How To Identify and Report Your Competitors’ Fake (Paid) Reviews (updated 6.2026) 

 Note I’ve broken some URLs below:

   Fake (paid) reviews may be found online on Amazon,  Google Maps (a.k.a Business Profile), Tripadvisor  etc . To state the obvious, fake reviews can majorly influence a product's (in an online marketplace like Ebay) / business’s ranking (and consumers’ perceptions) either positively (when the fake review is +ive) or negatively (when the fake review is -ive) . This is because many online marketplaces' / search engines’ / review sites’ algorithms use reviews as a key signal to determine a product's / business’s ranking among other products / businesses in the same category (Gobi and Rathinavelu, 2019). Fake reviews are also used to fake trust signals to consumers.

  Thus fake reviews can be a used as a weapon in a competitive online marketplace – an unethical firm may generate negative reviews about their rivals and you can decrease the visibility of your competitors by reporting fake reviews. If you are working in SEO / CRO / brand / online reputation management then keeping an eye on your clients' online reviews is a significant part of your job!

In 2025 fake reviews were made illegal by the UK government. Since April 2025, the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (a.k.a DMCCA) has made it possible for businesses to report their competitors' fake (online) reviews to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

    Some SEO agencies have been found to be writing fake reviews for their clients. One small UK based agency was found to have written 800+ fake (positive) reviews for 86 small businesses (published on  26 websites) between 2014 and 2015. 

    Here are some tips on how to identify and report your clients’ competitors’ fake online reviews relatively quickly and easily.

How To Identify Fake Online Reviews (Like a Forensic Linguist)

    1. Some review site(s) may flag certain profiles as having contained suspicious reviews e.g. on Trustpilot you used see a warning like:

        The above warnings on Trustpilot don't exist anymore from my review in 2026.

2. A large number of reviews (depends on the platform / scale & age of business scale etc) may indicate suspicious activity - but high hundreds / 1K+ on one platform might be worthy of scrutiny (hospitality / travel businesses might  be the exception). If a business has 300 reviews on Trustpilot with only 3 on the Google Map that might be a suspicious footprint...

 Also reviewers who have posted a large number of reviews may be a sign that they are doing so for money... I recently spotted a Trustpilot reviewer profile with a total of 20 reviews - 13 of which were for the same company.

3. A suspicious pattern of reviews e.g. 2 separate businesses - one in Canada, one in the United Kingdom: both with recent reviews on the Google Map from the same 2 "people"? With slightly different names? Can you believe it? What a coincidence…

4. A pattern of “General reviews” which often just mentions the support / customer service they received rather than specifics e.g. a product name.

  It is possible that with “review gating” ( e.g. by only asking customers who are in contact with customer services / support departments who had a positive outcome for reviews) that a similar patten might occur, but if no staff names are mentioned at all in multiple reviews that in my opinion may suggest fake reviews. See below:

   Also I've seen patterns like multiple reviews for a manufacturer / installer which states they are placing a review before delivery installation which may not "ring true".

 5. Content of review is irrelevant to the business – this appears to be where a review for one business is (erroneously) posted on another profile by the ‘fake reviewer’ working on multiple reviews. See an irrelevant review for an estate agent comparison site below:

 6. It may be that automated translation software is being used if the ‘fake reviewer’ is not a speaker of the language of the territory where the business being reviewed is located – thus the content might be written in incorrect English / French etc. 

7. If you search for the content of suspicious reviews on Google in inverted commas with one or more of the above / below characteristics you may see where the same review content was posted elsewhere.

8. The reviewers’ names often don’t look right . If for example there are a lot of Asian names reviewing a (local) service in an area without many / any Asian people that may be a clue. The screenshot below shows a few reviewers with look like double first names rather than a first name with a surname:

9. Sometimes reviews from different authors share the same typographical errors.

10. Reviews for companies which sell products but the reviews mention that the product has not yet been received may be considered a suspicious pattern - as are reviewers whose profiles mention their location as being in another country which is not serviced by the company in question.

    In Wu et al. (2020), this research proves that both real and fake reviews both have many micro-linguistic differences, which can be used to determine which is which.  Burgoon (2015) is a study which shows that fake reviewers tend to avoid the usage of first-person pronouns (in writing reviews) since they do not have a "real" first-hand experience to detail. Anotther studys analysing review content highlights that authentic reviews can be seen to contain more nouns, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions (Saidani et al., 2020). Nevertheless, considering only linguistic features may not enough to determine the authenticity of reviews (Dong et al., 2018), since they can be seen to have more positive or negative words than authentic ones because fake review writers often pretend to appear more emotionally involved (Cai et al., 2022, Xu et al., 2020, Chang et al., 2018, Moon et al., 2021).

11. Note it is also possible to use the LLM Claude to do an assessment of the authenticity of competitors' reviews on Trustpilot. You can use a prompt like "analyse all reviews and reviewer's profiles on https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/XXX.co.uk for suspicious patterns  including likelihood of undisclosed incentivation. do the same for all other pages e.g. https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/XXX.co.uk?page=2"

     It is also possible to copy and paste competitors' reviews in bulk from the Google Map (aka Google Business Profile) into Claude (the info that is possible to copy directly from the Google Map does not include review ratings nor reviewer names) and do a purely "text-based" authenticity / incentivisation analysis . 

How To Report Fake Online Reviews

    1. See “Report inappropriate reviews ” on Google: https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7445749?hl=en . There may also be other related Google Business Profile guideline compliance issues 

            2. For fake online reviews / misrepresentation of reviews there may also be grounds for a complaint to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (and similar regulators around the world) as they state that "Markets that are not working well can result in negative effects for consumers, businesses and the economy. E.g. consumers may be not be able to make informed choices about prospective purchases” (quote from page linked below) - see 'Problems in a market sector' section on https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem . 

   This type of activity in 2025 "could lead to a criminal conviction for misleading consumers under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, or even in more serious cases, prosecution for fraud under the Fraud Act 2006 according to one lawyer quoted on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-creating-fake-experts-your-company-really-bad-idea-flo-powell-jdcae who states this type of activity also:

"could lead to a criminal conviction for misleading consumers under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, or even in more serious cases, prosecution for fraud under the Fraud Act 2006. From a regulatory standpoint, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) requires all advertisements to be honest and not misleading. Using a fake expert in a commercial context may result in a banned campaign or further action from Trading Standards...

“The ... Online Safety Act 2023 may also apply to online platforms spreading such content, particularly where it causes harm or contributes to misinformation."

    4. Bing Maps: see https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/how-to-report-a-concern-or-contact-bing-1831f0fe-3c4d-46ae-8e57-16c487715729#:~:text=If%20you%20see%20factual%20errors,the%20bottom%20of%20the%20page. 

    5. Trustpilot: see https://support.trustpilot .com/hc/en-us/articles/203419993-How-consumers-can-flag-reviews-that-breach-our-guidelines