TripAdvisor Reports Over 1 Million Fake Reviews Made Last Year

Many of us rely on reviews when it comes to making decisions. But after a new report by TripAdvisor, you might not rely so heavily on them.

Tripadvisor identified more than 1.3 million fake reviews in 2022, and luckily they could stop most of them from being posted.

Unfortunately, the site couldn’t catch them all. But of those, Tripadvisor stopped, 72 percent of them from being posted on its website, which the company called a “significant improvement” compared to 2020, when only 67 percent were stopped, Travel and Leisure reported.

“TripAdvisor is built on trust, and we will never stop improving our systems to ensure our community has access to reliable content and the businesses listed can compete on a level playing field,” Becky Foley, the vice president for trust and safety at Tripadvisor, said in a statement.

“The findings from this report show that our approach is working; we’re catching a higher proportion of fraudulent content before it is published, with nearly three-quarters of fake reviews never even making it to the platform,” the company said in its 2023 Review Transparency Report.

A little over 24,500 fake reviews were associated with paid review companies, with nearly half coming from India, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Vietnam.

A review is marked fraudulent if it was “submitted by someone who is either biased in some way and/or who did not have a personal experience with the business they reviewed,” the company said.

The company’s infographic included in its report gives some tips on how to spot honest reviews: reviews that are “recent,” “first-hand,” “relevant,” and “respectful, and unbiased” are more likely to be genuine.