Platformised sacrality: rating, reviewing, and picturing Amsterdam’s mosques on Google Maps

Platform studies and digital religion scholarship rarely meet. Taking Amsterdam’s mosques as its case, this article analyses 62 mosques through 7,656 Google Maps reviews and 1,908 user-uploaded images (2012–2025) to show that platformisation reconfigures the conditions under which religious sites become findable, evaluable, and visible. ‘Platformised sacrality’ names this condition, in which places of worship are at once sites of devotion and platform objects, rated and photographed through an interface built without reference to religious traditions. Attention is radically concentrated; evaluation quadrupled in a single month through a change in platform prompting rather than anything at the mosques, even as its annual peak drifts with the lunar calendar of Ramadan. Review discourse remains predominantly devotional, the visual regime strikingly stable. Because the interface offers no field for marking a place as set apart, sacralising work migrates into its one unstructured slot, performed by users, not by platform or mosque.