Reviews And Trust
How to Tell If Software Reviews Are Fake
What to look for, what platforms actually mean by verified, and the questions worth asking any review site including this one.
Start with what verified means, because it usually means very little
Almost every review platform has a verified badge and almost none of them mean the same thing by it. On some it means an email address was confirmed. On others it means a screenshot was uploaded, or that the vendor said the person is a customer.
A single binary badge is the problem. It collapses somebody who clicked a link in an email and somebody who signed in through the product itself into the same word, which is exactly the distinction a reader needs.
If a site cannot tell you what proof sits behind a badge, the badge is decoration.
The five levels of proof, and what each is worth
| Level | Proof required | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Registered | Email sign-up only | not counted |
| Identity verified | LinkedIn or work email on a real company domain | 1.0 |
| Verified user | In-product screenshot, invoice, or vendor-confirmed customer match | 1.6 |
| Verified active customer | Signed in with the product itself, confirming an active account | 2.2 |
| Expert tester | Hands-on test by named Launch500 staff | not counted |
Seven signals that a review is not what it appears to be
No cons, or cons that are compliments. A review whose only criticism is that the product is so powerful it took a week to learn was written by somebody with an incentive.
A cluster of five-star reviews within a few days, particularly shortly after a funding announcement or a launch.
Reviewers with one review each and no history. Real reviewers accumulate a trail.
Language that matches the vendor's own marketing copy. People do not describe software in the phrases from its landing page unless they have been reading it very recently.
No specifics. A genuine review names the thing that annoyed them, a version, a number, a workflow. A fake one praises categories.
Ratings without written reviews, where a platform lets you leave one.
An impossible distribution. Real products collect a spread. A wall of five stars with nothing in the middle is a curated set, not a sample.
What a good distribution looks like
Our own distribution, 0 counted reviews
- 5 star0
- 4 star0
- 3 star0
- 2 star0
- 1 star0
A real corpus has a shape. If a product shows only fives, you are looking at a selected set rather than a sample of its customers.
The questions to ask any review site, this one included
Who pays you, and what can they buy? If the answer is vague, assume the worst. Ours is published with the revenue split.
Can a vendor pay to remove a review or change a score? Can they see who wrote a review about them? Both answers should be no, and the site should say so somewhere you can find without asking.
What happens when you get something wrong? A site with no corrections log either never makes mistakes or does not publish them.
And what does the law require? The FTC's 2024 rule on consumer reviews governs insider reviews, bought reviews and suppression. A site that cannot describe its own obligations under it has probably not read it.
Questions
Asked often enough to answer here
- Can a company pay you to remove a bad review?
- No. It is on the published list of things money cannot buy here, alongside scores, rankings, test dates and reviewer identities.
- Do you accept reviews from people the vendor sent?
- Yes, and they are weighted down. A review invited from a representative sample is worth more than one from a list the vendor hand-picked, because the hand-picked set is a marketing asset and the random one is evidence.
- Why do you publish reviews you have not counted?
- Because hiding them would be worse. A review from an unverified account is shown in full and carries zero weight in the score, and the page says which is which.
- What stops your own staff writing reviews?
- Staff cannot review, and our own hands-on tests are never blended into the community score. Marking your own homework is the failure mode the two-score split exists to prevent.
Where this comes from
The pages behind it
Found an error in this?
Tell us and we will correct it in public. Every accepted correction is published in the log with what was wrong and what caused it, including the ones that make us look bad.