Fake reviews are a real problem. When you’re buying something online, you’re basically buying it sight unseen–which means you need to rely on the reviews of other customers. Thing is, sometimes these reviews are actually fake. Sometimes these are planted by the manufacturer to increase sales of their products. Sometimes these are planted by rivals looking to trash their competition. Either way, it could make it impossible to determine what is really true.
Until now.
FakeSpot is a website that uses algorithms to determine whether reviews are real or fake. You simply plug in the Amazon.com product address, then viola, FakeSpot analyzes the site and tells you whether most of the reviews are legitimate.
Luckily, the service also works with Yelp, so you can be tell whether your restaurant or local business is benefitting from praise–or just gaming the system.
Fakespot breaks down multiple review metrics to help you determine what is real. To test it out, we put in multiple products to see what their Fakespot scores were. Since makeup and skincare reviews are sometimes rife with fake reviews, we tried put the popular E.l.f. Hydrating Face Primer to the test.
Interestingly enough, Fakespot claims that this product may benefit from suspiciously positive reviews–even though the company as a whole receives an A rating for having mostly real reviews of its products. Ironically, it seems E.l.f. Cosmetics is very trusted, although reviews of this product of theirs is not.
We also checked out the Atom Drop Through Longboard, which benefits from a higher score.
With over 90% high quality reviews, you could be pretty certain that these product reviews are real.
Since it also works with Yelp, we decided to test the Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York, which we checked out in this post.
Aaaannndddd…. It looks like the reviews are real. But are they real at your local diner? There’s only one way to find out:
Check out FakeSpot here.
