The CMA begins the reviews crackdown

As promised, the Competition & Markets Authority ('CMA') has begun its action to make reviews more useful for consumers. They wouldn't use the word 'crackdown', but make no mistake: they are responsible for the changes to the law last year and for the legal action that will follow if businesses persist in non-compliance.

Action to date

Regular readers will be familiar with the CMA code; it has been in effect for over 10 years and already bans selectively inviting reviews and gating (more on these two later). The CMA's latest move - on fake and incentivised reviews - is covered in this webinar...

...which you are welcome to watch. For those without the hour to spare, we summarise it here:

Businesses that invite, host or publish online reviews must

• Take reasonable steps to ensure that the reviews are written by genuine customers
• Not knowingly host fake reviews
• Not knowingly host incentivised reviews without making it clear that the reviews in question were incentivised
• Must not make the incentive conditional upon a positive review

HelpHound welcomes this and any action flowing from it in terms of enforcement. The CMA has already taken enforcement action against several businesses, and it has secured promises from the two biggest players in the reviews sphere: Google and Amazon, that significant resources will be put in place to detect and eliminate fake and incentivised reviews.

But the CMA acknowledges that this is just the beginning; it understands that, going forward, online reviews, relied on by so many consumers, must be reliable and genuine, and that they are not unfairly manipulated by businesses.

HelpHound's opinion on the above, and on the next steps we hope the CMA will take

This is a good first step. Fake reviews help no one, not even the business that may notionally benefit at first; they are too easy to identify and trace. If you have any doubts about this, please read Grizzly Research's recent report and see just how easily they identified fake reviews.

We would also like to see a complete ban on incentives. We consider that any incentive to write a review must come with a clear, if unspoken, implication that the business in question is looking for a positive review.

Going Forward

As you might imagine, we have quite a shopping list. This is borne of years of hands-on experience of inviting, moderating and just plain reading online reviews; not to mention watching - intently - the evolution of various review platforms, from the giants of Google and Amazon, the specialists such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com and the trades-specific sites, to the generalist review sites such as Yelp and Trustpilot that set out their stalls to attract businesses, both large and small, with their own 'solutions'.

Here it is:

 

Concerns

 

This business has over 8 million customers in the UK, but 32 reviews on Google

The same business has over 65,000 reviews on Trustpilot 

1. That a significant proportion of 'big business' has learned that using (and by 'using' we generally mean 'paying') a third-party review website to invite and host reviews can 'wash' its reputation on Google and provide great marketing ammunition at the same time. Businesses will pay good money for the 'right' to post four and a half stars, no matter the colour.

Plain English: Invite all our customers to write their review to the XYZ review site, and they won't write a negative review where it really matters/hurts (because it will be significantly more visible): on Google. 

HelpHound's suggested remedy: that businesses be made to answer a simple question: why do you not direct customers to Google? Where their reviews will be seen and read by the overwhelming majority of consumers and, wait for it, there is no charge! 

 

Another large business's take on reviews. 'Why not Google?' we ask. The staff member's comment 37 seconds in is instructive.

2. Many businesses, often large quoted businesses, have realised that a customer review rating a short telephone conversation carries just as much weight, when it comes to calculating the business's crucial star rating as a review of a lifetime's experience of the same business. 

More helpful to the business than its potential customers? Yes, we would say so

 

Plain English: some business's listings are flooded with such low-value reviews. Do they help consumers? We doubt that. Do they augment the business's headline score on the reviews site? Definitely. If a business is asking for reviews by push text/SMS or a QR code it is generally proof positve that all they really want is the customer's rating; they are not interested in review content. Consumers, on the other hand, are extremely interested in valuable review content.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: that sites are made to insists, as X aleady does, on a) a minimum numer of characters per review (140 will do to begin with) and to differentiat between reviews of the business itself and review of an interaction with an individual member of staff. No consumer needs half a million reviews of a business they are considering using. Quality must be prioritised over quantity.

