Guidelines for Reviewers

Everyone can read reviews on Trustpilot at any time for free. But if you want to write a review, you’ll need a user account.

A user account lets you manage your reviews, including the ability to update your existing reviews or write new ones. It also gives Trustpilot a way to contact you about your reviews, notify you when a company replies, and let a business you’ve reviewed ask for more information about your experience through your Trustpilot account.

Every review on Trustpilot is connected to a user account with a valid email address. You can create a user account by signing up with email, or via third-party accounts such as Facebook, Google, or Apple. You’re welcome to select a username and profile picture — as long as it doesn’t impersonate somebody else, or include advertising or anything offensive like hate speech or profanities. We also encourage you to securely verify your ID to help build trust and credibility with our community.

If your username, profile picture, or other details are wrong, then you can easily change them by adjusting the settings in your user account. You can also delete your user account, but this is permanent and will also delete all of your reviews.

To maintain the integrity of our platform, you’re only allowed to have one user account on Trustpilot. So if you’ve accidentally created multiple accounts, please ask us to merge them for you.

If you’re over 18 and you’ve had a recent, genuine experience with a business, you can write a review about it. An experience doesn’t necessarily mean a purchase — it’s broader than that, and can include an interaction like a phone call, email, online chat, or visit to an online store, even if you decided not to buy anything. When we say recent, we typically mean experiences within the last 12 months.

Reviews must be based on your own experience, unless in exceptional cases where you’re assisting and acting on behalf of someone who can’t write their own review, for example if you’re a care-giver or guardian.

We don’t allow incentivized reviews on Trustpilot. This means you’re not eligible to write a review if you’ve received or been offered an incentive in connection with writing or editing a review. This includes, for example: discounts, promo codes, prize draw entries, refunds, freebies, or any other benefit connected to the business for leaving a review. You’re also not eligible to write a review where you have a special relationship to the business you’re reviewing (for example, you’re the owner of the business, someone in their immediate family, are working with or for the business, are a shareholder in the business, or are a competitor). This is to prevent biased reviews on Trustpilot, both positive and negative.

No. Trustpilot is an open platform, which means you can write a review at any time without being invited by a business. You can also write a review if you’re invited to do so by a business.

Our Guidelines for Businesses set out how businesses should send review invitations. For example, they should invite customers to express their honest experience with a business in a neutral way. If you think a business is inviting unfairly we encourage you to report this to us by contacting our Content Integrity team via our Whistleblower Form.

A useful review helps others - consumers and the reviewed business - understand what the business is doing well or needs to improve on, and what factors inform the star rating you’ve chosen. A useful review describes your own genuine experience with a business’ service or product, including relevant details about what happened, including feedback for the business. Keep it recent - readers are looking to understand how the business is operating today.

Trustpilot provides a neutral and independent place for you to share feedback about your genuine service or product experiences. Trustpilot isn’t a place for sharing your views on any topic you like. Reviews which are not useful may be deprioritized, flagged for review, or removed.

In the event of a disagreement between a reviewer and a business, we take a neutral stance. We don’t get involved in factual disputes about what happened unless the law requires us to.

As the author of your reviews, you can edit or delete them at any time. We recommend that you edit and update a review if your opinion about an experience changes or a problem has been resolved — but you don’t have to and a business should never pressure you to do so.

You can also write a new review if you’ve had a new and unique experience with a business. If you write multiple reviews about a business, your reviews will be shown on Trustpilot grouped together with the newest one on top, and only the most recent review is factored into the business’ TrustScore.

A fake review is a review which doesn’t reflect your genuine service or buying experience 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.

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. These systems are 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 and Safety 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.

Businesses can ask you for extra details such as email address, reference number, name, or phone number to help them better understand your experience and get in touch to resolve any problems you may have. If you choose to respond to a business’ request, the information you provide will be shared with the business.

If you submitted a review independently, without an invitation, the reviewed business likely does not have your contact details. Sharing information in response to their request allows them to connect with you and address your concerns. We facilitate this to foster positive interactions between businesses and consumers. However, we understand that you may prefer not to share your information, and that is fine.

Keep in mind that if you choose not to provide the requested information, the business might report your review. In that case, we will investigate and may ask you for further details to validate your experience if necessary.

