ReviewAdviser only works if you can trust the reviews on it. This page sets out the rules every review must follow, how we check reviews, and what happens when someone reports one.
Review guidelines
A review must be based on your own, genuine experience with the company within the last 12 months. When you write a review:
- Do describe what happened: what you bought, how it went and how the company dealt with any problems.
- Do keep it relevant to the company and its products or services.
- Do be honest, including about the good parts of a bad experience and the bad parts of a good one.
- Don't review a company you work for, own, compete with or are paid by.
- Don't write a review in exchange for money, a discount, a gift or any other benefit, unless it is clearly disclosed in the review. We may still decide not to publish it.
- Don't post personal information about anyone, such as full names of staff, phone numbers, addresses or order numbers.
- Don't use hate speech, threats, harassment, discrimination or obscene language.
- Don't include links, adverts or promotional content.
- Don't post the same review more than once, or review the same experience under several accounts.
How we moderate reviews
Every review is checked before or shortly after it is published, using automated checks and, where needed, a member of our team. We look for content that breaks the guidelines above and for signs of fake reviews, such as many reviews from the same device or network, copied text, or unusual patterns of reviews for one company.
We do not edit the content of reviews. If a review breaks our guidelines, we either reject it or ask the author to change it. We may hide a review while we investigate it.
We publish negative reviews in exactly the same way as positive ones. We never remove, hide or delay a review because a company has asked us to, or because it is a partner of ours.
Verification
To write a review you need an account with a confirmed email address. We may ask a reviewer for proof of their experience, such as an order confirmation or a receipt, if:
- the company disputes that the reviewer was a customer
- the review is reported and we cannot otherwise judge it
- our checks suggest the review may not be genuine
If the reviewer cannot show that the experience was real, we remove the review. Any documents you send us are used only to check the review and are deleted afterwards. See our privacy policy.
Reporting a review
Anyone can report a review they believe breaks our guidelines, using the report option on the review or by contacting us. Tell us which rule you think it breaks and why.
We review every report, usually within five working days. While we investigate we may hide the review. We then keep it, ask the author to change it, or remove it, and we tell the person who reported it what we decided.
A company that disagrees with a review can reply to it publicly. Disagreeing with a review, or finding it unfair, is not on its own a reason to remove it.
Removing reviews for legal reasons
We remove a review if we are told it is unlawful, for example because it is defamatory, infringes someone's rights or contains personal data that should not be public, and we agree after looking at it. We may also remove content if a court or authority orders us to.
Scores
A company's scores are calculated automatically from all its published reviews: the share of reviewers who would buy again, and the average of the ratings for ordering, customer service, price and delivery. We do not adjust scores by hand, and no company can pay to change them.
Fake and incentivised reviews
Writing, buying or commissioning fake reviews is against the law in the UK under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. If we find evidence that a company has posted, bought or incentivised reviews of itself or of a competitor, we remove those reviews and may show a warning on the company's page.