 

 Articles such as this abound on the web

An 'oldie but goodie'

3. That SMEs and many professional businesses are universally flouting the CMA regulations concerning cherry-picking. 

Plain English: staff are routinely instructed - sometimes incentivised - to get nailed-on five-star reviews, and those only.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: Discipinary action by the CMA - fine plus publicity. It worked when estate agents were found to be illegally price-fixing back in 2017, it will certainly work again.

And it took us roughly ten seconds to find this

 

4. That a significant number of businesses are gating, commonly using e-questionnaires.

Plain English: nothing to add to the above.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: Discipinary action by the CMA - fine plus publicity. 

Examples of businesses only showing glowing reviews on their websites abound

 

5. That a significant number of businesses are flouting the CMA regulations concerning publishing reviews: commonly by choosing to show selected five-star reviews on their websites.

Plain English: as above

HelpHound's suggested remedy: CMA fine plus publicity (perhaps a warning in the first instance).

 

Aside from the fact that we might not agree that a business rated at one or two stars by nearly a third of those who have reviewed it should be described as 'Great', this review site justifies scoring the business at 4.1 (Google and HelpHound and every other site on the web, would score it at 3.7!).

6. That some third-party websites are flouting the spirit of the regulations, at the very least, by favouring businesses that pay for their 'additional services'; an example: businesses that pay the third-party site to invite significant numbers of reviews over a given period have their score weighted in favour of recent reviews, meaning two businesses with the same number of reviews and/or the same individual review ratings, can recieve markedly different scores on these platforms.

Plain English: businesses that pay for add-ons - specifically the right to invite numbers of reviews per month - score significantly better than those that resist the review site's sales pitch.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: methods or scoring must be unified. Outliers such as Trustpilot must be made to conform the the norm (that norm being a purley arithmetical average as used by every other site on the planet)

This is the listing for a nationwide group of veterinary practices on Trustpilot. It scores 4.4 out of 5 from over 8,000 reviews. It is rated 'Excellent' by Trustpilot, Trustpilot's top rating for businesses. But let's do what we bet an infinitesimally small proportion of the business's potential customers/patients will ever do: click on the box...

...and what do we see? That 35 per cent of those who have left a review (after being invited to do so by the business - a paying Trustpilot member) rate the service they and their pet received at just 1*. 'Excellent'? And its purely mathematical score if these numbers were on Google, or any other site? Just 3.4! If anyone reading this article agrees with Truspilot's description of this business as 'excellent' please leave a comment at the bottom of this article. 

7. That review platforms use subjective terms to describe businesses; examples include 'excellent' and 'great'.

Plain English: would most reasonable people describe a veterinary practice where in excess of one in three reviews rate a business such as the one above as 'Excellent'?

HelpHound's suggested remedy: subjective descriptions such as these should simply be outlawed. Consumers are intelligent enough to amke up their own minds if provided with the correct information and statistics.

 

Nearly 3,000 reviews of Trustpilot on Reviews.io

And nearly 400 reviews of Reviews.io on Trustpilot

8. That review platforms host many hundreds of questionable negative reviews of rival platforms on their sites.

Plain English: both common sense and experience dictate that the overwhelming majority of these reviews are of questionable origin: real people simply don't write reviews of review websites, certainly not in the volume you see above.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: moderation, again. Proper moderation would query just about every single one of the reviews posted on either of these sites. 

Conclusion

The above describes 'phase two' of what we consider to be the CMA's priorities regarding online reviews. With over 90 per cent of consumers currently consulting reviews before purchasing goods or a service, it is critical that the manipulation of consumer opinions - by the review sites and the businesses - as detailed above is addressed, and speedily. 

Without such action, consumers will begin to lose faith in online reviews, which would be a great loss to all of us, both business and consumer. And before the inevitable cynics say 'No great loss', may we refer them to this single review amongst billions all over the web...

...you may not need reviews of your local McDonald's to be 100% reliable (although McDonald's almost certainly would like them to be), but medical practitioners, financial advisers, lawyers and other high value servies? We rest our case.

No more one-star Google reviews - but how?

 Let's paint the current picture: there are two kinds of business on Google:

1. The one that selectively invites its happiest customers to write a review
2. The business that avoids any proactive involvement with Google reviews

Actually, there is a third category, but we'll come to that later.

