What stays up, what comes down, and why

Effective from 25 September 2026. Version 1.1. Changes are announced on the transparency page thirty days before they take effect.

Part 1. Guidelines for reviewers

1.1 Write about your own experience

A review describes something that happened to you, as a customer, with this business. You can write about a purchase, a booking, a service call, a cancelled order, or a refund that never arrived. You cannot write about what happened to a friend, what you read on a forum, or what you expect would happen. If you never dealt with the business, do not review it.

1.2 One review per experience

Each account can hold one live organic review per business. If things change, edit the review: the edit is logged and the date of the edit is shown. A new invitation after a new order is a new experience and can have its own review.

1.3 No conflict of interest

Do not review a business you own, work for, or have worked for in the last two years. Do not review a direct competitor of a business you own or work for. Do not review a business owned by a family member. Do not write a review in exchange for money, a discount, a gift, a refund, or a promise to fix your problem. Being offered any of those things is itself worth reporting.

1.4 Keep it about the business

Reviews can name a product, a branch, a delivery window, a price. Reviews cannot include the full name of a junior member of staff, a phone number, an email address, a car registration, or anything else that identifies a private individual. Owners and public-facing directors are fair game by name. Delivery drivers and call-centre staff are not.

1.5 No links, no adverts

A review that contains a web address is held automatically. A review whose main purpose is to send readers somewhere else, including to a rival business, is removed under this section.

1.6 Nothing unlawful or abusive

No threats, no slurs, no harassment, no content that would be unlawful to publish in the United Kingdom. Strong criticism is fine. “Worst customer service I have ever had” stays up. “I know where the manager lives” does not, and gets the account suspended.

1.7 Say what happened, not what you think happened elsewhere

You can say a business did not honour its own returns policy. You cannot say a business is committing fraud unless you have a finding from a court or regulator you can point to. Reviews making a factual claim of criminal conduct without that are removed under this section, and you are invited to rewrite the review as an account of your own experience.

1.8 Automated checks

Every review is scored against the signals on the trust page. A score of 40 or more holds the review for a person to read. Being held is not a judgement. Most held reviews are published unchanged within a business day.

1.9 Editor's reviews

Now and then a member of our team visits or buys from a business and writes it up. Those reviews carry a gold Editor's review mark, sit first on the profile, and are signed by the team rather than an individual account. We pay for the experience ourselves, we tell the business afterwards and not before, and no business can request, buy or remove one. They weigh the same as a verified review in the score.

Part 2. Guidelines for businesses

2.1 Invite everyone or nobody

When you send invitations through TheReviews, you send them to every customer from that channel. You do not filter by likely rating, by whether they complained, or by order value. On integrated stores we compare orders to invitations. A persistent gap, without a reason you have told us about, costs the Verified business badge and is logged.

2.2 Do not incentivise

You cannot offer anything in exchange for a review, or for a particular rating, or for changing or removing a review. A discount code for “leaving us a review” counts. A prize draw for reviewers counts. If a reviewer reports being offered something, both the offer and our finding go in the log.

2.3 Reply as yourself

Replies are public, carry the name of the person who posted them, and can be edited by you at any time. A reply can dispute facts, apologise, explain, or offer to take the matter offline. A reply cannot disclose the reviewer's personal details, threaten legal action, or demand the review be changed.

2.4 Report in good faith

Reporting is for reviews that break Part 1. It is not a way to contest a rating you think is unfair. Reports that cite “not a customer” need to be checked against your own records, and we may ask for the order search you ran. An organisation that repeatedly reports reviews without grounds loses the ability to report for ninety days, and that too is logged.

2.5 No fake reviews, obviously

Writing reviews of your own business, paying anyone to write them, or asking staff or family to write them ends your verified status permanently and results in a note on your profile that stays for two years. We publish the finding. We would rather never use this section.

2.6 Connected sources

On a paid plan you can connect your Google, Facebook, Trustpilot and Yelp listings through those platforms' official interfaces, so reviews left there appear on your profile too. You must own the account you connect and be permitted by that platform to show its content here. Imported reviews are always labelled with where they came from, never count towards your TheReviews Score, and cannot be reported or replied to through us; take those up with the platform they came from. Disconnecting a source removes its reviews from your profile.

Part 3. What happens when something is reported

1. A report is filed with a reason from the list and any details or evidence. The filing itself is logged as “Review reported”.
2. A member of staff reads the review, the report, and where relevant the account history. This takes up to two business days.
3. If the review breaks a section above, it is removed or hidden and the log records which section. If it does not, the report is dismissed and the log records that too.
4. The reviewer is emailed with the outcome and the section. They can rewrite a removed review to comply, and the new version goes through the same checks.
5. Nothing about steps 1 to 4 changes based on the plan the business is on, or whether the business is on a plan at all.

Part 4. Accounts

An account belongs to one person. Shared, purchased or automated accounts are closed. An account that is suspended for breaking Part 1 keeps its published reviews unless those reviews were themselves the breach. A person can delete their own reviews at any time, and delete their account from the settings page, which removes their name from the site within 24 hours.

Questions about a specific decision go through the contact form with the link to the log entry. We answer every one.