• Online review platform Trustpilot removed nearly 6% of all reviews posted to the platform in 2020, in its quest to rid the service of fraudulent and fake reviews.
• Founder and CEO Peter Holten Mühlmann says businesses’ efforts to manipulate reviews through providing incentives is the new, big problem for online review platforms.
• The company uses a combination of automated systems and anti-fraud staff to weed out illegitimate reviews.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

How can you trust what you read online?

That’s the fundamental problem that online review company Trustpilot says it has solved. Started in 2007, the free-to-use web service allows anyone to review a business’ services under a real name or a pseudonym.

The upside of Trustpilot’s potential is a depository of the world’s collective experiences about a company unaffected by PR spin. Anyone can read their website to find out independent perspectives on a company’s services, the company says.

But the company must also deal with low quality reviews to fulfil that promise. Trustpilot, like any online review service, receives fake and fraudulent reviews from people with incentives to try distort online reviews: ranging from politically-motivated trolls to companies trying to juice their ratings under fake names.

The company says it’s proactive about removing these low quality reviews. Since the Trustpilot’s ‘freemium’ model makes money from businesses paying to use to platform to analyse complaints and inviting their customers to leave reviews, everyone involved — Trustpilot, companies, customers — benefits from having high quality reviews on the platform.

A ‘trust promise’

In 2020, the company’s founder and CEO Peter Holten Mühlmann made announced a ‘trust promise’, pledging to improve on the company’s integrity measures. Following that, Trustpilot has just released its first ever Transparency Report.

Last year more than 38 million reviews were written on Trustpilot (with 809,000 coming from Australia). More than 2 million reviews were removed from the platform during the year, comprising about 5.7% of the total reviews.

Mühlmann told Business Insider Australia that the company’s automated systems analyse more than 100,000 reviews each day, capable of weeding out businesses leaving reviews on their own profiles or paying for reviews.

“The techniques adopted by those who want to manipulate the content on the platform constantly evolve, and therefore we are constantly adapting to stay ahead,” he said via email.

The company also has staff who manually review reviews that are flagged by users. Of the 99,412 flagged last year for being advertising or illegal content, 10,983 were removed from the platform (about 12.4% of flagged reviews).

Growing issues in online review integrity

He said the biggest rising issue the company is seeing is business efforts to manipulate their ratings.

One problem is ‘incentivised reviews’, which is what the company calls when businesses offer rewards or benefits in return for submitting reviews.

“While most companies use incentives in the right way to get more feedback, there’s growing concern that any incentive could sway sentiment in a more positive direction — ultimately making it harder to determine whether it is a true reflection of the consumer’s experience,” Mühlmann said.

Last year, the company banned incentivised reviews. And since September, they’ve also started labelling ‘referred reviews’, which are reviews that come from a user that came to Trustpilot from the company’s website. This helps contextualise these reviews, Mühlmann says.

Another novel area of fraudulent reviews is dealing with a flood of reviews in response to a news event. When companies come in the spotlight in the media or via social media, users may use reviews as a form of activism — something that Trustpilot attempts to neutralise.

“We issue public alerts when we see behaviour that consumers should be warned of, including spikes in reviews which are triggered by issues trending in the news or on social media,” Mühlmann said.

While the openness of Trustpilot makes its system vulnerable to influence — compared with other platforms which allow only purchasers to leave reviews — Mühlmann maintains that it’s ultimately a strength. He said that other platforms give businesses more power over how reviews are shown, and the openness of Trustpilot gives the power back to the consumer.

“If we allow censorship, manipulation and fakes to stifle authentic consumer voices and cloud the truth, trust could be crushed,” he said. “However, we have a great system in place to combat this and are constantly reviewing them to ensure fake or misleading reviews are flagged and addressed as fast as possible.”

Trustpilot tips for critically reading reviews

• Use reviews together with other sources and never replace common sense — if a company’s reviews are all five-star, with absolutely no negatives, question whether they can really get it right every single time.
• Look at the number of reviews a company has and their recency to make sure you harness the wisdom of the crowd and not just a select group.
• Don’t rely on star ratings alone — they give a quick indication, but it’s often worth considering different perspectives.
• Look for ‘open’ review sites that allow anyone to post a review, which prevents businesses from pre-screening or moderating what you actually read.
• Look at the negative reviews — they can be reassuring as they show the company hasn’t tried to edit out some of the more ‘constructive’ feedback.

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