Trust & transparency
We use technology and human moderation to protect platform integrity, but we don't fact-check reviews. Here is exactly what that means.
Last updated: August 28, 2026
Automated screening
Every review passes through fraud-detection models before publication: device and network signals, velocity, language patterns and links between accounts and businesses.
Human moderation
A Content Integrity team reviews flagged content, reports from the community and appeals from businesses and reviewers.
No pay-to-hide
Businesses cannot pay to remove, hide, reorder or suppress reviews. A paid plan changes the tools a company has, never the reviews the public sees.
Even-handed rules
Reviewers and businesses each have guidelines. Break them and content comes down, whoever you are.
Published numbers
We report how many reviews we remove, on what grounds, and how many business accounts we sanction.
Not a fact-checker
A review is an opinion about an experience. We do not verify each claim. Businesses may respond publicly; readers judge for themselves.
Why we do not fact-check reviews
Reviews describe personal experiences: how long delivery took, how a support agent behaved, whether a product matched its photos. We are not in a position to independently verify what happened between a customer and a company, and pretending to would give readers false confidence. Instead we focus on the question we can answer: is this a genuine review from a real person about a real experience, written without an incentive or a conflict of interest? Where we have grounds to believe the answer is no, the review is removed.
What gets removed
- Reviews we have reason to believe are fake, bought, incentivised, or written by the business, its staff, its competitors or their agents.
- Reviews that contain personal data about someone, hate speech, threats, harassment or illegal content.
- Reviews that are about the wrong company, are not about a service or purchase experience, or are advertising.
- Reviews that a court or competent authority has ruled unlawful.
Reviews are not removed because they are negative, because a business disputes them, or because the business is a paying customer. See the full Guidelines.
What businesses can and cannot do
| Can | Cannot |
|---|---|
| Claim their profile and reply publicly to any review | Delete, hide or edit a review |
| Invite all customers to review, in the order they were served | Invite only happy customers, or offer rewards for reviews |
| Flag a review they believe breaks the guidelines | Pressure a reviewer to change or remove a review |
| Show their TrustScore with our widgets | Show a selectively edited score or only positive reviews |
Transparency reporting
Once a year we publish a Transparency Report covering: the number of reviews submitted and removed, the share removed by automated systems versus human moderators, the grounds for removal, the number of business accounts sanctioned for guideline breaches, and legal requests received. The first report will cover the 2026 calendar year.
Appeals
If your review or reply was removed you receive an e-mail with the reason and a link to appeal. Appeals are reviewed by a different moderator from the one who made the original decision.