Category 1

Looking great, but...

...the pattern of reviews gives the game away: just 13 reviews in the last 12 months is a sure indicator that the business in question is hand-picking happy customers

We hear it all the time: 'We're forced to flout the CMA regulations, because all of our competitors do.' and/or: 'If we obeyed the CMA regulations and asked everyone for a review, our Google score would tumble.'

Category 2

A household name wealth manager with tens of thousands of clients

At the opposite end of the spectrum we hear 'We dare not invite reviews, because we wish to comply with the law, and if we do so, by inviting everyone to post a Google review we will open ourselves up to the kind of reputational harm that factually incorrect, potentially misleading or just plain unfair reviews will do to our business' from similar professional service businesses.

So, businesses are caught between the devil (flouting the CMA regulations) and the deep blue sea (not engaging at all). There are, of course, outliers: businesses that do invite all their customers to write Google reviews, but they are so rare that we have come across just a handful in over a decade.

So, back to the question posed in the title of this article:

How to be sure of not getting one-star Google reviews?

You may wish to read this recent article/case history before reading on: it will give you a massive clue as to the answer.

And that answer: follow our advice to the letter.

That advice: 

1. Adopt an independently moderated review management system. Moderation has proven, time and again, to resolve misunderstandings, errors or fact and just plain unfair reviews, before they are posted live anywhere, and certainly on to Google
2. Follow a disciplined approach to inviting customer reviews. Send an email - not a text (texts invite one-liners) - at an appropriate time. This establishes a valuable secondary communication channel that customers will use in preference to posting a one-star review on Google (or anywhere else)
3. Establish a review-centric culture among all management and staff. They should always be on the lookout for opportunities to prompt a review, and the most successful businesses invariably appoint a key member of staff to oversee the whole process and report results

The business that is the main subject of the article linked to above is an estate agency, an intensely competitive business operating in both the sales and lettings markets in London. The second is a women's healthcare medical practice in Harley Street. All of us know just how problematic the relationship between the various parties in such businesses and in such high-pressure interactions can be, and how often blame can be mistakenly apportioned (estate agency), and how reticent the GP's patients must be when it comes to 'going public' with a Google review. Yet the first business has gathered well over 500 Google reviews, in full compliance with the CMA regulations, without a single one-star Google review being posted in the last three years. The same applies to the Harley Street practice, although volume, as you might expect, is lower.

Our invitation to your business

Whichever category you currently fall under, come and test our guarantee. Your business will be in full compliance with the CMA regulations from day one, and the five-star Google reviews will begin rolling in within days.

Further reading

• One aspect of review management that is not covered in this article is the positive financial impact: a great Google score backed by a significant number of reviews is proven, time and again, to make a positive impact on a business's bottom line. More enquiries and more conversions, it's as simple as that.

The 'secret' impact of professional review management

What could be so 'secret'? The business invites reviews, and HelpHound moderates them to, as far as possible, eliminate factually inaccurate or potentially misleading reviews. The reviews are posted to the business's website and then copied to Google. Job done.

Or so you might - reasonably - think. But there's more to review management than simply inviting, moderating and posting reviews. There is the 'secret' impact on management and staff.

Case history

Business 'A', an estate agency, joined HelpHound in August of 2017. This is what they looked like on Google back then:

4 five-star reviews and one one-star review

And this is what they look like now, eight and a half years later:

This for a business employing less than a dozen staff (if you don't count the office dog). Mind you, they have opened another branch in the past year!

So what did we advise them to do, and what did they do, in reality?

Our advice

This was straightforward: we advised them to invite everyone to write a review. Buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants, professional connections and those they had advised but who had not, for whatever reason, conducted business. 

We provided them with our recommended wording for the email inviting the review (this is more important than you may imagine - both to send the invitation by email, not text, and to use precise wording), and our software - API - to enable them to prominently display their reviews on their website.

In less than a week, they went live. The very next day, the reviews began to roll in.

The reasoning behind that advice

There is no law that says a business must invite anyone and everyone to write a review; what the law - in the person of the Competition and Markets Authority's regulations - says is that 'if a business invites anyone to write a review it must allow everyone to do so'; in other words: no cherry-picking, no hand picking definitely happy customers only and then only inviting those to write a review.

