Guidelines for Businesses

We’re working hard in the background using people and technology to detect content that breaches our guidelines before it appears on Trustpilot. But where things slip through the net, everyone in our community can help by reporting it to us. Everyone can flag reviews, including businesses and consumers.

If you think a review breaches our guidelines then you can flag it to us via your business account or by contacting our Content Integrity team. Not liking a star rating or disagreeing with a negative review is not a valid reason for flagging it, and we don’t remove reviews just because a business thinks they are unfair or critical. You can read more below about the reasons you can flag a review for.

After you flag a review, a request is generated in our system, and our Content Integrity team will look into it as soon as possible. Please note that complex cases may require additional time. Flagged reviews remain visible online during the investigation, with the exception of reviews flagged as 'harmful or illegal,' which are hidden. If we need the reviewer to change their review or provide documentation, we will contact them to explain what is needed and request action within three days. Once the investigation is completed, we will notify you of the outcome.

Just remember that when flagging reviews, be fair and consistent. That means flagging 5-star reviews for the same reasons you flag 1-star reviews. You should also take care to ensure that you’ve chosen the correct reason. The flagging function is an important feature of our review community and we don’t tolerate misuse of it. This includes flagging reviews too quickly or for the wrong reasons, or in a way that shows you’re not properly considering how they breach our guidelines.

Fair treatment is one of the principles that guides our efforts to bring trust to consumers and businesses everywhere. This means that our guidelines apply to everyone who uses our platform, and we treat all flagged reviews consistently, regardless of who they are written by. The same fair treatment applies regardless of whether the reviewed business has a claimed profile, or uses our paid services.

You can flag a review for the following reasons:

It’s harmful or illegal

We don’t allow harmful or illegal content, and will remove it when we become aware of it. You can flag a review for:

• Hate speech or discrimination: content that negatively targets people or a group of people based on the basis of who they are, e.g. their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender, or other identity factor
• Terrorism: content that praises, supports, or represents hate groups including the promotion of hateful ideologies and the denial of hate crimes
• Threats or violence: content that incites or glorifies harm. This includes descriptions and promotion of violence, threats of harm, abusive behavior, and promoting self-harm
• Obscenity: content with severe profanity, disturbing material, explicit adult content, nudity or pornography
• Defamation: a false statement about a person or business which harms their reputation and leads to significant financial loss. Remember, expressing an opinion (like "I didn’t like their service") isn’t defamation because opinions aren’t statements of fact

When a review is flagged for containing harmful or illegal content, the review will be temporarily blurred while we look into it — we do this to keep everyone safe and because we’re required to do so by law for certain content. If reviews are flagged to us for other reasons, we keep them online while we investigate to maintain a fair balance between businesses and reviewers.

It contains personal information

To ensure the privacy and safety of everyone in our community, you can flag a review if it contains another person’s personal information such as someone’s name, phone number, email address, or photos/videos of others.

We won’t remove a review if it includes information available either on your Trustpilot profile or website, or if the reviewer has included their own personal information in their review.

It’s advertising or promotional

You can flag a review if it contains advertising or promotional content because this type of content is often not useful and compromises the integrity and trustworthiness of reviews on our platform.

This includes:

• Promoting another business or product which isn’t related to the reviewer’s experience, including unauthorised advertisements, links to another business, promotional codes and calls to action
• Purely advertising a political, religious or ethical view including reviews written solely about topics that are trending in the news or on social media, rather than feedback on a genuine experience
• Promoting scams, including financial scams like “get rich quick” schemes, offering incentives for writing reviews and clickbait content
• Promoting spam, including gibberish like only random numbers and letters
• Promoting misinformation or impersonation, including rumors confirmed by the authorities as false, medicinal product claims, and AI-generated content

We won’t remove a review just because it mentions another business or compares your business to a competitor.

It’s not based on a genuine experience

You can flag a review if you think it’s not based on a genuine experience. Keep in mind that a review may be genuine even if you don't recognize the reviewer or have specific details about them in your records as:

• Anyone with a genuine experience can leave a review at any time
• Genuine experiences aren’t limited to purchases
• Reviewers don’t need to be invited to leave a review
• Reviewers may choose to use a username that isn’t their real name

As long as the review reflects a genuine experience with your business, we allow it on the platform.

When a review is flagged to us for this reason, unless the law requires otherwise, we’ll run the review through our detection software, which looks at a variety of data points about the review and — if it looks suspicious — we’ll remove the review. We use this additional analysis instead of immediately moving the review offline and automatically asking reviewers to provide evidence showing their review is genuine, because this is a fairer process that helps us ensure that more genuine reviews remain on the platform.

