Published: 10 May 2025

The online ratings industry is built on the promise of objectivity and trust. But beneath the surface, many of the world’s biggest review platforms and ratings companies allow brands to influence, filter, or even purchase a better public image. The result: consumers are often shown a version of reality that is carefully managed by the very companies they are trying to assess.

How Ratings Companies Really Work

Most major review platforms operate a freemium or subscription model. While any business can collect reviews for free, paid accounts unlock powerful features: the ability to flag and remove negative reviews, display only positive feedback on their own site, and send automated invitations to cherry-pick happy customers. For example, Trustpilot's paid plans allow brands to challenge negative reviews for removal, filter displayed reviews using "Trustboxes," and send bulk invitations that can flood their profile with positive scores. Reviews.io, Feefo, and others offer similar features.

Some platforms, like Which?, restrict who can leave reviews to paying members, which can skew results towards a more loyal or less critical audience. Others, such as Google and App Store, have been shown to suffer from review bombing, fake reviews, or incentivised ratings. In almost every case, the headline score a consumer sees is not a simple, transparent average, but a moving target shaped by business decisions, technical loopholes, and paid features.

Common Manipulation Techniques

• Pay-to-Play Review Removal: Brands with paid accounts can flag and remove negative reviews far more easily than non-paying brands, often without the reviewer being able to contest the decision.
• Positive Filtering Widgets: Many ratings companies allow brands to display only 4- and 5-star reviews on their own website, hiding critical feedback from prospective customers.
• Bulk Solicitation: Automated invitations sent to recent customers can flood a profile with positive reviews, quickly burying older negative feedback.
• Access Restriction: Some platforms only allow reviews from verified or paying users, limiting the diversity of feedback and often raising the average score.
• Fake Reviews and Bombing: Both positive and negative fake reviews are a persistent problem, with platforms often slow to detect and remove them.
• Score Calculation Loopholes: Many headline scores are calculated using only recent reviews, not the full historical record, making it easy to "reset" a brand's reputation with a short burst of positive activity.

Why This Matters for Consumers and Brands

The effect of these practices is a ratings ecosystem where the most visible brands are often those with the biggest budgets, not necessarily the best service. Consumers may be misled into trusting brands with artificially high scores, while companies that refuse to pay for premium features can find themselves at a disadvantage-even if their service is superior. In the case of Trustpilot, studies show that brands with paid accounts have significantly higher TrustScores than those on the free tier, due in part to their ability to manage and curate their public image.

The industry’s lack of transparency and consistency undermines trust in the entire ratings system. That’s why GoNoGo is committed to a different approach: scores that are fully transparent, based on published criteria, and cannot be changed by brands after publication. Our audit widget below lets you compare the most common manipulation techniques across the leading ratings companies.