So why does HelpHound invariably advise businesses to invite 'everyone'? For one simple reason: the one person you exclude from the invitation to write a review may - even will - be the person who goes directly to Google and writes a factually incorrect, potentially misleading or just plain unfair review. And there's no moderating a Google review once it is posted.

Gaining the confidence that moderation works

Business 'A', as is the case with virtually every high-value business client of HelpHound's, took our advice, initially at least, with a grain of salt. They invited 'nearly everyone'; until they saw some people who they hadn't invited do one of two things...

• Write a review directly to Google

or...

• Follow the button on their website that a) keeps the business fully compliant with the CMA regulations and b) allows them to write a review without being first invited by the business

Once these two things had happened a few times, they reassessed our advice and their approach.

What did they do next?

They stumbled upon the 'secret'. And that secret? If all the business's staff, from CEO to the newest recruit, adopted a strategy that assumes that every single person they come into contact with will write a review, then the service they provide will be as near perfect as makes no difference. 

Reviews were no longer simply the responsibility of sales staff, or marketing staff, or client services staff, but of every member of staff. In no time at all, a senior member of staff was chosen to devote themselves full-time as the business's dedicated 'head of reviews'.

And every customer is now warned, at the first point-of-contact, that they will be expected to write a review - to help others choose the right business and to help the business provide a really tip-top service to its customers.

The results

In terms of numbers: a constant flow of 5* reviews (19 in the last month, so no slacking off, quite the opposite); importantly, and just about uniquely for a London estate agent dealing with multiple sales and lettings a week, the business has not had a one-star review for over three years, which has meant it has maintained its overall Google score at 4.9. In business terms? Imagine if you were a competitor? They have doubled their payroll and opened another branch as well.  

Another bonus? Here are the most recent two reviews...

These reviews came as a result of an email invitation. We have tested inviting reviews by text. The result? Short one-line reviews. Far less helpful (and far less convincing)

What do we notice? That they are thorough and, as a result, informative and extremely helpful. In short, the kind of review that encourages a potential client to make first contact. Job done.

Now, for a fact that may surprise some

There is no reason whatsoever why this scenario cannot be replicated for any well-managed business with dedicated staff.

But what about a notoriously difficult sector? Women's health, say? Where people - patients - often find themselves under severe physical and emotional stress, and, on top of that, are understandably extremely sensitive to personal privacy.

Like this...

How do you think this business feels, seeing this review as Google's 'Most relevant' at the head of every search?

Nothing like the volume of reviews, but starting from scratch in 2020, a steady average of roughly a review a month has seen this clinic build up critical mass, to the stage where their reviews are all a potential patient now needs to give them the confidence to make an appointment.

We are continually astonished at the wonderful women who are so conscious of the confidence they were given by reading the clinic's reviews that they not only write one themselves, but a great many, such as the one above, are content to see their name attached to it as well.

We can do this for your business

What if you are keen to see your business reap all the benefits of great professional review management, but remain concerned that you may attract unfair, inaccurate or misleading reviews? What is our candid advice? What is the safest compliant way of testing if HelpHound will work as well for your business as it so patently has for the two examples above?

The key word in the sentence above is 'compliant'. Any business can cherry-pick its way to a score of 4.9 in the short term. All it has to do is select the cream of its happy customers and just ask them, and them alone, to post a review. The fact that this tactic will be obvious to regulators and their competitors (not to mention their staff, some of whom will one day be ex-staff working for those competitors) doesn't put some businesses off adopting this 'strategy'. Unfortunately, apart from the legal issues, eventually its less-than-happy customers will find their way to Google, and that near-perfect score will begin to dwindle.

So let us begin with a compliant solution, shall we? This will involve placing some code on your business's website to enable your business...

1. To allow you to ask customers to post reviews there 
2. To allow us to moderate all your reviews pre-publication
3. To show your reviews to everyone who visits your website (potential customers)
4. To benefit from the SEO kicker - Google loves websites that host reviews
5. Get those reviews copied across to Google
6. Get you a great Google score 
7. Get you a consistent flow of great - factually accurate, and helpful - reviews

Just like the businesses at the top of this article.