If you believe we’ve made the wrong decision, you can reply and tell us why, and we’ll have our Content Integrity team manually review the decision. For example, if the review refers to a product that you don’t sell, or a location for your business that doesn’t exist, then this could indicate it’s not based on a genuine experience. Providing these types of details in your reply will help our Content Integrity team investigate the decision. We believe this process benefits businesses by increasing trust, giving you more say to explain why you believe a review isn’t genuine, and reducing your risk of the regulatory scrutiny that comes from attempts to discredit or hide genuine customer feedback.

Depending on our Content Integrity team's assessment, if a disputed review is deemed suspicious, we'll remove it and request documentation from the reviewer; otherwise, if we cannot confirm a guideline breach, the review will remain online.

It’s about a different business

You can flag a review if it clearly indicates it’s for another business, or ask to move a review that’s on the wrong profile because it refers to one of your other domains.

We don’t remove a review just because it's non-specific and doesn’t mention your business’s name.

When a review is flagged, we may reach out to the reviewer to ask them to consider updating their review or provide documentation.

If you believe we’ve made the wrong decision about your reviews or account, you can contact us by replying to the email we’ve sent you. Let us know why you believe the decision is incorrect and our Content Integrity team will be happy to take another look at it. Should you still disagree with our decision, you can submit a formal dispute using the link provided in the footer of our final decision email.

If you have trouble finding the dispute link or encounter technical issues, please contact us for assistance.

Consumers decide which businesses are reviewed on our platform. Once someone writes a review about your business, a profile page will be created to host and display reviews. Your business profile page is where we gather all of the reviews about your business in one place, and it will be visible even if you haven’t taken any action to claim it.

Because reviews help guide all of us as consumers, we don’t remove a business profile page or the business' reviews unless we have to.

If your business is reviewed on Trustpilot, you can easily claim your business profile page. Claiming your profile sets you up with a business account and gives you the ability to manage your reviews — including replying to them. Logging into your business account is the easiest way for you to flag reviews, but you can also do this without claiming your profile.

Once claimed, your profile page shows the label “Claimed” and you’ll have access to our free plan features. If you’re looking for more advanced features (like our AI insights tool or custom widgets) you can upgrade to one of our paid plans.

You can also add useful details to show a more complete picture of your business to anyone reading your reviews. Start by adding a description of your business, including your hours, store locations, and contact information, or confirming additional company details. Just make sure that any information you add to your business profile page is accurate, relevant, and won’t mislead consumers. For example, you should make sure that the name of your business on your profile matches the one you use for your shop, website, or products.

If you have more than one profile page on Trustpilot, in certain circumstances (such as identical domains, rebranding or business merger) you may be able to merge these into a single profile. This can make it easier for consumers to find and review your business, and for you to manage reviews.

People over 18 who have had a recent, genuine experience with your business can write a review about it. An experience doesn’t necessarily mean a purchase — it’s broader than that, and can include an interaction, even if the reviewer hasn’t brought anything, like:

• A phone call
• An email
• An online chat
• Visit to an online store

We encourage a wide range of review feedback, including from those who’ve had an experience with you and didn’t end up buying a product or service, as this can offer you valuable insights into why they may not have bought anything and what you can improve about your business.

We recommend that reviewers edit and update their original review if their opinion about an experience changes or a problem has been resolved — but they don’t have to and you should never pressure them to do so.

Reviewers can write a new review if they have a new and unique experience with a business. If a reviewer writes multiple reviews about your business, then their reviews will be shown on Trustpilot grouped together, with the newest review on top. Only the most recent review is factored into your TrustScore, though all reviews will count towards your total number of reviews.

We don’t allow people to write reviews if they have a special relationship to the business they’re reviewing and are likely to give a biased review, whether it’s positive or negative. That includes you, your immediate family members, someone who is working for your business, or a competitor.

Reviewers are free to choose a username of their choice. To protect their privacy and foster a safe space for genuine feedback, we don’t require it to be their full name, or even their real name, as long as it’s in line with our Guidelines for Reviewers. This means that in reading reviews about your business, you may not recognize every reviewer. Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean the reviewer didn’t have an experience with your business — they may simply feel more comfortable expressing their opinion without displaying their full name.

If you don’t recognize a reviewer, you can ask them to provide more information about themselves or their experience, which may help you better understand what’s happened and resolve any issues - though reviewers can choose whether to respond and share their details. This can be especially useful if a review has not been written in response to an invitation, and is instead what we call an ‘organic’ review. You can ask reviewers for their name, a reference number, email, or phone number and we’ll let them know they have three days to respond. If you don’t receive an answer and believe the reviewer hasn’t had a genuine experience with your business, you can then flag the review for the reason “Not based on a genuine experience”.

We encourage you to invite your customers to leave reviews so that you can collect more valuable feedback about your products and services — and gain more insight into how you can build trust, grow and improve your business. The easiest way to ensure you get reviews from a broad range of people is by using our automated invitation methods, but regardless of the method you choose, your process needs to be fair and neutral. We don’t allow incentivized reviews on Trustpilot. There should be no strings attached to your invitations - for example, no freebies or discounts in exchange for leaving a review.

