Many of us read online reviews of restaurants or web shop before we make a reservation or a purchase. But how trustworthy are the reviews and how can we recognize when a review is fake? VRT News’ Tim Veheyden provides 4 invaluable tips to help you detect whether or not a review is genuine or fake.
Some companies have no qualms about manipulating reviews even writing completely fake reviews about their products or services. This is all in order to gain the trust of potential customers.
But how do you know when reviews are genuine and trustworthy? Tim Verheyden provides 4 top tips.
What’s in a word?
"Overly enthusiastic reviews describing a product as "phenomenal", for example, can be suspicious. An abundance of details about the product can also be suspicious, as can repeated mentions of the product name. These tricks are sometimes used to make a review rank better in search engines."
"Real consumer reviews usually sound like a conversation between friends. They are down-to-earth, balanced and without excessive superlatives. Extreme praise or very detailed descriptions can indicate that review is fake."
Check the profile picture
If you are in doubt whether the review comes from a real person or not, you should check whether the profile picture accompanying it is genuine. "This can be done very easily: take a screenshot of the profile picture and post the photo in Google Lens. If you then end up on a website selling stock photos on it, you know the review is not genuine."
Be critical, even on trusted platforms
One of the best-known product review platforms is Trustpilot . This is a website that collects reviews from all over the world and actively works to root out fake reviews. "Generally speaking, we can say that this is a watertight system. They work closely with, among others, Amazon and Booking.com to in the fight against fake reviews."
However, sometimes fake reviews can still slip through the net. This is why Tim Verheyden recommends remaining critical and vigilant even on well-known and trusted platforms.
Look for verified reviews
Reviews are labelled as “verified” if the review platform knows they have been written by a genuine customer. They often check this by using an automatic detection system.
This detects any suspicious activity such as when an account places large number of reviews in a short time or when a review is written in the same style as other reviews from the same account.
Nevertheless, verified reviews are not always reliable. Judge.me is a review platform where, in theory, only customers who have actually bought a product can leave a review. However, experience shows that manipulation is also possible here too. For instance, online vendors could choose to publish only positive reviews and not the (more) negative ones.
"Practices of this nature naturally raise questions about the independence of platforms like this and their relationships with certain companies. Therefore, you should always check exactly how a platform operates."