Once Google Maps becomes so important to the survival of restaurants it ceases to be a useful tool and becomes a thing to be gamed.

Data mining it like Lauren Leek has done here is one way of dealing with that situation but it would be nice if this led to more sustainable approaches to the problem.

Platform transparency and auditability are no longer niche tech debates; they are quietly becoming tools of local economic policy. At minimum, ranking algorithms with this much economic consequence should be auditable.

https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-allocates