Coalition for Trusted Reviews: Fake reviews drive some consumers away from purchases
As bad actors change tactics, 85% of consumers in the UK, 82% in the US and 80% in Italy check reviews at least occasionally before buying. The findings come from a survey of 6,000 consumers in the three countries.
What's happening
According to CX Dive, the Coalition for Trusted Reviews, whose members include Amazon and Tripadvisor, said in a new white paper that fake and misleading reviews are changing some shopping journeys. Most consumers in the US and the UK have decided against buying a product or service because of concerns about fake or misleading reviews. In 2024, the US online travel app Tripadvisor removed more than 214,000 reviews containing AI-generated text. The company's analysis found that these reviews did not show a pattern of coordinated fraud; genuine consumers may have used AI to write or translate their reviews.
Whose desk it lands on
The head of customer experience. On the brand's review pages, what criterion separates genuine reviews written with AI from fake ones?
Our view
The CX Brief's interpretation, not a claim made by the source.
Tripadvisor's analysis shows that equating AI-written text with fraud can be misleading. The new task for platforms is to tell genuine reviews written with AI's help apart from fraud produced with AI. For a brand monitoring its reviews, too, the test is not who wrote the text but whether there is a coordinated scheme behind it.
