Every review has an owner
Reviews come from confirmed accounts with a name attached. No anonymous submissions, no unverified addresses, no bulk-created identities.
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Integrity
How we keep reviews authentic, attributed, and useful.
Read the guidelinesHow ratings work
Review platforms have a credibility problem, and they earned it. Manufactured five-star campaigns, quiet deletions that arrived with a subscription, and “verified” badges that verified nothing have taught people to discount star ratings altogether. That scepticism is rational, and it is the problem we have to solve before anything else we build matters.
Our answer is not a promise that fraud never reaches this platform. Anyone making that promise is either lying or not looking. Our answer is a set of mechanisms you can inspect: who is allowed to write a review, what is checked before it publishes, who decides when something comes down, and which of those levers money can reach. This page documents all four.
It documents the limits too. Automated screening produces false positives and false negatives. Moderators make judgement calls, and some of them will be wrong. A patient fraudster with real accounts is a genuinely hard adversary. What we can commit to is that the rules are identical for a company paying us every month and a company that has never logged in.
These are the load-bearing ones. Everything else on this page is detail underneath them.
Reviews come from confirmed accounts with a name attached. No anonymous submissions, no unverified addresses, no bulk-created identities.
A claimed company can respond publicly to anything written about it. It cannot edit a word, hide a rating, or have a review removed for being unflattering.
Every paid feature is a tool: replies, invitations, widgets, analytics. No plan changes a rating, reorders reviews, or influences a moderation decision.
Reviews come down for breaking published guidelines, decided by a person against a written rule — not by a script, and not by whoever complained loudest.
Six stages. The part worth paying attention to is who holds the decision at each one.
An account with a verified email address writes a rating, a title, and an account of what happened. The name on that account travels with the review permanently.
TrustGuard scores the submission against a battery of fraud heuristics the moment it arrives — before it is visible to anybody, including the company.
Clean submissions publish immediately. Anything above the confidence threshold waits in the moderation queue for a person. Nothing is deleted automatically, at any score.
The company can reply in public, ask for more detail, or dispute the facts — with its answer attached to the review, under its own name.
Any reader can flag a review they believe breaks the rules — including the company, and including the person who wrote it. Flags are queued, never acted on automatically.
A moderator keeps, hides, or removes the review against the guidelines. The company's rating and review count move with that decision.
Every review is attached to a verified account. We don't accept fake names, throwaway addresses, or paid review services.
In practice that means one confirmed email address per account, a name shown on every review, and no route for buying a bundle of ready-made identities. When a review arrives through an invitation carrying a valid order reference it earns a verified-purchase badge — evidence that the person did business with the company, not merely that they had an opinion about it.
No single signal is proof. Together they are usually enough to justify a second pair of eyes before a review reaches a profile.
Grounds for removal are written down in the guidelines. This is the short version.
We would rather show you a review we cannot fully verify, labelled for what it is, than quietly delete anything inconvenient. Silent deletion is the practice that destroyed trust in review sites in the first place.
Claimed companies can publicly respond to a review, but they cannot edit or remove it. Only TrustRating moderators can hide reviews that violate our guidelines.
That asymmetry is deliberate, and it is the most common complaint we receive from businesses. A company able to edit its reviews would have a marketing page, not a review profile. What a company can do is answer — and a considered public reply to a bad review persuades far more readers than a missing review ever could.
Anyone can flag a review for moderation. We review every flag and will either keep, hide, or delete the review with a public note.
A flag is not a delete button, in either direction. A flag raised by a company with a legal department and one raised by a first-time reader enter the same queue and are judged against the same guidelines. If we keep a review you reported, asking again more loudly will not produce a different answer.
From readers, reviewers, and businesses — often with some heat behind them.
The rules we moderate against are published, and they apply to every account and every company on the platform.