How Trustpilot works
We’re open to all. Reviews are published without moderation.
How do reviews get on Trustpilot?
Reviews on Trustpilot are written by consumers from across the globe. Anyone who has had a buying or service experience in the past 12 months can write a review, for free, as long as they have a Trustpilot user account, follow our Guidelines for Reviewers, and don’t have a conflict of interest with the business they’re reviewing. A user account must be connected to an email address so we can get in touch for account- and service- related issues.
All reviews about a business are shown on their profile page. This is where consumers can read and write reviews, and find other relevant information about the business, such as the overall TrustScore and star rating.
A Trustpilot review can start in two ways:
Consumers
Consumers who've had an experience with a business can create a Trustpilot account and write an unsolicited review. We call these "organic reviews".
Businesses
Businesses can ask their customers to leave a review using our invitation methods, for free. Businesses should ensure there is no bias in the way they invite their customers to review them, and they’re not allowed to offer any sort of payment or incentive for reviews.
Being open is in our DNA
Trustpilot was created in 2007 as an independent, open platform that sits between businesses and consumers, and empowers both by enabling collaboration.
We allow anyone to post a review, which prevents businesses from pre-screening or moderating what consumers actually read. This is one of the key ways we’re different from ‘closed’ or pay-to-access platforms where companies collect reviews as marketing collateral and can publish the reviews they like and ‘unpublish’ those they don’t (either after the fact or by pre-screening).
This is never the case on Trustpilot. We publish all reviews without moderation.
Consumers own their reviews
We consider reviews to be user-generated content owned by their author, and they are the only one who can edit or permanently delete their reviews. This can be done through their user account.
Unless a user permanently deletes their individual reviews, we keep reviews for as long as the user has a Trustpilot account. When a user deletes their account, all of their reviews are also permanently deleted. This is outlined in the 'How long do we store your personal data?' section of our Privacy Policy.
Fighting fake reviews
Every review on Trustpilot is screened by our bespoke automated fraud detection software that identifies and removes fakes. It looks at multiple data points, such as IP addresses, user identifiers, device characteristics, location data and timestamps, to determine if it exhibits patterns of suspicious behavior.
Whenever our software detects clearly fraudulent reviews, the review is moved offline and we send an email to notify the reviewer (we won’t send an email if the review is clearly advertising or promotional content). This provides reviewers with an opportunity to correct any false positives. However, if we have overwhelming evidence that the review is fake, we won’t reinstate it.
See more about how we safeguard our platform.
Flagging reviews
Being open to all also means giving both businesses and consumers the opportunity to flag a review if it contravenes our guidelines. Our Content Integrity Team checks each flagged review, and if they find that it breaks the rules, they take action.
Flagged reviews stay online while they are being investigated, except for content flagged as “harmful or illegal”, which must be hidden in order to protect the public and comply with regulation.
Our rules are crystal clear that only flagging negative reviews is against our guidelines. Businesses that misuse the flagging function damage the trustworthiness of our platform. We take this very seriously. Learn more about how we address misuse of the flagging function.
A neutral space for dialogue and collaboration
"An open conversation means no censorship. Trustpilot is for everyone because we believe that’s the best way to deliver an honest and representative view of a company’s customer service."
Ausra Mazutaviciene
Director of Privacy
Contact us
Want to know more?
Get in touch to find out more about what we do to build trust and promote transparency in online reviews. For editorial and press enquiries, see Trustpilot’s Press site.