Guidelines for Business

People who have had a recent, genuine experience with your business can write a review about it. Bear in mind that an experience doesn’t necessarily mean a purchase — it could be, for example, a phone call, an online order, a visit to a store or otherwise using your company’s product/service.

But anyone with a conflict of interest cannot write a review of your business — this includes you, your employees and your immediate family members. It also means you and your employees can’t review a competitor. This is to protect the integrity of reviews.

If you’re asking for reviews, your invitation process and language should be fair, neutral and unbiased. And if you’d like to include an incentive in your invitation, we need to approve it and inform our community by adding a note to your company profile page. It’s also possible to ask reviewers to provide a reference number when they leave a review, to help identify an experience.

Reviews can’t be collected on company premises without prior permission from our Content Integrity Team. And you can’t ask customers to use your equipment (for example, an iPad) to review your company.

Don’t write or ask people to write fake reviews. We have zero tolerance for fake reviews and will remove them.

We give reviewers the freedom to choose their own username, so you might not always recognize their name as a customer of yours. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t had a genuine, recent experience with your company. If you want more information, try engaging with the reviewer.

And if that doesn’t work, you can ask us to try to verify the reviewer's experience.

We expect you to be a respectful contributor to our platform. So play nice. Don’t post anything harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene. And don’t lie, bully, blackmail, make threats or do anything illegal.

Here are our tips for replying to reviewers.

We want the privacy and safety of everyone to be respected and protected, so don’t post any sensitive or personal information. We’re talking names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and anything else that could be used to track, identify, contact or impersonate someone.

If your employees decide to use their own name in replies to reviews, then they’ve put that information out there and you shouldn’t flag other reviews for including that same name.

We won’t remove a review just because you think it’s unfair, you don’t agree with its content or you think the reviewer should have left you more stars. We don’t get involved in disputes about what actually went down between a reviewer and a business. Trustpilot is a consumer review platform, not a regulatory authority or a court of law.

We're a platform that sits between consumers and businesses, so we have to balance competing responsibilities: We want to let everyone tell their story (good or bad), but we're also required to take down words and statements that are likely to cause serious harm to someone’s reputation or serious financial loss to a business. That’s why you can flag reviews that are defamatory.

But remember, just because a review is negative, that doesn’t mean it’s defamatory.

Claim your profile and get a business account. You can use it to send invitations, reply to reviewers and flag reviews that breach our guidelines. The information shown on your company profile page must be correct and not misleading.

A review is owned by the person who wrote it. They can edit or delete their reviews at any time, and can write more than one review if they’ve had more than one experience with your business. But they don’t have to update their review if things change — like if you give them a refund. Offering a reviewer an incentive to change or delete their review is a big no-no.

We don’t moderate reviews, but everyone can flag reviews that breach our guidelines. You can use your business account to flag reviews for different reasons (not liking a review is not one of them!) and we only assess a review for the chosen reason.

If a flagged review breaches our guidelines and the problem can be fixed, the reviewer will be given the opportunity to change it. The review might be temporarily hidden during this process. If the problem isn’t resolved or it can’t be resolved, then the review will usually stay offline.

If you flag reviews, be fair and consistent — that means flagging 5-star reviews for the same reasons you flag 1-star reviews. We’ll display a public version of your report, so that everyone can see why you’ve flagged the review. For transparency, all your flagging activity is also publicly visible via your company’s profile page.

We’re all for freedom of expression, but some content just won’t fly. We can delete a company reply that breaches these guidelines. And if you misuse our platform we can block access to or suspend features in your business account, place a consumer alert on your profile, and potentially even terminate agreements you have with us.

These guidelines are just that: guiding principles. Please understand that we have the final say with regard to the interpretation and application of these guidelines, and we can update them at any time. If you’d like more detailed information about how we work, you’re welcome to visit our Support Center.