TheUserOpinion
Community standards

Review guidelines

The rules every review and every business here plays by: what belongs in a review, what doesn’t, and what happens when someone breaks them.

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The short version

Four things every review needs. The rest of this page is the detail.

  • GenuineWrite about your own, first-hand experience — never one you heard about, and never your own company.
  • UsefulSay what happened and when. Specifics help the next customer more than adjectives do.
  • RespectfulBe as critical as the experience deserves, without insults, threats or hate.
  • PrivateLeave out personal details: no addresses, phone numbers, emails or private people’s full names.

Writing a review

Anyone with an account can review a business they’ve used — one review per business per account.

What the form asks for

Star rating
1 to 5 starsRequired
Title
Up to 255 charactersOptional
Your review
10 to 5,000 charactersRequired
Date of experience
When it happenedOptional

Reviews go live as soon as you publish. You can’t edit a published review, but you can delete it from your account at any time and write a new one.

Do

  • Describe what you bought or used, when, and what happened
  • Mention what went right as well as what didn’t
  • Keep it about the product, the service or the experience
  • Refer to staff by first name or by role
  • Write soon after the experience, while the details are fresh

Don’t

  • Review a business you haven’t used
  • Review your own business, your employer or a competitor
  • Accept money, discounts or gifts in exchange for a review
  • Include personal information about anyone
  • Use hate speech, threats, harassment or discriminatory language
  • Post ads, spam or links to other businesses
  • Post the same review on several businesses, or use more than one account

What each star means

Pick the rating that matches the experience as a whole. The review form uses the same definitions.

  1. 5ExcellentExceptional quality, highly recommended
  2. 4GreatHigh quality service with minor caveats
  3. 3AverageAcceptable performance, met basic expectations
  4. 2PoorDid not meet standard expectations
  5. 1BadUnsatisfactory experience with significant issues

Verified reviews

Some reviews carry a Verified label. Here’s exactly what it means.

Verified Review

A review is Verified when it was written through a personal invitation from the business:

  1. 1The business created an invitation for the customer’s email address.
  2. 2The customer opened their personal link. It works once and expires after 14 days.
  3. 3They wrote the review signed in with that same, confirmed email address.
  • Verified describes how a review arrived — not whether it’s positive or negative.
  • The business owner, and addresses on the business’s own domain, can’t use an invitation.
  • Businesses should invite customers without screening for the happy ones.
  • Reviews without the label follow the same rules and count the same toward the star rating.

Rules for businesses

Businesses get tools to respond and to grow. They don’t get control over what customers say.

Claiming a listing is free

To claim a listing that’s already here, prove you own its website’s domain in one of three ways:

  • DNS TXT recordAdd a theuseropinion-verification record to your domain.Verified straight away
  • HTML meta tagAdd a verification tag to your homepage.Verified straight away
  • Work emailConfirm an email address on your own domain.Reviewed by our team

Registering a new business? You get the dashboard straight away, and the listing is marked verified once our team has reviewed it. The verified badge means ownership of the domain was confirmed — if a verified business changes its name, domain or website, the badge goes back for review.

Businesses can

  • Reply in public to any review — one reply per review
  • Report a review that breaks these guidelines
  • Invite customers with personal review links
  • Track ratings, replies and profile views, and export reviews as CSV
  • Show their rating on their own site with a widget

Businesses can’t

  • Delete, edit or hide a review — not for any fee
  • Pay to improve their rating or trust score
  • Offer anything in return for a review, or for changing one
  • Review their own business, or a competitor
  • Pressure or threaten reviewers
  • Impersonate another business or claim a domain they don’t own

Something wrong with a listing?

Use Report this business on its profile. Our team looks at every listing report.

  • Wrongful verification
  • Domain ownership dispute
  • Impersonation
  • Fraudulent business
  • Other

Reporting a review

See a review that breaks these rules? Report it with the flag on the review — you’ll need to be signed in.

  • Spam or fake reviewAds, gibberish, or a review written to push a rating up or down.
  • Not a genuine customer experienceThe writer never actually used the business.
  • Offensive or inappropriate contentHate speech, threats, harassment or obscenity.
  • Conflict of interestWritten by the business, its staff, a competitor, or someone who was paid.
  • Contains personal informationAddresses, phone numbers, emails or a private person’s full name.
  • OtherAnything else that breaks these guidelines — add the details.

Add details if they’ll help (up to 500 characters). Reporting a review doesn’t take it down — a moderator decides.

How moderation works

Reviews are published straight away. When one is reported, a moderator — a person, not an algorithm — reads it against these guidelines and decides what happens.

  1. KeptIt follows the guidelines. It stays up and keeps counting.
  2. Held for checksFor a serious report, a moderator can take a review down while they look into it.
  3. RemovedIt breaks the guidelines. It comes down and stops counting toward the rating and trust score.

A review is never removed because a business asked or paid — only because it breaks these guidelines. The person who wrote it can also delete it at any time.

How the trust score works

Every business with reviews gets a trust score from 0 to 5. It combines five things, all measured on published reviews:

Average rating
40%
The mean star rating across published reviews.
Review volume
20%
More reviews make a score more reliable. This part grows with the count and maxes out at 100 reviews.
Recency
20%
Reviews received this month, compared with a twelfth of the business’s total. A steady flow keeps it high.
Reply rate
10%
The share of reviews the business has answered in public.
Verified share
10%
The share of reviews that arrived through invitations.
  • It’s recalculated whenever a review is published, removed or answered.
  • A business with no reviews has no score — we don’t guess.
  • Nobody can pay to change it, and it’s worked out the same way for every business.

Questions

Something not covered here?

If you think a decision is wrong, or you have a question these guidelines don’t answer, get in touch.

Contact usHelp centre

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