“Better Homes & Gardens never mentioned conducting tests prior to the Google Product Review Update in July 2022.”
By July 26th, one day before Google announced its update, Better Homes & Gardens said it had tested 38 air purifiers. Dotdash Meredith reuses the same photos across its magazines and ranks the same picks at the top of Google. HouseFresh has published over 60 hands-on reviews and watches its traffic drain away. Google wrote rules for helpful reviews and then handed the top spots to whoever learned to fake the signals.