Client case study
How one McDonald's owner/operator took back their stores' ratings
An anonymized look at our work with a multi-store McDonald's franchisee. At the owner's request, we share the process — not the name, the locations, or the numbers.
A multi-store McDonald's owner/operator in the U.S.
The situation
This owner ran several McDonald's restaurants in the same metro area. The stores were busy and the teams were solid, but the Google ratings told a different story: old reviews about staff who had left years earlier, one-star ratings with no text, and a cluster of angry reviews that arrived after a local news story that had nothing to do with the restaurants.
Like most owner/operators, they had no time to learn Google's review policies, and no one on staff owned the problem. The ratings sat there, shaping what every hungry guest saw first.
What we did first
We audited every review on every store's Google Business Profile against Google's content policies. Most negative reviews were genuine guest feedback — those stay, and we never try to remove them. But a meaningful share broke the rules: fake engagement, off-topic rants, and reviews from accounts that showed no sign of ever visiting.
We documented each violation with the specific policy it broke, reported the reviews through Google's official channels, and tracked every report to a decision instead of assuming one click was enough.
When a store went viral for the wrong reason
Midway through the engagement, a wave of off-topic one-star reviews hit one store after a news event. We treated it as review bombing: documented the pattern, reported the reviews the same day, and escalated until Google removed them — the same outcome Google confirmed publicly when it pulled off-topic reviews from the Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's in December 2024.
Building the routine
Removal is only half the job. We set up monitoring across all of the owner's stores so new reviews are seen the day they post, wrote response templates the owner approved, and trained the team on when to respond, when to report, and when to fix something in the restaurant instead.
What changed
- Policy-violating reviews reported, tracked and removed through Google's official process
- Every store monitored daily instead of checked when someone remembered
- A response routine the owner's team now runs without us
Published with the owner's permission. Names, locations and metrics are withheld at their request. Nothing here is a composite or an illustration.
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Reputation Medics is an independent company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by McDonald's Corporation. McDonald's is a trademark of McDonald's Corporation, used here only to identify the businesses we serve.