The fake reviews ban: what it means for how you collect and show reviews

What the ban covers, in brief

From the sources above, two practices are banned outright:

• Fake consumer reviews: submitting them, or commissioning someone else to.
• Concealed incentivised reviews: reviews where the reviewer was given something in return and that fact is hidden.

The CMA's guidance is aimed at businesses that publish consumer reviews, which includes online shops and service firms that show reviews on their own sites. If you display reviews, it is written for you. It goes into more detail than this summary, so read it directly rather than relying on any second-hand account, including this one.

Questions to check your collection process against

Use these as a checklist to review with whoever handles reviews in your business, then compare your answers with the guidance:

1. Has anyone in the business, or anyone paid by it, ever written a review of your products or services posing as a customer?
2. Has the business paid or rewarded a person or service to produce reviews?
3. Do you offer any incentive for leaving a review, such as a discount, entry into a draw or a free gift, and is it disclosed wherever the review appears?
4. Do you ask every customer for a review, or only those you expect to be happy?
5. Are staff, friends or family ever asked to leave reviews?

If any answer makes you uneasy, stop that practice while you check the guidance.

Write down how your process works today, step by step: when customers are asked, by whom, through which channel, and with what wording. A written process is easier to check against the guidance, easier to train new staff on, and easier to show to an adviser if you want a second opinion.

Questions to check how you display reviews

Collection is half the job. Display is the other half. Ask:

• Are all genuine reviews published, or are negative ones held back?
• Are reviews from one product or service shown against another?
• Are old reviews presented as if they were recent?
• Is any review summary or star rating calculated from the full set of reviews?
• If incentivised reviews are shown, is that disclosed next to them?

The CMA guidance sets out what businesses that publish reviews are expected to do. Compare your answers against it.

What this means for competitor research

Reading rivals' reviews is still a sound and legitimate way to learn what customers value. Our post on reading rivals' reviews explains how. Two things follow from the ban:

• Never leave reviews of a competitor's business, positive or negative.
• Treat a rival's suspiciously perfect review profile as an observation, not evidence of wrongdoing. You cannot tell from the outside how reviews were gathered.

Equally, do not copy a rival's review tactics on the assumption that because they do it, it must be allowed.

Building a review habit you can defend

The safest review process is also the simplest: ask every customer at the right moment, make it easy with a direct link, never pay or reward for reviews unless you disclose it clearly and have checked the guidance, and reply to reviews in public, including the critical ones.

A steady flow of genuine reviews, with visible replies, is a trust signal that rivals cannot easily copy. Our post on trust signals worth copying covers how to show them well.

Where the risk usually creeps in

Most businesses that fall foul of review rules do not set out to deceive. The risk tends to creep in through small, well-meant habits: a manager asking staff to leave a review to get a new profile started, a thank-you discount mentioned in a follow-up email without any disclosure where the review appears, or an agency hired to "manage reputation" without anyone asking exactly what that involves.

If you use an outside agency or platform for reviews, ask them in writing how reviews are collected, whether any incentives are offered, and how those are disclosed. Responsibility for what appears on your site does not disappear because someone else arranged it. Again, check the guidance and take advice where you are unsure.

Next step

Run the two checklists above with your team, then read CMA208 in full. If you want to see how your reviews and other trust signals compare with up to three rivals, an Intel loop scores trust signals as one of its eight categories, with quoted evidence. Our trust page explains how we handle the public information we collect.