby.
• Community value.
• Personal bragging rights.
• Promote local hidden gems.
• A reason to practice photography skills.

If any of these stories resonate, you might make a good Local Guide and experience personal satisfaction from participating. 

Local SEO Mike Blumenthal’s biographic Confessions of a Local Guide details his love/hate relationship with the program (and with Google Maps in general). 

On the one hand, there’s the excitement of going to a new town and photographing its antique shops while his wife is browsing. On the other hand, there’s his frustration that even his worst photos would be accepted by Google, downgrading results quality.

He even hints at how the program could lead to extortion, and there are some slippery slope conversations like this one from Reddit:

“You can monetize your work as a Google local guide. There is a whole marketing space for that. Many businesses look for local guides to help them on various marketing related activities on Google maps. Look for local SEO groups on Facebook and you will see. 

Some examples: some bad actors spam businesses with fake reviews, clearly fake but Google won’t take them down and it’s lowering a business rating. Local guides could mark those reviews as non-helpful and Google removed them. You get compensated by the business or marketing agency providing services to that business.

Another one is recommending business name changes. There are some businesses that play the SEO game where they change their business name to add keywords in it. That is against Google guidelines but Google is very slow to change that. Local guides can request a change in names. You may be compensated by the marketing agency running competitor businesses.”

The main lesson here?

Google Local Guides often enjoy the experience if they think of it as helping people without any need for a reward. 

Has Google’s Local Guides program been a success or failure?

Many countries have moved from using traditional phone books to online mapping apps and search to find nearby resources.

One way to measure success is by checking if Google’s packs, Maps and other local tools provide enough information to connect people with local businesses.

Using this yardstick, it’s clear that the world’s 150 million Local Guides have significantly contributed content that searchers can easily discover. 

Google has unquestionably succeeded in attracting a massive membership to this program over the past decade.

Many individuals get a sense of personal accomplishment and community from this initiative and offer valuable help to neighbors and local business owners.

Seen in this light, the entire venture has tons of merit.

When we try to use that same ruler to measure quality, the program’s shortcomings become apparent.

The ethical questions of whether it’s right to incentivize GBP content or to treat real-world businesses as the building blocks of a game should be further explored.

After all, your hometown shouldn’t be confused with a Monopoly board. Nor should users’ YMYL search queries be answered by trolls simply fooling around with local business listings. 

What’s next?

Ten years in, perhaps we can see that Google’s experiment can legitimately be viewed as both a success and a failure. I am curious about what they will do next with the program.

As a long-time local business advocate, I’d like to see the gamification reconsidered and the Local Guides program continue.