What if it doesn't work?

As you can probably imagine, with our 'no minimum period' contract and money back guarantee, we are loath to take on businesses where our magic will fail. We will conduct a full audit of your CRM and make the processes crystal clear before you go live (we are far more than just a great piece of software; unlike some businesses in this sector, we always answer the phone and respond to emails). So no risk there.

What remains to be done?

Speak to us. Meet us. Get HelpHound working for your business. You won't regret it.

Further reading

• Moderation - the cornerstone of all we do for our clients

• CMA regulations - why it is so easy, and important, to obey them

• Results - see for yourself, hard numbers

• Our guarantee - HelpHound really is a win/win - two years and counting, and no one has invoked it

• Our fees - all of this for so little? Yes!

Trustpilot - surely enough is enough?

As regular readers will know, we monitor all review channels on a continuous basis. For the benefit of our clients and their customers. Our only loyalty is to both of these constituencies. If a new and better solution to reviews emerges, or a currently great review solution makes a misstep, we need to know so we can advise our clients accordingly. We have no contract or financial arrangements with any of these solutions, and we never will. 

Trustpilot - again

One such solution is Trustpilot, the Danish-based and London-quoted review site. It makes much of its AI fake-review detection. 

We recommend you park this video for later and read on (we have viewed all 40 minutes on your behalf); in this article, we are just going to test one sentence from Anoop Joshi, Chief Trust Officer at Trustpilot, and that is his assertion that 'it is incredibly difficult to spot what is genuine and what is fake'. And remember, when you read our findings, that we have no access to any of the multitude of data points that Trustpilot's software is able to pick up

So we decided to put their much-vaunted AI to the test by giving two of our moderators a challenge: find us 20 definitely fake or fraudulent reviews on Trustpilot in half an hour. Here are the results (click on individual images to enlarge).

Oh, and while you're at it...

Now another, this time based in the UAE...

Red Flags

Almost too many to count, some apply to all, some to individual reviews...

• All reviews were written on the same day
• None of the reviews are of businesses in the reviewer's home country
• The spelling and grammar are suspect
• The content of the review bears no relation to the product/service reviewed
• The content of the review is patently irrelevant 
• The spectrum of reviewed businesses is untypical of a genuine reviewer: parking services in San Francisco, a T-shirt retailer in South Carolina, an AI tech platform (!) based in SF, L Ron Hubbard's publisher in LA, a quilt manufacturer in the Italian Dolomites, a Tennis coaching business in Queensland, a music label in Berlin, a baby stroller rental company in Orlando, and the list, as you can imageine, goes on in a similar - and similarly unlikely - vein.

Take the first review written by 'Ganesh Awate': it purports to be of Hollywood Mirrors, a makeup mirror supplier based in South Yorkshire. The review begins 'very comfortable...' A 'comfortable' mirror? His second review is of Photon Brothers, a solar panel installer from Denver, Colorado. What would you expect a review of solar panels to say? 'Great installation'? 'These panels saved me money'? No such thing. Instead, we find gibberish.

Fazullah Mohammed - who has written 262 reviews on Trustpilot - is a Trustpilot 'verified user'...

...and has written 282 reviews, all the same (nonsense), this one for Mochi health is particularly interesting...

...because it even elicited a thank you from the business, which is intriguing, since they almost certainly paid for the review in the first place, which leads one to wonder...

...just how many more of those nearly 15,000 reviews are genuine? And please bear in mind we are not dealing with reviews of a pizza parlour here. Fake reviews of such a business? A second-rate pizza and it's £10 down the drain. This is a Healthcare business!

And it explicitly contravenes the UK CMA regulations by selectively showing only 5* reviews on its own website. When it has been rated one-star by over 1400 people, including 8 in the last week.

