Online restaurant reviews can be helpful, or misleading.

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Something to ponder the next time you’re deciding whether to order from a new restaurant and looking to online reviews for help.

An East Dallas McDonald’s, hardly anyone’s idea of haute cuisine, has a 4.5 rating out of 5 on Uber Eats. That’s higher than the site’s ratings for Smokey Joe’s BBQ, which is on the Observer’s list of the area’s top 50 restaurants.

An exception? Hardly. Look at online ratings and reviews, including the three major delivery services and Yelp, and you see that contradictions like this abound. The Einstein Bros. Bagels in a strip center on Mockingbird Lane, again, not likely to be confused with a neighborhood bagel shop in Brooklyn, scores 2.6 on Yelp but 4.6 on Grubhub.

In other words, as SMU’s Venky Shankar, PhD, chair of the Cox School of Business marketing department, reminded me recently, online reviews aren’t worth much, never have been, and probably won’t ever be. That’s because they’re not necessarily there to help diners find a good place to eat, but to sell product. That’s the point of Amazon’s years-long battle against fake reviews, which has included lawsuits against – believe it or not – what the company calls “fake review brokers.” 

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Meanwhile, advances in AI technology, which allow what seems to be actual writing from real people instead of machine gobbledygook, have made it even harder to spot traditional fake reviews, like those with five stars but a one-line comment. 

The wisdom of the crowd was supposed to save us from this. The theory assumes a large group is smarter than its smartest individual, so its conclusions are more valid. In other words, 100 people reviewing a restaurant would offer a “better” assessment than a single professional reviewer. The Internet, with its potential for millions of reviews on the same subject, was supposed to show the wisdom of the crowd at its finest.

Which, given a 4.5 rating for a McDonald’s, really hasn’t happened.

So how can you use online restaurant reviews, allowing for all of this? Keep these guidelines in mind:

• Dates. The third-party delivery services are notorious for showcasing positive reviews, even if they’re two or three years old (see the 2024 review for the NorthPark-area Norma’s on DoorDash). That’s bad enough, but in this restaurant environment, where operators are cutting costs and quality is suffering, older reviews are even less accurate. So go past the front page to check out the more recent reviews.

• Number of reviews. More is better, even with the wisdom-of-the-crowd fallacy, says Shankar. A handful of glowing reviews, or even negative ones, won’t be as representative as hundreds.

• Perspective. What’s the reviewer looking for? If all they want is coffee and a biscuit and a seat at McDonald’s to kill a morning, a 4.5 isn’t out of the question. But someone who gives a high rating for a sodium-laced, oddly sweet Quarter Pounder with Cheese probably has different standards than those of us who want something a little less chain-like. So their rating can be discounted. Yelp reviews can take perspective to extremes, with ratings downgraded because of “surly” employees, changed opening hours, or restaurant policies that annoy the reviewer, none of which have anything to do with the quality of the food.

Because, in the end, if you like the food, what anyone else thinks doesn’t really matter.