39 Percent of Online Reviews are Totally Unreliable

Have you ever walked into a brick-and-mortar store and thought to yourself, "What these products need are instantly readable reviews, like the ones online!" Well, think again. On average, almost 4 out of every 10 reviews you read online are unreliable at best and utterly made-up nonsense meant to ruin a business at the worst. This is despite the fact that 88 percent of real people surveyed said they had left a legit review.

The research was conducted by BestSEOCompanies.com, which is exactly what the name says: a site that rates and compares SEO services. They checked through thousands of reviews using Fakespot, an online review-analysis tool that anyone can try—paste in a URL for a product from Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart and others, and you'll receive a report on how many reviews on the page are made-up bull-pucky. The site also surveyed consumers (using Amazon Mechanical Turk) who read and write online product reviews, and it talked to some online marketers about their scheduling and money-making efforts with reviews.

You can see the bad news above. Unreliable reviews for apparel come in at 46.2 percent, followed closely by reviews for home décor (45.6 percent) and electronics (42 percent). The numbers drop from there, but not by much. The lowest percentage of unreliable reviews they found was for books, of all things, at 22.9 percent. (They determined this by checking reviews on 389 products, with at least 25 products in each category). Total out of the 2.7 million reviews they analyzed showed 39 percent of them as untrustworthy.

A full 24 percent of the 389 products they checked had 50 percent or more of unreliable reviews.

Why does this matter? Because people are reading the praise and critiques and making purchasing decisions based on them. The chart below shows the categories for which people read reviews first.

A lot of people, 21.5 percent, won't purchase a product that doesn't have any reviews, but 35.8 percent said they would. The majority of people—83.4 percent—said reviews were moderately to extremely influential on their purchases.

Even more were inclined to believe reviews if they were written by verified buyers.

There's a lot more in the report that you can read here, including info from the marketers and business owners dealing with reviews. One big takeaway is summed up in this quote: "While an honest negative review may save customers a lot of time and trouble, a fake negative review can cause undeserved havoc on small business owners."

For more, read How to Spot a Fake Review on Amazon.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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