Round 8% of the 31.1 million critiques submitted to Tripadvisor in 2024 had been faux, in response to the corporate’s “Transparency Report 2025.”
That is greater than twice the quantity detected in 2022, in response to firm experiences.
However that does not imply the variety of faux critiques on the location doubled, mentioned Becky Foley, vp and head of belief and security at Tripadvisor.
Whereas submissions to the web site elevated, Tripadvisor’s insurance policies on faux critiques additionally modified, she mentioned, citing the corporate’s extra aggressive stance towards “incentivized critiques.” These happen when firms provide prospects reductions or freebies in alternate for critiques, or present incentives to workers whose names are talked about in critiques.
“The workers get their mother, finest buddy or cousin to submit critiques, mentioning their names,” she mentioned. “It finally ends up resulting in companies having critiques that are not truly worthwhile to our neighborhood.”
What’s a faux assessment?
In accordance with Tripadvisor, it’s “any assessment submitted by somebody who’s knowingly submitting biased or non-firsthand content material, in an effort to control a property’s status.”
However there is a greater motive detections are on the rise, she mentioned.
“Our system is at all times getting higher,” she mentioned, citing Tripadvisor’s three-pronged course of that depends on auto-detection, human assessment and neighborhood suggestions.
Some 7% of submissions in 2024 had been auto-rejected earlier than being posted, the report mentioned. Auto-detections additionally flagged one other 5% of submissions for human assessment.
Nonetheless, Tripadvisor’s belief and security crew in the end moderated greater than 4.2 million critiques, amounting to greater than 13% of all submissions in 2024, in response to the report.
One other 244,000 critiques had been disputed by members on the third stage of assessment, the report confirmed. Of those, some 72% remained on the location, and 28% had been eliminated, it mentioned.
Find out how to spot a faux
Tripadvisor has 4 classes of faux submissions: boosting, vandalism, member fraud and paid critiques, Foley mentioned.
There is a false impression that vandalism accounts for many faux critiques, Foley mentioned, including that boosting (54%) and member fraud (39%) have lengthy made up the majority of these critiques.
Paid critiques (4.8%) are a smaller however “extra pernicious” class of fakes, she mentioned.
This contains “assessment farms,” she mentioned, including that these authors are sometimes concerned in different sorts of on-line fraud too.
Most paid critiques originate in Asia, Foley mentioned, though solely 17% of actual submissions got here from the continent final 12 months.
In 2024, greater than one-third of all paid submissions detected by Tripadvisor got here from Indonesia and Vietnam, whereas in 2022 most paid critiques got here from India, experiences present.
A ‘cat and mouse’ recreation
Rooting out faux critiques is a continuing “cat and mouse” recreation, Foley mentioned. However Tripadvisor is getting higher at detecting them yearly, she mentioned.
“We’re the primary to confess that we’re by no means going to achieve absolute perfection,” mentioned Foley. “We’d not catch [a fake] the primary time, however we’ll catch it will definitely.”
Tripadvisor makes use of its personal expertise, developed over 25 years, to flush out fakes — a system that more and more depends much less on what a assessment says, and extra on the way it’s posted, she mentioned. The corporate makes use of synthetic intelligence and behavioral biometrics to seek out patterns, which may detect abnormalities like submission spikes and IP deal with masking makes an attempt.
To catch paid reviewers, Tripadvisor investigators pose as faux assessment brokers, Foley mentioned. When a nasty actor posts their first paid assessment, “now we have all the knowledge … a whole lot of information factors related to it,” which the corporate makes use of to construct patterns to determine different critiques submitted by the writer prior to now.
Violators aren’t pulled off the location, however their rankings are penalized for a 12 months, Foley mentioned. Repeat offenders obtain a pink badge on their itemizing “that claims this property is making an attempt to deceive you,” she mentioned.
AI critiques: not faux, however not allowed
Most critiques written by AI should not faux, Foley mentioned, calling that “one of many myths I like to bust.”
Most are written by common vacationers that use the expertise to make their writing extra polished, she mentioned.
Nonetheless, the corporate would not permit them — at the least not for now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor eliminated greater than 200,000 critiques that it suspected had been written by AI, in response to the corporate’s 2025 transparency report.
“We are going to proceed to watch the traits and patterns. However proper now, we simply don’t desire vacationers to come back to TripAdvisor for a sea of sameness.”