We took a closer look at both these businesses and make the following comments:

The great upside of AI is that once developed and implemented, it is effectively free (for the business); on the other hand, human moderators, such as those here at HelpHound, are highly trained and experienced salaried specialists. But we have always been very much aware that the reviews we moderate are used by consumers to make potentially life-changing or decisions that will have long-term impacts on their financial and even physical well-being; reviews such as those you see above would never be relied on by anyone in their right mind when choosing any kind of business or service, but that's the core issue: Trustpilot reviews are virtually invisible once posted, they are rarely returned in Google searches - Google reviews are what the majority of consumers see; it is the overall score that businesses are looking for, to bolster the kind of marketing you see Mochi above

1. Our moderators found these reviews, undoubtedly all fake and paid for, within minutes (the individual reviews within seconds), yet they evaded Trustpilot's AI moderation
2. These reviews are not difficult to spot with the naked eye
3. We use our own AI for basic functions such as identifying foul language in reviews, but we would not dream of using it to moderate reviews 
4. None of the above reviews would make it through HelpHound moderation. 

In addition, Trustpilot already admit they remove millions of fraudulent reviews. This raises another question: just how long do these reviews remain on the site before removal?

Both the company listings and reviewer accounts remain live on Trustpilot as of today's date; we will monitor them going forward to see what action, if any, is taken.

Conclusion

Adrian Blair, current CEO of Trustpilot, is quoted in the article above as saying 'More and more people are using us every month because they see us as a trusted source. A lot of people are saying just that in their Trustpilot reviews.

“And why is that? Because we go to enormous lengths to ensure that the content on Trustpilot is trustworthy.

“We have more than 350m reviews on our platform. Every one of those reviews has metadata attached to it.

None of the above reassures us, or should reassure users - business or consumer - of Trustpilot. Or the CMA. 

The fact that 'more and more people are using [Trustpilot]' is simply a factor of its sales success, not because consumers 'see [Trustpilot] as a trusted source'. If the likes of Octopus Energy (740,000 reviews on Trustpilot and counting) are using Trustpilot of course 'more and more people are 'using' it. But we need to define 'using'.In the main this 'using' is simply the act of writing a review when requested by the company, not, as in the case of Google, reading those reviews (Trustpilot reviews are surprisingly hard to find in search, unless one goes directly to their site, which we are sure few people do - except, as perviously mentioned, to write a review.

'Enormous lengths'? We feel we have already adequately covered that point.

'Metadata attached'? We've said it before: metadata -  time of writing the review, location of the review writer's IP, IP address, device, etc. - might be useful to support real-world moderation, but in and of itself, it is very nearly useless. 

This headline from December 2025 should ring alarm bells for any CEO. More so, the readers' comments, which are mostly in this vein...

The 'likes' only serve to reinforce the comments

We - and many others - have been highly critical of many aspects of Trustpilot's business model, modus operandi and systems for many years now. Because the whole universe of online reviews, which we fervently believe to be a force for good, stands and falls on their credibility. 

Link

Being able to trust reviews is vital, maybe not so much for online retail (you can return most products bought online these days - irritating, but you remain unharmed), but for an oncologist? A wealth manager? A family lawyer? We are sure you are getting our drift

Companies such as Yelp, in the US (no longer trading in the UK and EU thanks to compliance issues too many to mention in this article), and others that have prioritised traffic over moderation will, eventually come to the attention of the "woefully underfunded and therefore underresourced" (we quote) CMA - which recently announced AI all of its own to track down companies that host fake reviews. 

Comment on Trustpilot's annual report

And when they do, we hope they wish they had used some of their investors' cash and/or profits to moderate the reviews they expect consumers to trust and rely on to choose really important - often life-changing - services.

More from the web...

• The CMA documents detailing the compliance issues surrounding publishing fake reviews

• The CMA's Fake Reviews guidance 

• Fake Review Report - by Fake Review Watch

• Money Saving Expert - a forum thread entitled 'Trustpilot - can they be trusted?'

• An interesting Reddit thread - entitled "Trustpilot isn't a review site, it's a protection racket for fake reviews.'

• Grizzly Research's report - entitled 'The Trustpilot Mafia, how the extortion model destroys Trustpilot's value proposition.'

• Richman SEO's deep dive - dating back as far as 2019, but not a lot has changed since then