The more consumers use our platform and share their own opinions; the richer the insights we offer businesses; and the more opportunities they have to earn the trust of consumers, from all around the world. Trust in online reviews has never been more important as consumers increasingly look to buy goods and services online. At Trustpilot, we’re surfacing what we do and giving everyone more understanding and greater confidence in the information on our platform. The global platform continues to provide increased insight into how every business is obtaining, reporting and responding to reviews through its Business Transparency pages.
By mastering these techniques, you transform a potentially misleading tool into a true decision-making compass. Directly comparing two companies’ ratings without accounting for their platform status. Specifically, a paying company can schedule review invitations 7 days after purchase—when satisfaction is at its peak—while avoiding customers who have contacted customer support.
Look for details such as what was purchased, when it happened, how the company responded, and what the final result was. But they can also suggest review manipulation. Trustpilot reviews are not automatically fake, but manipulation can happen.
In March 2026, the Italian Competition Authority fined Trustpilot $4.6 million for misleading customers regarding how its services worked and failing to verify review authenticity. On 16 September 2025, the company announced a share buyback program worth up to £30 million. Additionally, 469,000 companies reported fake reviews, and around 90,000 fake reviews were removed by consumers.
It has been criticised for its hosting of fake reviews, and for allowing companies to remove negative reviews. Each profile now displays a consumer alert, warning consumers about these companies. “Since further concerns have been raised we have launched a deeper investigation and removed further fabricated reviews from each profile. “We have previously taken action against the companies mentioned, removing fabricated reviews and issuing both warnings and legal cease and desist letters for guideline breaches,” the spokesperson said. The exact names of companies are used in this article, as such entities often imitate or reference real businesses.
The group, which also includes workplace review site Glassdoor and review platform Trustpilot, will share information on www.rating.solutions deterring fraudsters. In conclusion, exposing fake reviews on platforms like Trustpilot is crucial for maintaining trust and credibility in online reviews. Trustpilot’s content integrity team employs a multi-layered approach to verify reviews, combining automated technologies and manual review processes to assess authenticity. Companies should engage with genuine customer feedback, both positive and negative, and demonstrate a commitment to resolving issues and improving their products or services. In some cases, companies may face legal action from consumer protection agencies or competitors.
As a home tech expert, I beg you: don’t run these appliances on a power station
Coordinated fake review campaigns may give rise to unfair competition claims and FTC enforcement in addition to defamation claims depending on the evidence. This documentation supports your flagging requests and any legal escalation. When a Trustpilot review contains demonstrably false statements of fact that have caused measurable harm, and Trustpilot has not removed it, a cease and desist letter to the reviewer or a defamation claim are options. This process is slower than automated flagging but produces better results for clear violations that the system missed. After a denial, contact Trustpilot’s business support team directly rather than re-flagging. When that happens, your practical options are escalation, legal recourse for genuinely defamatory content, and parallel action on review volume.
What are the biggest red flags of a fake review?
Lawyerd does not remove or suppress lawful, genuine customer reviews; we challenge content that is fake, defamatory, or in breach of the platform’s terms. Buying or seeding positive fakes can get your store penalised under the FTC’s review rule and torched by Google’s and Trustpilot’s detection systems, destroying the trust you were trying to build. This checker is a triage aid that tells you where to look more closely; the real verification comes from the reviewer’s purchase history, account age, review velocity, and whether the order can be matched to a real transaction. The result is a continuous stream of genuine, purchase-verified social proof, the single best antidote to fakes on either side. No detector will fully police the reviews on your store, the durable strategy is to make authentic reviews so plentiful that fakes are diluted and easy to spot. The checker above helps you triage both, but the structural fix is to flood your listings with verified reviews from real, recent buyers so authentic voices dominate.
With a claimed profile, businesses can easily access all their customer reviews directly on their Trustpilot profile page. The platform also encourages businesses to reply to reviews if they’ve claimed their profile (a simple step that verifies their ownership) on Trustpilot. Businesses can share review generation forms or add a QR scanner to their feedback form. To boost credibility, businesses can send automated review requests directly to customers after a purchase or interaction. Trustpilot is a transparent review platform, which means anyone with a genuine experience – good or bad – can share a review without having to wait for an invitation.
A small business at 3.9 stars with a basic profile may actually deliver service equivalent to a large enterprise displaying 4.4 stars with all premium tools activated. Premium companies can immediately respond to negative reviews, publicly propose solutions, and sometimes discreetly negotiate modifications. Here’s exactly how Trustpilot’s verification works, where fake reviews still slip through, what Reddit users say about the platform, and how Stripe-verified reviews offer a structurally different alternative.
But it says there is only a small difference in scores between those paying it to send invitations and those businesses that are active but using a free plan. Trustpilot acknowledges companies that regularly ask customers for reviews tend to have higher star ratings. She explained the large discrepancy between actions taken on business complaints versus consumer ones as being the result of other companies having more insight into the issue too. However, in recent years the firm has made efforts to tackle such activity, most recently switching to leaving flagged reviews online until it has completed an investigation.
Checking Trustpilot reviews for fakes
Some also claimed positive, verified reviews vanished after refusing paid service upgrades, raising concerns over editorial independence. SafePaper cites widespread evidence, backed by investigations from The Guardian, that some companies buy fake five-star reviews through freelance marketplaces. Its paid plans offer tools like review invitations, analytics, and TrustBox widgets that highlight only selected reviews, usually the positive ones. That transparency is at the core of the approach we take when it comes to using and developing AI tools for our platform and is something that consumers increasingly come to expect While AI and machine learning continue to rapidly evolve, generative AI tools allow written information to be quickly created from a few simple prompts. Sign up for the free trial of SocialPilot Reviews and start collecting authentic reviews to build long-term brand credibility.
The platform’s content integrity team works tirelessly to detect, investigate, and remove fake reviews to ensure that consumers have access to genuine customer feedback. Laws targeting fake reviews aim to prohibit businesses from creating a misleading impression of their products or services through deceptive means. The increasing prevalence of fake reviews has prompted legislative action in various countries, aiming to protect consumers and businesses from deceptive practices.