Yes. Every review on the platform has a flagging icon, which you can use to report a review to our Trust & Safety teams. Although we’re working hard in the background using people and technology to detect content that breaches our guidelines before it appears on Trustpilot, we recognise we’re not perfect and things can slip through the net. All businesses and consumers can report reviews if they think they breach these guidelines.

If you think a review breaches our guidelines then you can let us know by clicking on the flag icon below a review or by contacting our Content Integrity Team. We value the help of our community in letting us know about problematic reviews, but we don’t accept misuse of our flagging function such as repeatedly flagging the same review.

You can also see how a business has flagged its reviews over the past 12 months on the Company activity page.

On Trustpilot, we expect you to be a respectful contributor to our platform. We don’t allow review content that’s:

Harmful or illegal

We don’t allow harmful or illegal content, and will remove it when we become aware of it. This includes:

• Hate speech or discrimination: content that negatively targets people or a group of people based on the basis of who they are, for example 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 of violence, threats of harm, promotion of gang culture, abusive behavior, and promoting self-harm
• Obscenity: content with severe profanity, disturbing material, explicit adult content, nudity or pornography.
• Defamation: Only businesses can report for defamation. This is referring to a false statement about a person or business which harms their reputation and leads to significant financial loss.

When a review is flagged by the business 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.

Personal information

Your review shouldn’t contain another person’s personal information, such as the name of a business’ employee, phone numbers, email addresses, or photos/videos of others. This is to ensure the privacy and safety of everyone in our community.

We won’t remove your review if it mentions information available either on the business’ Trustpilot profile (information regarding the business itself, information contained in the reply to your review) or website. While we highly recommend not including your own personal information in your review as it’s publicly available, we won’t remove your review on this basis. However, if you mistakenly include it, you can always edit your review at any time. Alternatively, please reach out to us for assistance.

Advertising or promotional

Your review should not contain advertising or promotional content, like links to an unrelated business. This helps keep the review focused on your experience with the business, and maintains the integrity and trustworthiness of reviews on our platform. This includes:

• Promoting another business or product which isn’t related to your experience, including unauthorised advertisements, 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 rumours confirmed by the authorities as false, medicinal product claims and AI-generated content

We won’t remove your review just because it mentions another business or compares the reviewed business to a competitor, but be sure to only include relevant information in your review.

Not based on a genuine experience

Your review must be based on a genuine experience. Trustpilot’s automated systems can remove suspicious reviews, and reviewed businesses can also flag your review if they don’t recognize your experience and think it might not be genuine. We may therefore ask you for further details to validate your experience, so please hold onto documentation that shows you’ve had an experience with the reviewed company.

About a different business

Before you post your review, please make sure you’ve got the right business. We suggest double checking the company and country domain you’re reviewing to make sure you’re on the right profile page. We can remove a review if it indicates it’s for another business, or move a review that’s on the wrong profile because it refers to one of the business’ other domains.

We won’t remove a review just because it's non-specific and doesn’t mention a business’s name — but keep in mind that reviews without much detail are likely to be less useful to readers.

Fair treatment is one of the principles that guides our efforts to bring trust to consumers and businesses everywhere. This means our guidelines apply to everyone who uses our platform, and we treat flagged reviews the same, regardless of who they are written about or whether they use Trustpilot’s paid services.

We’ll remove your review if it breaches these guidelines or if we’re legally required to do so. For example, if your review contains obscene content, if it’s promoting financial scams or if it contains someone else’s residential address. But rest assured that businesses have no control over review removal, whether or not they pay for our services, and we won’t remove a review just because a business dislikes or disagrees with it. If your review is flagged, we may ask you to consider updating it or providing documentation to support it.

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.

If you become aware of a business misusing our platform, for example because they’re asking for fake reviews or pressuring you to remove your review, we encourage you to report this to us by contacting our Content Integrity team via our Whistleblower Form. We’ll investigate your report and where appropriate, we’ll take action in accordance with our Action We Take policy.

You can delete your Trustpilot user account at any time. You’ll still be able to search for a business and read reviews on Trustpilot. You just won’t be able to write them yourself anymore. The vast majority of users 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 repeatedly posting harmful reviews, threatening businesses. 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 or data, we will take action - this can include blocking access to or suspending features in your Trustpilot user account and taking legal action.

Our Action We Take policy describes in more detail the different types of misuse we don’t allow on our platform, including what we do to prevent it and the action we take to address it.

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.