Your Foursquare reviews on Foursquare or anywhere online matter because bots exist. These bots are crawling all web content all the time. They don’t discriminate between a review on an industry site and a review on something like Foursquare.

Imagine someone walking into your store. They are irritable and abusive to your employee. They tell your employee that she looks fat in her uniform. They try to negotiate for lower prices. Finally, they put a deposit down on a blonde oak package. A few hours later, they call and change the amount that they need. The next day, they call and change the color, each time making the order more and more complicated. It’s almost guaranteed that something will go wrong in a situation like this.

And when something does go wrong, these people run to every site that they can – saying that your business cheated them. Warning people to stay away from you, detering new customers and eroding the trust of customers who have only had a few dealings with you. That’s the most important reason why Foursquare reviews matter at all.

Google and Bing and other aggregating sites don’t just count reviews on their platform- they search for every time your business is mentioned online. Have you ever used Bing? If you have ever had Siri look something up for you, you’ve used Bing. The inner workings of how we get the information that we do aren’t always apparent!

They can’t determine the legitimacy of a review, they can only authenticate the reviewer. So, if your former client starts a smear campaign against you, you are in trouble all over the internet, not just in one corner.