Trustpilot, Fake Reviews, and the Complicated Truth About Transparency

The Trustpilot fake review drama isn’t new. And it’s definitely not a one-off. If you’ve worked in marketing or growth, especially in B2C, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Sitejabber, Reviews.io, Feefo, and not to mention WikiFX: all of them are popular, but often attract critics for questionable practices.

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But here’s the thing no one likes to spell out: Review platforms like Trustpilot sit on a double-edged business model. There are two sides of the coin: one is the users leaving reviews (aka angry customers or incentivized fans) and the other is the companies being reviewed and paying for visibility.

Now guess which side is actually funding the platform? It's the companies. However, it’s a classic case of incentive misalignment.

Trustpilot needs to appear fair and neutral to users, but at the same time—they need to keep paying companies happy. Retention metrics, upsells, sales targets—you name it.

Trustpilot has a pretty solid client retention rate (check their latest earnings report). So yes, they are making their clients happy. Its net dollar retention rate of 103%, which means current clients are paying more year-over-year​.

It must be highlighted that Trustpilot has solid processes in place. Running a publicly traded company with that much controversy isn’t easy. And web traffic to the platform is not going anywhere either. If anything, it’s growing. The Trustpilot website had around 51 million organic visits in these months of 2025, as seen on SemRush.

Trustpilot's Questionable Business Practices

When it comes to Trustpilot's business practices, there are many questionable bits. One company (not naming names) ran a legit Trustpilot campaign. They bought a premium plan with official emails and had CTA buttons. But one trick they baked into the flow is when a user clicked 4 or 5 stars, the reviews were directly sent to Trustpilot, but when they clicked below 4 stars, the reviews were redirected to an internal survey.

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The practice of that company is definitely shady. But how did Trustpilot handle it? The review platform flagged it for a short time, but allegedly ignored the issue when the company bought a higher-tier plan.

Some other questionable practices of Trustpilot are:

• You can’t remove your company profile from Trustpilot.

• They believe in “transparency.” But if you try collecting positive reviews without paying, you’ll get a “policy violation” warning.

• If you’re not a paying customer but have client reviews, you can’t use Trustpilot rankings on your site.

Companies were even told it was forbidden to send customers to their Trustpilot profile—unless they were on a paid plan. So the bottom line is to collect good reviews, companies have to pay, and to have “an opportunity” to suppress (dispute) bad reviews, you also must become a paying customer. That’s the model.

Read here: A company's tussle with Trustpilot over the fair use of its reviews on the review website.

Some businesses have even tried suing Trustpilot over fake reviews from people they claim never worked with them—saying they lost business as a result. So far, all those lawsuits have failed. Courts ruled there was “an absence of reality with the claim as put by the claimant,” since there was no link between the specific reviews and any actual financial loss.

A Reality of the Review Industry

Companies want reviews: great ones and lots of them. The reason being social proof strengthens trust, with the ultimate result of conversion. Especially in high-churn, low-loyalty markets like finance or e-comm, such social proofs with reviews are crucial.

Due to this demand, scammers caught on. It was only a matter of time before fake review farms popped up.

A quick glance at Black Hat World (BHW)—not to advertise—show how dire the fake review scenario is. It’s a real forum, proudly hosting agencies offering “verified” Trustpilot reviews and other unconventional marketing techniques. Some are shockingly sophisticated.

Sadly, some businesses using Trustpilot may also be blackmailed by some of the scammers also offering fake reviews.

Accounts are aged, review behavior mimics real users, and yes—you can even order a custom blend of negative reviews to look authentic—all for $5 to $15 per review.

To be fair to Trustpilot, they are trying to fight these fake-review sites. They even won a legal case against review sellers ahead of new law banning the sale of fake reviews.

But, how do legit companies get so many real reviews? The answer lies in automated email campaigns. After a purchase, interaction, or download, they send a feedback email. The industry average response rate to these feedback emails are 6 to 12%. Although the response rate might appear low, the volume on scale, however, can be massive.

If you’re a growing “trader funding” company popularly known as prop trading company, with 500 clients and non-existent web traffic, it’s not plausible to have 200 legit reviews. For real business, the strategy is to scale, follow up, nudge, intensify and get the stars on review websites.

However, smaller companies often try to “boost” the process a bit by buying a few reviews to offset the rage-posts. Although this is a questionable practice, who’s counting?

If you’re using any B2C review platform today—great. Just know and understand what game you’re playing. And if you think, as a consumer, that those glowing 5-star reviews give you the full story? You’re probably wrong. I don’t know a single B2C review platform I would genuinely trust—but that’s just me.

Financemagnates.com reached out to Trustpilot on its questionable practices and received the following response:

Trustpilot is an open platform that all businesses, no matter their size, can use... In the enhanced plans they can also benefit from tools including insights into customer sentiment and being able to use Trustpilot logos and reviews in their own marketing materials.

[...] Paid packages offer enhanced engagement tools and analysis, but upgrading does not give a business the ability to remove, reinstate, change and redirect reviews. All businesses are treated in the same way when we apply our guidelines and rules governing behaviour on our platform. There is also no policy in place that prohibits companies from sending customers to their Trustpilot profile unless they are on a paid plan.

[...] We let consumers decide which businesses are reviewed on Trustpilot. — A business profile page is automatically created when someone searches for the business's web address on our platform, or it can be added from the search results page. Consumers can then start posting reviews about their recent experience with the business. If a newly-created profile page does not get any reviews in 7 days, the page is automatically deleted. However, once a business has been reviewed on Trustpilot, we won't remove its profile page.