Our content integrity policies are better for your business. Here’s why.

Trustpilot has quite a few guidelines for businesses and consumers on our platform.

Part of this is because we’re an open platform, while many of our competitors are closed review platforms. This means that no one can review a company on that platform without an invitation (giving businesses a large control over who can leave a review) and that customers can only see the reviews those businesses choose to show them. 

Our mission is to help businesses build trust online with consumers and these guidelines help us do it. And although this requires a few more rules, the result is very beneficial to the businesses on our platform. 

Guidelines for businesses 

Because we’re an open platform, anyone who has had a recent genuine experience with your business can write a review about it. Most of the time this will be a purchase, but it can also be things like someone who visits your store, had an interaction with one of your employees, or visited your website. Anyone with a conflict of interest (you, your employees, your immediate families, or the employees of one of your competitors) are not allowed to review your business. 

We encourage all businesses to ask their customers for reviews. But your invitation language and process needs to be fair, neutral, and unbiased. You can’t provide incentives (discounts, gifts, coupons, etc) in return for reviews either. Reviews can’t be collected on company premises without our prior permission and you can’t ever ask customers to use your own equipment (like an iPad) to review your company. 

No fake or hidden reviews

You would think we wouldn’t need to say this, but there are a lot of fake reviews on the internet (and a lot of review platforms that turn a blind eye to them). Never write or ask people to write fake reviews on our platform. We have zero tolerance for fake reviews and will remove them. If you see a reviewer that you don’t recognize and you suspect that the review is not genuine, try engaging with them. If that doesn’t work, we can verify the reviewer’s experience for you. This keeps the platform trustworthy for everyone and helps us create more genuine experiences online. 

There have also been some very hefty FTC fines for large brands like Hey Dude and Fashion Nova for review suppression and blocking negative reviews. We work very hard to keep fake reviews or review mismanagement off our platform to protect our integrity, but it’s also to protect the integrity of the businesses on our platform and ensure they avoid fines like this from the FTC. 

Automated fraud detection 

We offer 24/7 fraud detection on our platform. Our unique automated software runs 24/7 detecting unusual patterns and removing fake reviews. It runs independently across our platform, examining different behavioral parameters like IP addresses and scoring them based on how likely they are to be fake. If the likelihood is high, our software automatically moves the review offline and emails the reviewer to let them know. Reviewers are then able to contact us on the off chance that our software was incorrect and we can reinstate them if that turns out to be the case. 

We also have manual processes to support our software. Our Content Integrity Agents and Investigators also have access to tools that help them manually examine review patterns for anomalies. This combines the best of both worlds, technology flags patterns that humans might not see and our agents can use these elements to investigate further. There are 88+ people safeguarding our platform, including Agents and legal experts to ensure we apply our guidelines fairly and equally regarding fake reviews. 

Why this is all good for you and your business

All in all, our guidelines are stricter than many other customer review platforms. And we don’t provide businesses with the same tools to be selective about who gets to leave a review and who doesn’t, or which reviews are visible to the public and which are not. This is, of course, to help our customers avoid hefty FTC fines like we covered above. But the other reason that we do all of this is to maintain transparency and build better trust between consumers and businesses online. 

And this is exactly what makes our platform more valuable to you as a business. This is what has enabled our customers to build trust for their own brands online and see improved ROI as a result, particularly in industries where consumers have a little more trouble trusting businesses. 

Like when LendingTree was able to combat consumer uncertainty (loans are a very difficult industry for trust since people are so cautious about their money and there are many predatory players in the space) and increase application conversions by 6% and overall revenue per customer by 2-4%. All from leveraging Trustpilot to build trust throughout their customer journey. Or when Groupon came to us to build trust for them externally because they had excellent internal customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores but they weren’t reflected by their online reputation. 

This wouldn’t be possible without our content integrity team or guidelines. Many of our competitors in the space don’t maintain policies like this or work to build trust on their platforms. This is why their reviews can function well as a marketing tool, but their usefulness generally starts and ends there. Because we focus so much on the integrity of the reviews on our platform, we’re able to help you build trust for your brand holistically, instead of just leveraging a positive review here and there as a marketing tool. 

And when a review platform functions this way, consumers see right through it. They want to see the full range of reviews for a business — not just the 5-star ones you happen to be using on your product pages — and they will go searching for them. Trustpilot helps you build trust and improve your business for your customers based on your feedback, so that your ratings and reviews consistently go up and you’re able to win more customers. 

If you’re looking to build trust with your customers and use that trust to grow your business, request a personalized demo today.