We also encourage you to engage with reviews through replies, especially if you believe the TrustScore doesn’t adequately portray the level of service your business is offering.

Do:

• Invite people who have had a genuine experience with your products or services - this should be one invite per experience
• Invite consistently and fairly — this means inviting everyone in the same way, regardless of whether they’ve had a positive or negative experience with your business
• Give your customers time to experience the product or service before asking them to provide feedback
• Use fair, neutral, and unbiased language. This helps reviewers feel comfortable to express their genuine opinions. If your review invitations fall short on these points, we may ask you to make some changes to the language, or reset your invitation template if it’s found to be in breach of our terms

Don’t:

• Be selective with invitations, by picking and choosing which customers you invite. This includes inviting only those people who you know have had a positive experience, or setting review invitations to go out to customers at a certain stage in the customer journey that will only be reached by people who have had a good experience
• Include anything misleading, fraudulent or harmful such as phishing links
• Suggest that reviewers only leave positive reviews — for example, “If you like us, please leave us a 5-star review”
• Offer incentives in connection with writing or editing reviews. This includes, for example: discounts, promo codes, prize draw entries, refunds, freebies, or any other benefit connected with your business for leaving a review
• Invite customers who you know have a special relationship with your business (for example, close family members, people working in or with your business, or shareholders in your business)
• Pressure, blackmail, or threaten reviewers to write, edit, or delete a review. If you think a review violates these Guidelines for Businesses then you should flag the review
• Ask people to write fake reviews (positive or negative)
• Use unsupported invitation methods. Businesses must only use Trustpilot’s supported invitation methods to request reviews. Sending invitations outside our platform is still considered use of our services and is therefore subject to our restrictions. For more details, please refer to our Terms of Use and Sale for Businesses.

Reviews are user-generated content that are owned by the people who wrote them. Reviewers are able to edit or delete their reviews at any time.

There are different options to share and showcase the reviews about your business, as well as your TrustScore and star rating. The options available to you will depend on which Trustpilot Business plan you have, and you should make sure you follow our Legal Brand Guidelines when sharing your reviews.

Fake reviews are reviews which don’t reflect genuine service or buying experiences with a business. They’re often written in an attempt to mislead and manipulate what other consumers think about that business (positively or negatively).

Fake reviews undermine trust and are illegal. We do not tolerate them on our platform. Do not write or ask or encourage people to write fake reviews for your business.

To safeguard our platform and make sure that we’re increasingly effective in identifying and removing fake reviews, we use a three-pronged approach that includes our people, technology, and community. Our automated detection technology goes beyond the content of reviews to analyse a large range of behavioral data points. This is supported by a layer of bespoke systems designed to detect other types of suspicious behavior and misuse, as well as the human expertise in our Trust teams.

We run all reviews through our automated detection software before posting them on our platform. When we detect fake reviews, we remove them and take action in accordance with our Action We Take policy.

We encourage businesses to engage with reviewers by responding to reviews. Replying to reviews provides an opportunity to answer customer questions, resolve issues, give thanks, and build trust with your customers.

Be sure to always keep your replies polite and professional, and don't include things such as personal information, threats, or aggressive language — otherwise we will remove your replies.

Trustpilot is a place for sharing feedback about genuine experiences, and we take a neutral stance. We generally don’t get involved in disputes about what happened between a reviewer and a business unless the law requires us to.

If you don’t agree with a review but it doesn’t breach our guidelines, we recommend writing a reply to the review and telling your side of the story, so that people reading reviews can decide how much weight to give to the review in question. This also lets you show that you genuinely care about consumer feedback and are willing to engage with reviewers to constructively resolve an issue.

There are certain types of businesses we don’t want on Trustpilot, because they may cause or create harm, or they don’t share our values and core beliefs. We call these businesses “bad-fits” and in accordance with our Action We Take policy, we’ll remove them from Trustpilot.

If you misuse our platform, we may take other types of action as set out below and in our Action We Take policy.

The vast majority of businesses use Trustpilot in the way it was intended, for the benefit of everyone. But we don’t allow users to misuse our platform, for example submitting or procuring fake reviews, misusing our flagging function, collecting reviews in a biased or unfair manner. We also don’t allow users to copy, collect and commercially exploit the data on our platform without our permission (known as “data scraping”). If you misuse our platform, data or brand, we will take action - this can include blocking access to or suspending features in your Trustpilot business account, terminating any agreement you have with us, placing a Consumer Warning on your profile and hiding your TrustScore and taking legal action.

We describe in more detail the different types of misuse we encounter on our platform, what we’re doing to prevent it and the action we will take to address it in our Action We Take policy.

These guidelines are just that: guiding principles.

Our aim here is to explain how we operate and why. In the event of any ambiguity we have the final say on how these guidelines are interpreted. We can also update them at any time. Visit our Help Center for more information.