# Guidelines for Reviewers

June 2022Trustpilot is here to help you shape and improve the world. We do it by giving you a powerful, open-to-all review platform where you can share and discover experiences, and connect with businesses to help them improve.

The only thing we ask is that you respect and follow these guidelines (together with our Terms of Use) to help us all keep Trustpilot a collaborative and trustworthy place for everyone to enjoy. Thanks for getting on board — let’s upgrade the world!

You can write a review if you’ve had a recent, genuine experience.

You’re not allowed to write a review if a company has offered you an incentive to do so. Incentives include things like discounts, monetary rewards, loyalty points, gifts, coupons and referral bonuses. These undermine the integrity of reviews. If you receive an incentive, you can report it to us here.

Reviews are your chance to share your experiences with others and give feedback to companies. Size doesn’t matter here, we think all experiences big and small are worth reviewing — whether it’s a phone call, an online order, a visit to your local store or otherwise using a company’s products or service.

Just keep it fresh by writing about your experience that happened in the past 12 months. While your story about buying a boombox in the 80s is cool, it’s less relevant for consumers looking to invest in today’s hi-tech audio products. When you share your recent experiences, other readers get a feel for how a company is operating now. And companies get valuable up-to-date feedback. Learn more about who can write a review and when.

Don’t make up an experience or write a review for someone else — leave it to them to write their own review. And if you’re closely associated with, work for, or are in competition with a particular company, you shouldn’t review it.

Receiving an incentive to write, change or delete a review is a big no-no.

Hold onto documentation that shows you’ve had an experience with the company (for example, a receipt, order confirmation, screenshot of your chat with online customer service) because you might be asked to verify your experience.

We expect you to be a respectful contributor to our platform. So play nice, don’t be a jerk. Don’t post anything harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene. And don’t lie, bully, blackmail, make threats or do anything illegal.

Here are our tips for writing a great review.

That's a tough one to explain. We're a platform that sits between consumers and businesses, so we have to balance competing responsibilities: We want to let everyone tell their story (good or bad), but we're also required to take down words and statements that unjustly cause significant damage to people's reputations or serious financial loss to a business.

The most powerful reviews explain what took place and leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

We don’t get involved in disputes about what actually went down between a reviewer and a business. Trustpilot is a consumer review platform, not a regulatory authority or a court of law.

Keep your reviews relevant — don’t include any promotional references, marketing material or links. This isn’t the place to sell stuff, offer discount codes, form action groups or meet other like-minded singles in your area.

Your reviews are public. That’s why it’s not a good idea to include your own sensitive or personal information, and it’s never OK to include someone else’s. We’re talking names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and anything else that could be used to track, identify, contact or impersonate someone. We want the privacy and safety of yourself and others to be respected and protected.

You’d be surprised how often people mistakenly leave a review for Company A on Company B’s profile page (trust us, on Trustpilot’s own profile page we often hear about how much people love or hate our non-existent delivery service!). So before you post, please double check the company and country domain you’re reviewing. It’ll save potential headaches later on.

You need a user account to post a review. Just like your first kiss, you only get one user account and it should involve a real person. Your username, profile description and picture must reflect who you are (don’t go impersonating other people, thanks) and can’t be harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene — because everyone can see your profile! If you do include something you shouldn’t, or you create more than one account, we can delete your account/s.

Your user account also needs to be connected to a valid, permanent email address in case we need to contact you.

Sometimes your account is automatically created and pre-filled with your name, like if you click on an email invitation link from a company or sign up via Facebook. You can always edit your details to include only the information you want publicly displayed.

Your review is owned by you. That means you can edit, update or delete your review at any time. You’re encouraged to update an existing review if you want to add more information about a particular experience. And while it’s fine to write more than one review for a business if you’ve had more than one experience, please don’t bombard a business with lots of reviews, because that’s not helpful for anyone.

We love it when you put on your superhero sidekick shirt and help us protect our platform by letting us know about problematic reviews — especially if you’ve got proof. Only flag a review if you genuinely believe there’s a problem, and please be fair and consistent.

We’ll check flagged reviews to see if they breach our guidelines. And if they do, we’ll take action.

We’re all for freedom of expression, but some content just won’t fly. If someone flags your review for breaking our rules, we may temporarily hide it and ask you to make some changes. We’ll give you the opportunity to bring genuine reviews within our guidelines so they can stay on Trustpilot.

But if you seriously misuse our platform we can remove your reviews and/or block or delete your account. If your account is deleted, your reviews will also be deleted.

In addition, our super cool software is constantly on the lookout for suspicious and fake reviews and will remove them.

These guidelines are just that: guiding principles. Please understand that we have the final say with regard to the interpretation and application of these guidelines, and we can update them at any time. If you’d like more detailed information about how we work, you’re welcome to visit our Support Center.