Maintaining trust in online reviews takes more than good intentions - it takes action. The Coalition for Trusted Reviews’ Bad Actors Working Group is spotlighting the proactive steps our members are taking to preserve the integrity of online review content and uphold consumer trust.

Members of the Coalition for Trusted Reviews have put our best practices into action in ways that reflect the unique nature of their platforms, ensuring that review content remains authentic and trustworthy.

All of our members rigorously analyse and proactively block fraudulent reviews before they are published. Furthermore, they take legal action against bad actors that provide or procure fake reviews, sending a clear message that such practices have severe consequences.

Below, you can find key actions taken over the past year (2024-25) that demonstrate how members put our best practices into action and work to maintain the integrity of trusted reviews.

Amazon

Amazon proactively blocked more than 275 million suspected fake reviews from its store in 2024.

Amazon analysed 100% of product reviews in 2024 through a combination of advanced machine learning models and expert investigators prior to being posted on its platform.

As a result of Amazon’s legal actions in 2024, over 40 fake review brokers and related websites have ceased their illicit activity attempting to abuse Amazon’s store. In the last two years, Amazon has taken legal action against 115 fake review brokers.

Booking.com

In 2024, Booking.com identified and investigated coordinated fake review activity involving major accommodation chains. This led to targeted actions (suspensions and terminations of the accounts) against multiple offending groups.

To strengthen platform-wide integrity, Booking.com aligned its fake review detection strategies across multiple company verticals, with a focus on the Accommodation and Transport business units.

Additionally, Booking.com enhanced the performance of its machine learning models by engineering and refining key features, resulting in improved accuracy and effectiveness of its fraudulent content detection systems.

Docplanner

Every opinion submitted to Docplanner in 2024 was rigorously reviewed to check for the reviewer’s activity and behaviour (such as how they use the platform and any unusual platforms), the doctor’s or clinic’s history, any potential connections between the reviewer and the doctor or clinic, and any usual patterns across many users or providers. Docplanner used automated tools to make these checks fast and consistent, with manual reviews for edge cases.

To promote consumer trust in reviews published on their platform, Docplanner rejected any reviews that weren’t helpful or constructive or that contained content with the potential to create legal risks of patients.

Demonstrating its commitment to safeguarding the integrity of reviews, Docplanner took legal action against companies and individuals who tried to create fake reviews at scale.

Glassdoor

As part of its commitment to protect the integrity of reviews on its platform, Glassdoor actively monitors any attempts to manipulate employer ratings, whether through fake positive reviews or coordinated negative attacks, and takes remedial action as appropriate to help maintain the trust of its community.

When there is clear evidence that an employer — or someone acting on their behalf — has attempted to artificially inflate employer ratings, Glassdoor removes the unauthorised content and places a visible alert on the employer’s profile, thereby signalling that content has been removed for violating Glassdoor’s Community Guidelines.

In cases where repeated or coordinated attempts to manipulate reviews are detected, Glassdoor applies heightened fraud monitoring to that employer’s account. New content from these employers may be escalated directly to Glassdoor’s fraud investigations team for manual review before it can be cleared for publication.

Glassdoor has also identified situations where employers appear to be targeted by third-party reputation management companies with suspicious waves of negative reviews after declining unsolicited services from them. While difficult to attribute definitively, these patterns raise concerns about coercive tactics. To help prevent any negative impact to the authenticity of its platform, Glassdoor’s moderation team appropriately responds to remove such impermissible content.

Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor protected its user base from 2.7 million fake reviews in 2024, with the vast majority being caught before they were ever published.

In 2024, Tripadvisor undertook vital enforcement action against "employee incentive" programs, whereby businesses attempt to circumvent the platform’s anti-incentive policy by bypassing guests and offer bonuses and rewards to their employees in exchange for being mentioned in reviews. By utilising statistical analysis and deep investigation methods, Tripadvisor removed over 360,000 low quality, reputation-damaging reviews for violating these guidelines.

Tripadvisor reached out to over 90 million of its users with a proactive educational campaign explaining why our policies prohibit incentivised reviews, how we protect them against these reviews, and what they can do to proactively report incidents to the platform through a dedicated reporting channel.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot undertakes extensive enforcement when fake reviews are detected, of which education represents a key step. After removing the reviews, Trustpilot sends an educational email to the business, explaining why fake reviews are not tolerated and giving the business an opportunity to correct their behaviour.

Trustpilot has issued legal claims and sent pre-action legal letters threatening legal action to several other businesses. In each claim Trustpilot has received a court order or legal commitments from the businesses to stop procuring fake reviews, and to pay the platform damages and contribute to their costs of the legal claim. Trustpilot has received damages, which they will be donating to consumer rights charities.

Trustpilot took legal action against an online retailer of new and used photographic equipment. They had been procuring fake reviews on and off since 2014 and had not taken any notice of Trustpilot’s enforcement action. The court gave a resounding judgement in Trustpilot’s favour, ordering the retailer to stop engaging in fraudulent review activity, pay damages to Trustpilot, and make payment towards the platform’s costs.

Spotlight: how our members preserve the integrity of online reviews